Mr Vertigo

I do not generally like magical realism but this book was amusing and touching and the magic was well integrated into the story. The story is told from the point of view of an orphan in 1920s America who learns to fly under the guidance of his 'Master.' They take the show on the road and both

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hilarity and tragedy ensue. The writing is very funny at times. I've read 4 Auster novels now and his breadth of style and topic are immense. Highly recommended. (M y 11 year old son wanted to read this book. I didn't think he's get far, but he finished it in 4 days. It's a bit rough for that age group, but I guess the story was compelling enough to keep him glued to the pages. My rule is 'if you can read it, you can read it.')

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Mr. Vertigo tells the life story of Walter Claireborne Rawley, from his boyhood as an orphan in St. Louis during the 1920s to his reflections as an old man some 70 years later. The pivotal event for Walt occurs early on when he is rescued from his abusive uncle’s care by a mysterious man called

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Master Yehudi. The Master has seen greatness hidden in Walt and the two embark on an ambitious path to turn the lad into “Walt the Wonder Boy,” who is capable of levitating and moving through the air at will. After considerable initial success touring with their act, Walt suddenly loses his powers and that incident alters his fortunes for the rest of his life. Eventually, he moves on to become a Depression-era mobster in Chicago before spending most of his adulthood in relative anonymity. The tale ends with Walt writing his memoirs, which, in a clever bit of meta-fiction on the part of the author, turns out to be the novel itself.

This book really seemed like two separate stories to me. The first one involving Walt’s youth and his training to become the Wonder Boy was charming and very engaging. Auster did a marvelous job of presenting the magic realism elements associated with the human levitation angle in a matter-of-fact way that made it easy for the reader to suspend any natural sense of skepticism. Also, the dialogue is crisply written and captured nicely the patois and spirit of the Roaring ‘20s. By contrast, the second part of the novel covering Walt’s post-Wonder Boy career fell flat for me. In fact, the whole gangster story arc seemed completely contrived and the scheme involving the baseball player stretched credulity to the breaking point. So, while I came away from reading Mr. Vertigo liking the book, the unfortunate thing is that for most of the tale I was prepared to love it.

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my absolute favorite book by one of my favorite authors. its relatively short but a lot happens. when i think back on it it almost seems like two or more books. very funny, beautifuly written, delightful read all that.

I love this book. As you'd expect from Paul Auster it is beautifully written and I find the story strangely haunting. In fact writing this makes me want to read it again!

Warmer, less austere than some of Auster's more 'experimental' work like City of Glass and In the Country of Last Things.

There was something very familiar-feeling about this novel: an street-smart, wise-cracking orphaned child alternately neglected and abused by his aunt and uncle (Walt); an enigmatic European Master of uncertain origin, beneath whose gruff exterior lies a twenty-four carat heart (Master Yehudi); a

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Mother Earth figure whose name even goes as far as calling her Mother Sioux. Stock-standard characters from the world of myth and folk-tale, to be sure. And yet what attracted me to this read, apart from the bizarre cover I found which bears no resemblance to the picture here - a Klansman peering out between vicious black horizontal bars - was the first line: "I was twelve the first time I walked on water."

I think there is something intrinsic about flight that just captures the imagination. Dreaming of flying is the closest we get to what Auster, and Master Yehudi, term "loft and locomotion". So I was expecting, and hoping for, a tale of magic realism, despite the grim cover I was presented with. And the first part of the story fulfils all these expectations, and more. I didn't even mind the stock-standards, because that seemed to me the stage set behind the innovation that was to take place.

And sure enough, the parts of the novel I enjoyed best concerned Walt and his flying. After going through his obligatory petulant boy-child phase, and his Master's obligatory will-breaking training, Auster's surest touch is given to those scenes where Walt experiments with his newfound gift. The scene where he develops his music-hall routine at the height of his powers is dazzling. Auster makes his readers present in the scene to the point where they will audibly gasp: "It has to look like an accident. I've just tripped again, and as I stagger forward, desperately trying to regain my balance, I reach out my hand and catch hold of something. It's the rung of an invisible ladder, and suddenly I'm hanging in midair -".

Having said that, though, just like Walt's descent from the heights, so this novel also had a sense of crescendo, and descrescendo to it. In parallel to Walt's career, the best parts are the build-up and summit; while the last half or so of the book lack the earlier inspiring quality and the last years of Walt's life, merely perfunctory.

Disappointing structure aside, it was the setpieces that I enjoyed most - Walt's futile escape attempts from the all-seeing Master Yehudi; the alternately grim and mordantly funny kidnapping scene (no harm, of course, will truly come, because this is ostensibly Walt's autobiography); the out-of-control crowd scene in New Haven. The most blindingly piercing of these is Auster's transcribing of Walt's migraines and physical decline.

And perhaps this explains the descrescendo of the novel: that life is indeed inscribed with the hand of mystery and wonder, along with vast and unnameable sufferings, at an early age; but as we grow older, we make more and more pragmatic compromises with life and potential and the people we live with. Perhaps.

For me, the ultimate estimate of a book lies in what it is able to do with this question: Why? Actually, it's a yardstick I tend to apply not only to books, but to film and other forms of art. Of course, I'm aware it's a yardstick that also takes the measure of my intelligence, and it's a high enough standard that ensures I will never ever be able to write a novel, but that's for a different journal entry. (I remember vividly, for example, walking out at the conclusion of Mystic River, thinking 'Why did this movie have to be made?' That and - 'Argh! I dropped my choc-top on myself!' and 'I will never eat a choc-top in the dark again.')

And for me, Mr Vertigo fell short of being able to answer that. It was a good yarn, and I devoured it almost whole, but it's not something I'll mull over with any profundity. Out of great suffering comes great art? The best art comes not from the conscious but the unconscious? You can do anything you put your mind to? Walt's platitude just didn't ring true for me: "every human being is capable of duplicating the feats I accomplished as Walt the Wonder Boy. You must learn to stop being yourself... Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That's how it's done."

Maybe I'm just too cynical.

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I found it quite different from the other Auster books I've read. There's usually this magic realism, this sense of 'something's not quite right, but you can't put your finger on exactly what it is' in his books. But it's far more explicit in this book, and I'm not sure how well I like that.

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Nonetheless, it's still a great book, and I liked it very much. The characters are very well rounded and likeable in their quirky ways, and the history is charming, horrible and captivating.

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This book was recommended to me by a dear friend of mine a while ago. I’ve often seen other books by the same author on the shelves and they seemed quite popular, so I reckoned he was at least a decent writer. Turns out he is far better than “a decent writer;” one sentence in and I was

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hooked.

Mr. Vertigo tells the story of Walt Rawley, an orphaned boy living with his neglectful aunt and uncle in Saint Louis, and how his life was changed when a man who calls himself Master Yehudi took him away and told him he would teach him how to fly. When I read the synopsis at the back of the book I thought to myself that this would be a fun and easy book to read; but boy, was I wrong! Walt’s story is not, by any means, a walk in the park; it is nothing short of a blitz attack on the reader’s emotions. It tracks one disaster after the other and just when you think all is well, things go downhill again.

Because of realistic setting of the story I found myself completely believing everything I read, that Walt the Wonder Boy is in fact real and that people with “the gift” can learn how to fly. People say that great books transport you from your own world to a whole new one - well, this book did not do that. It took the world I already live in and changed the way I see it. Needless to say it takes a great amount of skill on the author’s part to make the reader fully believe everything he says without a doubt and that alone made me fall in love with the writings of Paul Auster.

I highly recommend reading this book. It is quite short and incredibly entertaining. I’d give it 4/5.

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Once again if it had not been for the 1001 list this is a book that I would never have read and that it would have been a shame. To be brutally frank I had never previously heard of Paul Auster let alone Mr Vertigo.

Initially it took me a little while to get into this book and I also found it a

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little hard to particularily like any of the main characters but as I got further into the book the more it and they grabbed me, so much so that I found it a little hard to put down at the end. The fact that the book was not what I had expected probably had a lot to do with that.

Before I started this, going by the blurb, I was rather expecting a tale about an urchin boy being taught to levitate and then joining some sort of travelling fair with other quirks of humanity, painted lady, strong man etc, something that frankly has little appeal to me. Thankfully this proved wrong. I loved the gritty pre- WWII life in America that Auster describes as we are led trough Walt's life's ups and downs but this too is only a little background to the main tale. What this book is a moral tale or perhaps even two.

You could either argue that the moral of the tale is that if you want something badly enough and are willing to but the effort in, with exclusion to everything else, then you can achieve it no matter how humble your beginnings. Or you could argue that the moral is that of Sod's Law. Namely every time you think that you have got life cracked and everything is going along swimmingly then life throws you a curve ball making you re-evaluate you life and the direction that it is going in.

For me the book was alittle over long but very enjoyable all the same. I will certainly keeps my eyes open for Auster's other works

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This is a weird and wonderful book. It's got so many characters and big, big things that happen, both tragic and miraculous.

Nine-year-old Walter Rawley, an orphan roaming around the streets of St. Louis avoiding his abusive uncle, is one day approached by a stranger with a strange proposition: The man is known as Master Yehudi and he promises that they will both become millionaires because he'll be able to teach Walt

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how to fly. While Walt thinks there's a strong potential the master has lost his marbles, he decides he has nothing to lose and follows him to Yehudi's farm home in Kansas. Here he joins a ragtag team including not only the mysterious master, but also Mother Sioux (a former rider in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show), Aesop (a crippled 15-year-old scholar), and occasionally Mrs. Witherspoon (the master's wealthy girlfriend).

I was entertained by the book so it arguably did its job, but I didn't think it lived up to the hype of literary greatness. Besides being drawn in by the interesting title, one of the reasons I chose to read this book was its placement on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list (although I later discovered that it's been bumped off the list in the recent updated version). There's nothing about this book that I would consider "must read." Yes, it's magical realism so it's slightly different than your typical fare. However, it's not like magical realism hasn't been done before or since. In terms of literary devices, there's a pretty heavy-handed and frequent use of foreshadowing but nothing else that really sticks out. All in all, I felt like the writing style was far too much "telling" for my taste and not enough "showing." In fact, the book is very narrative heavy, although it all comes from the first-person perspective of an older Walt looking back, so it's arguably very thought heavy. But it is important to note that Walt is not really much of an introspective type and is more concerned with jotting down events that happened.

I found the beginning of the book to be a little slow, and I struggled a bit to get into it. But once I did, I found it read very quickly as it is not difficult read whatsoever. The ending did start to feel a little bit off, however. The whole Dizzy Dean storyline was just very strange and felt tacked on to find a way to move Walt out of the Chicago mob business. After that strange interlude, some 40-plus years of Walt's life were very briefly summed up with very little to say about what must have been watershed moments in his life - fighting in World War II, getting married, etc.

The middle section of the book dealing with Walt's relationship with Master Yehudi and the rest of the gang were no doubt the best parts of the story in my opinion. The characters were quirky enough to be interesting but there was little by way of character development, even for Walt who begins the book as a 9-year-old boy and ends it as a 77-year-old man. Outwardly, there are no doubt changes in Walt, especially as he cleans up from being a street urchin and farmhand. But he always seems to be the same impulsive and grandiose character throughout, despite whatever he has to say about himself at any given time. Arguably, Master Yehudi evolves as a character, but I think it's less a change in him than it is a perspective shift from Walt as he ages.

All in all, I don't regret spending time reading this book, but it didn't compel me to rush out and pick up any more books by Auster. This is a book geared more for those who read for plot than those who prefer character development. However, an important distinction is that this is not a thriller-like plot. It certainly moves quickly enough but it's not necessarily action packed from beginning to end.

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Very nice job... Auster is always good for the fantastic/absurd. I particularly liked how the narrator's voice changed as he grew up... He matured but never lost that rough, uneducated edge despite all that he had learned and experienced. Fun stuff.

This isn't your typical Paul Auster. I tend to think of his works as contemporary New York, but this is a Great Depression era novel set primarily in the Midwest. That said, a number of his common themes shine through. It is the tale of a boy who is whisked away from his family with promises of

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fame and fortune. This brings me roughly half-way through my collection and it was a nice change of pace.

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Story of a performer and the changes through his life.