Magic

You hold down the sustaining pedal on the grand piano.  You reach inside a pluck the bass strings to sound a pleasing, plausible, but slightly dissonant chord.  Sensible enough, pleasant.  Keeping the pedal down you pluck a related but different chord in the mid-range, then something a bit similar in the treble.  The sounds are individually interesting if not fascinating, but together they start a sympathetic vibration where one chord causes the previous one to echo again, and so on to the next.  Every new combination of chords is revealing, and the chords keep coming until the entire instrument pulses with striking sounds that contrast but also reinforce one another.  You lose track of beginning and end; the result is a sustained shimmer that in which all the components sound, but the total is something different again, something that seems to contain the answers to all the questions ever and never asked.

For me that’s what it’s like to read Paul Auster’s fiction.  Moon Palace is no exception.  The words are well chosen but ordinary.  There is nothing flashy or poetic, no Updike thesaurus and no Banville lyricism.  The plot starts out as something ordinary, but step by step the main character becomes separated from objective reality, he loses his grip and enters a world where truth and fiction blur, where real and unreal become one, where art and reality become confused, where causation becomes indeterminate.  Observing the dissolution while reading the seemingly ordinary prose is pleasure enough, but the surreal
experiences that follow in the Austerian landscape are both chilling and beautiful.  You look into the kaleidoscope and you see that the individual fragments are all realistic, but the whirling pieces together form a kind of meta-world, a way of seeing and experiencing which is truly special.  Objectivity and emotion combine to form a vision which belongs uniquely to Auster.

No need to go into details about Moon Palace.  There are plots and subplots, repeating themes, unlikely coincidences, startling revelations.  We go further and further into the looking glass, and we end at a beginning, at a place where we see the world anew, where nothing can be taken for granted, where all is accepted, and in which human experience through all of history reverberates forever.  We are dazed and a little confused, but we feel part of something epochal where interior and exterior merge, where past, present and future come together.

No idea how he does it.