El Palacio de la Luna

Marco Stanley Fogg (by Marco Polo, by the Stanley Who Found Livingstone, and by Phileas Fogg from Around the World in Eighty Days) is on the verge of manhood when astronauts set foot on the Moon. The son of an unknown father, his mother died when he was eleven years old, Marco Stanley was brought up by his uncle Victor, an eccentric who made a living playing the clarinet in seedy orchestras. Now, at the beginning of the lunar age, with his uncle dead, Marco Stanley Fogg has only money to survive a few more months. Gradually, but without pause, he falls into destitution, loneliness and a kind of quiet insanity with Dostoevskian overtones, where his life is reduced to exploring the joyous hells of absolute deprivation. He already lives like an animal in a cave in Central Park, in a half-delusion caused by hunger, when the beautiful Kitty Wu rescues him. Fogg is saved and decides, for the first time in his life, to look for a job. Fate, and a complex network of signifiers around the moon, lunar and light, lead him to work as a reader and companion of Thomas Effing, an old paralytic painter. And writing the biography of Effing, which he wants to bequeath to Solomon Barber, the son he never knew, Marco Stanley Fogg will discover, on a journey that takes him from the Palacio de la Luna, a Chinese restaurant in New York, to the moles landscapes of the American West, the mysteries of his own origin, the name and identity of his father.