Moon Palace Library

Despite the fact that Moon Palace's courses are over, Mrs Bowley asked us during the holidays to imagine how Marco Fogg's future would look like, how Moon Palace would be if it had a sequel. Here are some wonderful and interesting follow up stories written by Mrs Bowley' students :  Hind : Then the moon came up from behind the hills. It was a full moon, as round and yellow as a burning stone. 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. I had the impression that she told me to follow her example, not to turn away until I, in turn, found my place in the world. Despite my reluctance to resurface in the world, the fact that I found some of my family members who I thought were lost gave me hope. The hope of wanting to live a life full of joy and happiness. The numbers of abandonment I experienced this year put a huge hit on me, and created a void in me. A void that I don't want to fill out of fear t

Hello everyone,  It's with a lot of sadness that we announce the end of our chapter on Moon Palace. This week, we started by connecting Moon Palace with Bildungsroman. We were once again divided into 3 groups and had to analyse, thanks to articles, to what extent the novel was a Coming-of-Age story. The 1st article was called "A Picaresque Search for Father and for Self" and explained that Moon Palace contained the most important element of a bildungsroman which is the character's evolution. Marco evolves throughout the book, from a miserable and unlucky orphan to a man who thanks to his experiences gained maturity and is ready to start his life all over again. Moreover, Moon Palace contains a lot of dialogues, flashbacks and emotional transmission.The second article was in French and was called "Les Tribulations d'un Américain en Amérique". It explained how the time setting highlighted the characters' evolution and how Marco being an orphan and ther

Hey everyone,  This article is somehow a bonus, it does not deal with our courses but it is still has a link with Moon Palace. Some students were asked if they would be down to take part in an audiovisual project. Indeed, the project consisted in recording yourself while reviewing and sharing your honest feelings on Moon Palace. All of the participants were very surprised by the quality of the novel and their opinions were all positive! If you'd like to take a look, here's the video:   In order to share more reviews of students, we would like to write and share them: Ainhoa & Elina : We personally liked this book because the story is really interesting but also it personally gives us something. We can learn about life by reading this book . Besides, we can learn about ourselves as well and how it is difficult sometimes to find ourselves. The only thing we didn’t like about this book is that the descriptions were sometimes too detailed , but it is also the unique writing sty

Hello everyone, Our chapter on Moon Palace is coming to an end and we must enjoy the few classes left we have to study it.  Firstly, we began the week  by defining Moon Palace's literary period. Paul Auster wrote Moon Palace during  post modernism . Post modernism is a literary period that you can find in most of 60s/70s/80s literature. It contains fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humour and authorial self-reference. Indeed, Moon Palace files up all of those criterias. We can find a lot of coincidences in the plot as Fogg meets his father and grand-father miraculously. Moreover, fragmentations have an important role in the novel. Indeed, this book loses the sense of being a linear story, Paul Auster drives us from a place to another.  As some kind of conclusion, we were asked to hand back a personal book review of Moon Palace with the help of a requirements specification. In our book review

Hello everyone,  After not posting for a while, we're back with new content! This week, we studied 3 different critics of Moon Palace. They all gave their opinions on the novel authentically and they dealt with different aspects of Moon Palace. The first critic was called "an Overview of Moon Palace" in which Nathan Hobby shared his opinion. The second one was called "Moon Palace and the art of Paul Auster" and it focused more on Paul Auster's writing style. The last one was called "The Remarkable Journey of Marco Stanley Fogg" and explained how Fogg was an unconventional hero.  Then, each student was given an extract of the novel and had to analyse it grammatically. Some students had to study "would", while others had to do the "comparative and superlative form", others "If", and the rest "parallel progression (the more...,the more...)". Not only this exercise reinforced  our grammatical knowledge as we&#

Hello everyone,  For our second week of working on Moon Palace, we focused on its characters and the different aspects the novel holds. First of all, each student had to form groups, study a specific character and present it orally. We focused on Marco Stanley Fogg, Thomas Effing and Salomon Barber (the 3 main characters), but we also focused on Uncle Victor, Kitty Wu and Zimmer who played an important role in the protagonist's life. We studied each character and their complex role in the book.  MS Fogg, raised by his uncle Victor after the death of his mother, is a Columbian student who becomes homeless and is saved by his former college classmates, Zimmer and Kitty Wu. They are very faithful to him. To survive, he works for a wheelchaired man and discovers that his father is Barber, who is the son of Effing. In fact, Effing recruits Fogg to write his own unbelievable story. They eventually bond and establish a relationship. When Effing dies, he makes Fogg promise to meet Barber

After several months of excitement, we finally get to study Moon Palace by Paul Auster. We started this new year by watching a French interview of Paul Auster, who speaks French well, in a show called "Apostrophe" in the 90s. In this interview, Paul Auster answers to questions of the host and literary critics, and he confronts their opinions on his work. We had to summarise the French interview into English as if we had to explain it to a non-French speaker.  Here is the link of the French interview :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afu-OMdM9Nk Then, we focused on Paul Auster's writing and what the steps of a great writing are according to him. For example, he believes that you must write with passion, we must put our ego aside and be patient because sometimes inspiration doesn't come as fast as we want it to be. Finally, we learnt that in the United States, being a writer is a job and you can undergo some training.  Here is the link of the article of Paul Auster