Moon Palace was a really good book, so much that it reminded me a lot of Haruki Murakami’s novels. Not that there was any Magical Realism in it, although some of the occurrences seemed to happen so much by sheer coincidence, that they almost had a touch of magic to them.
But Moon Palace had something that has always fascinated me in Murakami’s books, which is that the language was so wonderful that, no matter what sad or weird things happened in the story, they were coated. Coated by the marvelous wording, so that at first they didn’t seem as dreadful or strange as they actually were. As if the language distracted the reader for a moment when something bad occurred, just to make them realize with a bit of a shock few moments later that indeed something had happened, so that their belated reaction to the events was even more intense than it normally would have been.
Still I have to deduct one star, because I could not really get into my reading flow with this book. I usually read a Murakami novel in one or two days; Moon Palace took me twenty days to finish. I am not sure if it was the book’s or my fault, so I guess I will have to read more of Auster’s work to find out. I have already bought Sunset Park, and if he continues to amaze me with his language, I think I might have found a new favorite author.
5
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