← Back to browse / Mr. Vertigo
Book · 1994

Mr. Vertigo

Where to read

We haven't mapped providers for this yet. search the web .

Taste threads

What this title is working with

Magical realism tinged Showman origin story American hood myth Vaudeville glamour Rise and fall arc Coming of age

TasteGraph uses signals like these to connect titles across movies, TV, books, and games. Your ratings decide which ones belong in your Taste DNA and how strongly they matter.

How cross-media recommendations work →

Catalog

Release
1994

Synopsis

In Mr. Vertigo, his dazzling eighth novel, Paul Auster introduces a quintessentially American hero who, early in his life, masters the art of the unimaginable, and then must live out his days long after the magic has been lost and forgotten. It is 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charles 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 of America in its pre-depression heyday, from the Kansas Ku Klux Klan to the Chicago mob, and Walt's resilience, like that of his young nation, is over and again challenged. Paul Auster, a "literary original" (Wall Street Journal) whose "bounties of intelligence, mystery and literary magic nourish and delight the mind" (Chicago Sun-Times), embraces both the realist and the mythic traditions in American literature. Walt and Yehudi are classic entrepreneur adventurers, and what they sell in Walt's performance is defiance of the natural laws governing men. This is an extraordinary, exuberant novel that captures the aspirations and excesses of a country ready to soar.

Why you like this

TasteGraph reads what you rate and works out why you like it, then finds matches across movies, TV, books, and games. No account needed.