The palace of coincidences
Moon Palace (1989) is a novel about coincidences, about the things that happen without the hero being able to do something to avoid it. The events occur, they rush, they slow down, but in one way or another these events produce synchronous effects on the heroes of history: blows that cut, that shorten, that divide time.
Events drag the existence of the heroes like an avalanche. I don't call them heroes just because: one comes out of this story with the feeling of having read a Greek tragedy in late-twentieth-century model Yankee prose.
The resource of relatives who are recognized by body marks, birthmarks, scars, that is in this novel: only that the scars are internal, they belong to the world of the spirit. There is a force - in the Auster universe that force is chance or fatality (from fatum = what was said by God) - that exceeds the will of the heroes, an external force, overflowing, that weaves together the worldly tapestry where the characters -the heroes- mobilize.
In fact, the protagonist of the story makes it explicit: "I woke up in the morning, I thought that the robbery had not been committed by men. It was a trick of the gods, an act of divine malice whose sole purpose was to crush me."
The palace of the moon is an intricate labyrinth where theses and minotaurs permanently intersect, sometimes they fight and defeat each other, opprobriate and kill each other; other times they sit at a bar table sipping beer while debating preferences between Schumann and Schubert.
The palace of the moon is also a kind of Ode to American history, but not the History of Manifest Destiny and the American Dream, not the one that Emerson, Whitman and Melville envisioned, but the other story: the narrative of broken dreams. under the weight of the same world that crumbles and falls on everything that exists.
An America of prostitutes, of hotels that smell like dirt, of dislocated families, of economies that fluctuate between luxury and destitution: "The country had gone to hell, she thought, and she managed to say goodbye without any regret."
The palace of the moon is one of the most beautiful novels that I had the fortune - following the idea of a manipulative Destiny - to read.
Auster creates a story tailored to the human soul, it is not by chance that the inner mobility of the novel resembles the stories of the Greek tragedians.
I close this text of thanks -because that is it and nothing else- by sharing one of the countless paragraphs that I underlined:
"You know failure too often to be proud of occasional success."
Paul Auster (United States, 1947) creates with this work that takes place in contemporary cities a great shadow that illuminates from the past, from the most remote part of human evolution: the history of coincidences, of encounters and disagreements, of gods who meet here and there they strive to prune the great landscape of misfortune and happiness.
