The Remarkable Journey of Marco Stanley Fogg
By JOYCE REISER KORNBLATT
In somber, cerebral and terse narratives, Paul Auster has hunted down his obsessions. The missing father, the limits of language, the past as a crime we are driven to solve: from these themes, Mr. Auster has built a reputation as a post-modern gumshoe, fusing the conventions of detective fiction with Beckett-like despair.
Now comes “Moon Palace,“ a novel that chides the reader – and reviewer – who might have assumed that all Mr. Auster’s brief and elliptical meditations on loss would surely lead to yet one more. Hadn’t we cracked the Auster esthetic by now? Couldn’t we predict, after all these quiet volumes, still another spare metaphysical puzzler with little, if any, big-screen (or mini-series) potential? “Moon Palace“ plays with recognizably Auster concerns – lost fathers abound, the narrative investigates itself, psyches collapse and, repeatedly, life reveals itself to be “a series of lost chances.“ But there is nothing quiet about this story, or spare, or restrained. And although the book chronicles innumerable tragedies, it is, in manner and vision, a comic novel. How could a narrator named Marco Stanley Fogg not be funny?
“It was the summer that men first walked on the moon,“ Marco begins, and we are off on a series of picaresque adventures that borrow quite openly from those very literary traditions that have seemed most alien to Paul Auster’s imagination. Of course Marco is an orphan; his mother dies at 29, his father is a mystery of whom not even a picture remains, and Fogg (Fogelman, actually, before an Ellis Island clerk truncates the family name) grows up with his Uncle Victor, a hapless itinerant clarinetist who leaves Marco his personal library of a thousand books. For a time, the unopened cartons serve as furniture for our impoverished student-hero; then he reads his way through them, sells them and, finally destitute, lives for awhile in Central Park, encounters as many miracles as depravities there, survives for a time in a cave and is finally rescued by his friend Zimmer and Kitty Wu, a young Chinese dancer with whom he falls in love.
This is just the beginning, of course. Mr. Auster invents an aging rich man named Thomas Effing, who hires Marco Fogg as his companion and becomes Marco’s wacky spiritual guide, tormentor and benefactor. Effing tells his own story at length (Marco writes it down as the old man dictates) so that his narrative functions as a kind of tale within the tale, its meanings opening up to us as Marco’s own saga progresses. Effing claims to have been a somewhat famous painter who, after a series of mishaps, tragedies and debacles, makes a journey on foot through the transforming landscape of the American Southwest – “the land is too big out there, and after a while it starts to swallow you up“ – and survives, half mad, in a cave he fills with paintings. “He untaught himself the rules he had learned, trusting in the landscape as an equal partner, voluntarily abandoning his intentions to the assaults of chance, of spontaneity, the onrush of brute particulars. He was no longer afraid of the emptiness around him.“
In this way Mr. Auster works the mythology of the American West into “Moon Palace,“ its beauty and violence and Indian mysticism a counterpoint to the gritty New York terrain the rest of the novel details. And it is no surprise that the final leg of Marco Fogg’s odyssey takes our hero himself to that primal landscape. But not before he discovers the shocking truth about Effing’s long-lost son, Solomon Barber, an obese itinerant history professor (and of course his scholarly focus is the American West) who has also written a kind of futuristic pulp western, which we hear about at some length. In a moment of rage, Marco attacks Solomon Barber, his dear friend seemingly turned traitor, and the larger-than-life father figure falls, fatally injured, into a freshly dug double grave, feet away from Marco’s own beloved mother’s grave, which Marco has taken Barber to visit on their journey west.
With Effing and Barber dead and Marco’s relationship with Kitty Wu ruined by the abortion she insists she needs and Marco cannot accept, the novel comes full circle: Marco Stanley Fogg is alone again, orphaned many times over, destitute, lost this time not in Central Park but in that place in the world most like the moon, the American Southwest. For four months he wanders – “For the first two weeks, I was like someone who had been struck by lightning. I thundered inside myself, I wept, I howled like a madman, but then, little by little, the anger seemed to burn itself out, and I settled into the rhythm of my steps.“ Like many proper archetypal American heroes, Marco ends his quest in California, in Laguna Beach. “This is where I start, I said to myself, this is where my life begins.“
“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.
I wondered: was this an early novel that Paul Auster reworked, in hopes of a wider audience, after his years as an experimental and elusive stylist? Or is “Moon Palace“ a determined retreat from the growing darkness of his own prior work, of which he writes in his moving memoir about fatherhood, “The Invention of Solitude“: “In that the world is monstrous. In that it seems to offer no hope of a future, A. looks at his son and realizes he must not allow himself to despair. There is this responsibility for a young life, and in that he has brought this life into being, he must not despair.“
Joyce Reiser Kornblatt teaches writing and literature at the University of Maryland. Her most recent novel is “Breaking Bread.“
THE NOVELIST OUT OF CONTROL
When he starts to write a novel, Paul Auster said, “I begin with a personality, rather than an idea. And the person becomes very real to me. It’s almost as though I give myself up and enter into that other consciousness.“
The process is not as impulsive as it is reckless. “It’s a funny thing,“ Mr. Auster said, “but I’m not actually in control of what I’m doing. I think a lot of writers feel this way.“ He was talking on the telephone from the Brooklyn studio – he doesn’t work at home – where he wrote “Moon Palace,“ his fifth novel.
“The story and the characters become so real,“ he said, “that they lead you along. It’s a matter of following them correctly and not pushing them off the track.“
But even the surest of foot, of course, cannot always stay the course. “Early on in every project I’ve gone off track and had to throw away six, eight months’ work,“ Mr. Auster said. “There is an idea that’s shining through all the material somehow, and the obligation is to find that core and stick to it.“
Mr. Auster, who is 42 years old, said that it took a long time for him to find the idea that, quite literally, shines through “Moon Palace.“ (The book takes its name from a Chinese restaurant – and its bright neon sign – on Broadway near the campus of Columbia University.) “This novel was knocking around in my head for many years before I actually sat down and wrote it,“ he said. “Then the sign came in at a certain point and was a way of crystallizing all the images and unifying the book for me.“
“In some sense, this is my first novel, but I wrote it later,“ Mr. Auster continued. “And now I’m working on something else as hard as I can to try to keep my mind off the publication of it.“
In his new novel, Mr. Auster said, he probably will once again touch upon many of the themes that appear in his earlier works, such as solitude and the search for a father. “I think it’s simply that one’s inner life burns with the same problems all the time. You never get rid of them,“ he said. “I try to be as different as I can in each book, but of course I keep discovering myself. I have no choice in the matter.“
– MICHAEL FREITAG
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/06/20/specials/auster-moon.html
Heat and Dust (1975) is a novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala which won the Booker Prize in 1975.
The events of the story take place in India, during the periods of the British Raj in the 1920s and the present day of the novel (the 1970s). A young English woman, searches for the truth about Olivia (1920s), the first wife of her grandfather. The narrator discovers that Olivia was a woman smothered by the social restrictions placed upon her by British society. She falls in love with a Nawab and becomes pregnant with his child. Her decision to abort the baby results in a scandal. In discovering the truth about these events, the narrator also comes to understand herself better and develops an interest in India.
Heat and Dust Summary | Plot Summary
A young English woman goes to India to reconstruct the life of Olivia, her grandfather’s first wife. Olivia had married Douglas in England some 50 years earlier and moved with him to Satipur, India. After she first met the Nawab—at a dinner party at his palace in Khatm—she was certain he would, within the week, visit her in Satipur. She was correct (he arrived with his full retinue and stayed the day). It was after that first visit she began writing Marcia.
Olivia and the Nawab first become friends and then lovers. When she realized she was pregnant, she told the Nawab and then her husband Douglas and she had the Begum, the Nawab’s mother, arrange an abortion. Following the abortion, she went directly to the palace in Khatm and the Nawab later purchased and maintained a house for her in X, a small village in the steep foothills of the Himalayas (he never spoke of her again publicly). Olivia died in the 1950s, a few years after the Nawab, a quarter century before the narrator arrived in India. Against British custom, Olivia had also had her body cremated and her ashes spread on the mountainside.
The young woman who came to India to discover more about Olivia is the narrator—neither her name nor the exact year she arrived are ever stated. She takes a room in Satipur and visits the house in which Olivia and Douglas had lived (it had been subdivided into several government offices, in one of which Inder Lal, her new landlord, works). She first visited the Nawab’s palace with Inder Lal. She first visited the shrine of Baba Firdau on the day of an annual fertility festival (the „Husband’s Wedding Day“), with Inder Lal’s mother and her friends. When she subsequently visits the shrine with Inder Lal, the two become lovers (near the spot where Olivia and the Nawab had become lovers in 1923). The midwives in Satipur can tell the narrator is pregnant before she herself realizes it. The novel concludes with the narrator, whose choice is to carry her child to term, having arrived in X (she has taken a room; she has stood inside Olivia’s house). The narrator has heard there is an ashram further up the mountain although she does not know how long she will stay, she says she rarely looks down.
British Raj (lit. „reign“ in Hindustani) primarily refers to the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; it can also refer to the period of dominion, and even the region under the rule. The region, commonly called India in contemporary usage, included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom, as well as the princely states ruled by individual rulers under the paramountcy of the British Crown. After 1876, the resulting political union was officially called the Indian Empire and issued passports under that name. As India, it was a founding member of the League of Nations, the United Nations, and a member nation of the Summer Olympics in 1900, 1920, 1928, 1932, and 1936.
The system of governance was instituted in 1858, when the rule of the British East India Company was transferred to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria (and who, in 1876, was proclaimed Empress of India), and lasted until 1947, when the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two sovereign dominion states, the Union of India (later the Republic of India) and the Dominion of Pakistan (later the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the eastern half of which, still later, became the People’s Republic of Bangladesh). Partition also produced the independent princely state of Hyderabad which was annexed by the Union of India in 1948. Other parts of the Indian Empire became the independent states of Burma and Sri Lanka in 1948
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj
Rudyard Kipling, an example of an Englishman having imperialist ideas?
Rudyard Kipling produced a large number of short stories, including some of his best known writing (The Jungle Book, for example, being a collection of connected tales). They are quire varied, even when dealing with a specific theme, as here: Life’s Handicap contains twenty seven stories about the experience of the British in India. Some have dated more than others, but they all have the marvellous sense of atmosphere which is the hallmark of Kipling’s writing.
It is often said against Kipling that he was an imperialist, and it is hardly possible to deny it – there are moments when his now uncomfortable assumptions about the superiority of the white man become apparent. Kipling fits into the time and place of his background as well as most people do, and it is rather unfair to expect him to have the attitudes of someone born a century later. The chosen theme of most of his writing makes these background ideas particularly obvious, so that he is something of a sitting target. He is a greater writer than the two others who have survived and who also can be accused of the same kind of unconscious racism (I’m thinking of Buchan and Haggard), and he is much less one sided. He writes about unpleasant Europeans, of British officers who fail, as well as of ones who are as infallible gods to their native servants. His characters, even in the short stories, are more than the stereotypes of cheap imperialist fiction.
In the case of Life’s Handicap, I remain slightly uneasy despite the excellence of many of the stories. This is because of the title of the collection, for which the only interpretation I can think of is slightly racist (though possibly just reflective of the social situation in nineteenth century India): that some people have a superior position or an inferior one from the start of their lives, dependent on whether they are Indian or European. It may be a racist idea, but Kipling didn’t originate the system, and it was certainly true.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/6422/rev0665.html
British Asians are British citizens who are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from South Asia, or the Indian subcontinent. The term Asian British is used by the UK Government for the same group. In British English, the term ‘Asian‘ usually excludes East Asians (see East Asian people in the United Kingdom).
Immigration of South Asian people to the United Kingdom began with the arrival of the East India Company to the Indian subcontinent. Immigration continued during the British Raj and increased in volume after the independence of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh from British rule, chiefly for education and economic pursuits. A major influx of Asian immigrants, the majority of them of North Indian and Pakistani ancestry, also took place following the expulsion of Indian communities (then holders of British passports) from Uganda and other nations of East Africa (see African migration to the United Kingdom).
Usage
In British English, the word „Asian“ is often used to refer to those of South Asian origin, particularly Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, as well as the less numerous Sri Lankans (Tamils), Nepalese and Maldivians. … This usage should not be confused with the common American English tendency to use the term „Asian“ to refer mainly to peoples from East Asia, as the majority of Asians in the US originate from the ‘Far East’. The American English usage for Asian is also used in Canada and Australia. …
In terms of key demographic measures, the two Asian groups, Indians and Pakistani/Bangladeshis have developed significant differences. The unemployment rate in Indians in UK is about 2%, comparable to that of the White British. On the other hand Bangladeshis have higher unemployment rates of 13-14% with Pakistanis having one of the highest rates,around 23%. On the other the same surveys also showed that Pakistanis did not have the highest unemployment rates (circa. 15-16%), though this is probably attributable to the fact a greater proportion were found in self employment. The same surveys also revealed the Indian unemployment rate to be 6-7% Persons of Indian or mixed Indian origin are more likely than White British to have university degrees, whereas Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are less likely.
British Asian ethnic groups mostly originate from a few select places in South Asia. British Pakistanis originate largely from the Mirpur area, with the remainder originating from cities and villages in Punjab Province and North-West Frontier Province along with some from Karachi. British Bangladeshis largely originate from the Sylhet region of the country. British Indians tend to originate mainly from two Indian States, Punjab and Gujarat. However, in recent years, there has been significant Tamil immigration from Sri Lanka.
According to the United Kingdom Census 2001, British Asian men from all British Asian ethnic groups intermarried with another ethnic group more than British Asian women. Among British Asians, British Indians intermarried with a different ethnic group the most both absolutely and proportionately, followed by British Pakistanis and British Bangladeshis.
No one knows the earliest origins of settlement of South Asians in Great Britain for certain; if the Romani (Gypsies) are included, then the earliest arrivals may have been in the Middle Ages — although not normally included as South Asian, the Roma and Sinti (most in the UK have been Sinti) are both believed to have originated in parts of what is now North India and Pakistan and to have begun travelling westward around 1000, though they have mixed with Southwest Asians and Europeans over the centuries. Romani began arriving in sizeable numbers in parts of Western Europe in the 16th century.
People from South Asia have settled in Great Britain since the East India Company (EIC) recruited lascars to replace vacancies in their crews on East Indiamen whilst on voyages in India. Many were then refused passage back, and were marooned in London. There were also some ayahs, domestic servants and nannies of wealthy British families, who accompanied their employers back to „Blighty“ when their stay in Asia came to an end.
The Navigation Act of 1660 restricted the employment of non-English sailors to a quarter of the crew on returning East India Company ships. Baptism records in East Greenwich suggest that young Indians from the Malabar Coast were being recruited as servants at the end of the seventeenth century, and records of the EIC also suggest that Indo-Portuguese cooks from Goa were retained by captains from voyage to voyage.[13] In 1797, 13 were buried in the parish of St Nicholas at Deptford.
Since the 17th century, the East India Company brought over thousands of South Asian lascars, scholars and workers (who were mostly Bengali and/or Muslim) to Britain, most of whom settled down and took local white British wives, due to a lack of Asian women in Britain at the time. Due to the majority of early Asian immigrants being lascars, the earliest Asian communities were found in port towns. Naval cooks also came, many of them from the Sylhet Division of what is now Bangladesh. One of the most famous early Bengali immigrants to Britain was Sake Dean Mahomet, a captain of the British East India Company. In 1810, he founded London’s first Indian restaurant, the Hindoostane Coffee House. He is also reputed for introducing shampoo and therapeutic massage to the United Kingdom. By the mid-19th century, there were more than 40,000 Indian seamen, diplomats, scholars, soldiers, officials, tourists, businessmen and students in Britain. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were around 70,000 South Asians in Britain, 51,616 of whom were lascar seamen (when World War I began).
Following the Second World War and the break up of the British Empire, Asian migration to the UK increased through the 1950s and 1960s from Pakistan (including present-day Bangladesh) and Commonwealth countries such as India, at the same time as immigrants from former Caribbean colonies were also moving to Britain.
Although this immigration was continuous, several distinct phases can be identified:
Manual workers, mainly from Pakistan, were recruited to fulfill the labour shortage that resulted from World War II. These included Anglo-Indians who were recruited to work on the railways as they had done in India.
Workers mainly from the Punjab region of India and some from Pakistan arrived in the late 1950s and 1960s. Many worked in the foundries of the English Midlands and a large number worked at Heathrow Airport in West London. This created an environment to where the next generation of families do not lose their identity as easily. A good example would be the area Southall to which is populated by many Sikhs.
During the same time, medical staff from the Indian subcontinent were recruited for the newly formed National Health Service. These people were targeted as the British had established medical schools in the Indian subcontinent which conformed to the British standards of medical training.
During the 1960s and 1970s, large numbers of East African Asians, who already held British passports, entered the UK after they were expelled from Kenya, Uganda and Zanzibar. Many of these people had been store-keepers in Africa and opened shops when they arrived in the UK.
The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 and Immigration Act 1971 largely restricted any further primary immigration, although family members of already-settled migrants were still allowed. In addition, much of the subsequent growth in the British Asian community has come from the births of second- and third-generation Asian Britons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Asian
