Saturday, August 17, 2019

Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster

(hb; 1994)

From the inside flap

“It is 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charle Lindbergh─and of Walter Claireborne Rawley, a streetwise orphan from Saint Louis who becomes ‘Walt the Wonder Boy,’ a diminutive showman famous for stunning audiences across the country with his feats of levitation.

“Walt’s teacher is Master Yehudi, a mysterious iconoclast who rescues him from poverty and instills in him the faith, fearlessness, and devotion to hard work essential to such a magnificent venture. Inevitably, Master Yehudi and Walt fall prey to the sinners, thieves, and villains in America in its pre-depression heyday, from the Kansas Klu Klux Klan to the Chicago mob, and Walt’s resilience, like that of his young nation, is over and again challenged.”


Review

Vertigo is an excellent, immediately immersive novel. Its mix of “magic,” American history, colorful characters and its from-high-to-low-situations storyline made Vertigo hard to set down, one that will likely stick in this reader’s memory for a long while. Worth owning, this.

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