So, at last, I have finished it. 
I bought Pauls Auster´s Moon Palace, ISBN 0-14-013211-2, in 1994 (I usually jot the date of buying a book down on the first side of it, so I am sure about the date), when it was recommended to me by the receptionist of the hospital I worked at then (Mr. H., an 30ish academic journalist, who settled for working as a receptionist, himself a person I always found very interesting, but a bit exotic, as well, was someone you could have interesting talks with; so I used to visit him quite often during the nights when I was on duty). My copy is now eleven years old, looks a little bit battered (although I ususally take great care to preserve my books as they are) - indeed this very edition with the cover photo of some moon-like (!) landscape in Utah (?) is no longer available.
I started reading the book in 1994 - and it took 11 years, until this afternoon, for me to finish it. Not quite a turn-the-pager, it seems - and yet during those years I have been repeatedly naming the book as one of my favorites. Hmmm - contradicitive, and I cannot really explain the contradiction.
A try: the novel starts out in a way I like it (”It was the summer that men first walked on the moon”), the plot becomes quite fascinating (and exotic, bizzarre) very soon - and somehow I did not want to read on: the first chapters gave me a lot to think about, already, and I think I wanted to save pages, not read through them too quickly - sometimes I do that; I still remember how I made the last chapters of “The Lord of the Rings” last, when I read it in 1983; (another practical thing - my edition is printed in extremely small letters and really quite a strain on the eyes to read).
The plot does not move too quickly really, and there are passages that seem to stretch on rather endlessly, tempting the reader to take a break, have a nap, go to work, read on later.
Anyway - I like the book!
The story is told by and about a young orphan in his twenties, Marco Stanley Fogg, and situated in the late 196os to the late 1970s. MS, as he is called, is adrift, like most of the protagonists in this book, that is indeed a bit of a road story (from the East to the great, old American West). But he, like many other protagonists in the novel, is adrift in a bizzarre, exotic, surreal way: living in a room with bookcases for furniture which slowly disappear, as each book he has read through, is sold for a living, until the room is completely empty and MS is on the brink of starving. He sinks even more, starts to live in Central Park as a city vagrant, almost dying from hunger and cold and infection in the process. Until he is rescued by friends and a beautiful Chinese girl called Kitty Wu, staying passive all the time, just trusting on the moon which takes a major symbolic place in his world of ideas and as a poetic theme in the novel, a bit like the snow in Ernest Hemingway´s (Moon Palace is the name of a Chinese restaurant in the book). Another theme, worked craftfully and in elegant prose into the novel, is the mythic American Wild West (the landscape of which, as Auster points out, does resemble the surface of the Moon in some places) and the road-story tale of moving from the urban and hectic New York to the wide and peaceful wilderness out there in the west.
The whole plotline is held up by fantastic coincidences which give a strange and surreal atmosphere to the novel. MS, by chance, comes to live in with an eccentric (how could it be otherwise?) blind, old man, whose strange and extraordinary story of life he is to record and write down (which takes a major part of the book). The old man´s story resembles over wide parts very much the same adriftness that MS has already experienced, and indeed the more the plot progresses the more it turns out that everyone and everything in this novel is strangely and improbably and fantastically and almost unbelievably connected and related (!) to each other.
MS ends up alone, without money or employment, without a real plan, a staked-out future, without Kitty, an orphan again (!), on a Pacific beach in California, with a full moon rising. “This is where I start, I said to myself, this is where my life begins”. “I kept my eyes on it as it rose into the night sky, not turning away until it had found its place in the darkness”.
The book is about your place in the darkness, your way in life, about the connectedness of things and events, about history and future, about identity, about fathers and sons, parents and siblings, being lost and yet somehow being strangely guided, danger and hope, fear and grit - and all this in a quiet, sometimes otherworldly, often quite unbelievable and yet enthralling atmosphere that Paul Auster weaves.
Gideon Strauss names it as one of the important books of his life. “If we read to know that we are not alone, this was the book that most reassured me.”
Read an elaborate review by Joyce Reiser Kornblatt at the New York Times website: “‘’Moon Palace'’ (the title refers to a Chinese restaurant in New York) is held together by unlikely coincidences. All the characters are eccentrics who border on caricature, yet their struggles are heartfelt and complex. The plot of the novel is so unbelievable, its narrator often has trouble being convinced by it himself. And the motifs are extremely familiar: the beleaguered orphan, the missing father, the doomed romance, the squandered fortune, the totemic power of the West, the journey as initiation. Yet the story is, finally, so goodhearted and hopeful, so verbally exuberant, that its obvious architecture, its shameless borrowings, may be forgivable.”
So, yes, although it took me exotic, bizzare and strange 11 years to read through the 307 pages paperback, this IS one of my favorite books, which I am goint to reread some day (and it won´t take me 11 years again).
Recommended Reading (by me).
Via “In which our hero” I came upon StoryCode, a site where you can “review” a work of fiction in a somewhat formalized way. ” The folks at StoryCode have an interesting approach. You “code” each book you read by answering a series of questions, all on sliding scales (Erotic or not? Scary or not? Character-driven or plot-driven? Many characters or few?), and providing an overall star rating (from 1 to 5). Based on your ratings, and on the collective wisdom of everyone who uses the site, you’ll be given a list of recommendations; the more books you code, the better the advice should be.”
I tried it out and did a rating on “Moon Palace” there, but this will not become a favorite site of mine, I think: while the idea of a formalized review, where you are being asked important aspects in a flow-sheet way. is not a bad one and could be really helpful, indeed, I was disappointed by the “outcome” - all these questions just for a number of stars at the end; I could have reached that result with much less effort. And those book recommendations that are based on your ratings - well, I have already got way too many unread books and way to many ideas for further book aquisitions. Do not lead me into temptation 
book, review, Paul, Auster, Moon, Palace, books, reading
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