Mr. Vertigo

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful tale
Review: I think I heard someone once refer to MR. VERTIGO as Auster-lite. And on a first reading, sure, it does seem like he's pulled back and gone for a lighter touch with this one.

A second reading revealed that, no, this was Auster, full-strength. But I don't see this a a Paul Auster novel. No, this is a Paul Auster tale. Walt and Master Yehudi are wonderful characters who come to life in a way that reminds me of stories i used to hear as a kid from older people. At time and place far removed and some truly incredible goings on.

This certainly isn't Auster's best, I'd say Leviathon (today anyway) has that honor. However, if you are a fan of his work, you need to read this book. And I'd suggest a couple of readings, actually. if you are just now coming to Auster, well, i'd suggest Moon Palace or The Music of Chance as the place to start. I would say the trilogy, but i've talked to some who were a little put off by it originally. I don't get that, but so be it.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful tale
Review: I think I heard someone once refer to MR. VERTIGO as Auster-lite. And on a first reading, sure, it does seem like he's pulled back and gone for a lighter touch with this one.

A second reading revealed that, no, this was Auster, full-strength. But I don't see this a a Paul Auster novel. No, this is a Paul Auster tale. Walt and Master Yehudi are wonderful characters who come to life in a way that reminds me of stories i used to hear as a kid from older people. At time and place far removed and some truly incredible goings on.

This certainly isn't Auster's best, I'd say Leviathon (today anyway) has that honor. However, if you are a fan of his work, you need to read this book. And I'd suggest a couple of readings, actually. if you are just now coming to Auster, well, i'd suggest Moon Palace or The Music of Chance as the place to start. I would say the trilogy, but i've talked to some who were a little put off by it originally. I don't get that, but so be it.

Rating:
Summary: Mr. Vertigo
Review: I wanted so much to like this book.

The premise is awesome: A crazy old Hungarian called Master Yehudi picks up a mostly homeless boy from St Louis with the promise of teaching him to fly. What could be greater than that? So for the next one hundred and fifty pages we go through the lessons and teachings of the master as he tries to teach Walt to be everything he couldn't: a boy capable of flying up and down and left and right and swooping and spinning and somersaults.

The narrator is, for the most part, told in the voice of a down on his luck boy, with appropriate slang and cadence that I would expect from a kid in the late twenties. It is a joy to read because of that, it really is. Very stubborn character to, the things he puts up with from master Yehudi is simply amazing. And in the end it pays off: he can fly and they set off to make their riches.

The next fifty pages or so recounts their travels and mishaps, fortunes and predicaments. Still an enjoyable book. The front cover of my book shows a Ku Klux Klan member, so I was predicting the direction the book would take, and I wasn't happy that it was going that way. But then it didn't, and the KKK played a very very minor part.

So what went wrong? *spoilers but you really shouldn't read this book anyway* Walt can't fly any more, master Yehudi recommends he should stop. Everything is still ok, the stage is set for the perfect scene where master Yehudi reveals how he learned the knowledge of flight and what the problems are. But that never happens. Instead they have cook up a stupid plan to go to Hollywood. Then that fails. Then Walt becomes a criminal. Then he owns a nightclub. Then he poorly explains to the reader why he wants to kill some random baseball star and goes to war. Then he returns and marries someone. Then she dies thirty years later and he meets up with some old friends. Sounds a bit rushed? That's how it felt for me reading it. All that happened in a hundred pages, and this was a very quick hundred pages where important events were glossed over and the narrator started rambling on about things I didn't care about.

To sum it up: the author sums it up. That is as good as I can tell it. The book went from a well-narrated story about a boy being able to fly to a rambling memoir that rushed to complete the end (if fifty years of a person's life can be called the end) of a boring person's life.

I was so disappointed by this. I can't recommend it, not at all. Maybe Paul Auster is a good author - and, technically, he is - but I'm going to be wary about reading something by him any time soon. I'd still like to look at the New York Trilogy, but after this...

Rating:
Summary: An Alleghory For Human Life
Review: In his book "Mr. Vertigo" Auster once again reveals an incredible talent. A talent for painting a picture with the same clarity with which he writes. In a very real sense, this book is an alleghorical story of most all human life. To summarize his message, it seems he is telling us this:

1) You are born and childhood is mystical, magical, and all things seem possible.
2) You hit puberty, and life is turned a little upside down from what it was before.
3) You recover from the shock and go on and build a life.
4) Somewhere in the process of building this life, something happens and life itself again gets twisted on its head.
5) You rebuild your life.
6) You hope you retire in peace.

While the meaning of the alleghory is poignant, the manner that Auster paints the picture contains even more virtuosity. The story starts very whimsically, with a sense of magic. And then, as usual, there is clearly a lose of innocence, and an experiencing of multiple severe personal tragedies.

These tragedies ultimately lead his protagonist onto the next phases of his life, as they do with most people. And in each phase, he rebuilds that life. And often, because of factors that have nothing to do with his own actions or beliefs, that world is destroyed, and sometimes it is destroyed, because of his actions and beliefs, but each time, he rebuilds, he realizes that he is rebuilding a better life, than the one before.

Auster displays his usual incredible sensitivity and insight. He lays out the mental processes with great aplomb. And he takes the reader through an experience that in many ways, the reader is able to use as an analogy for their own life.

This book is one of Auster's classics and all Auster fans should not miss the opportunity to read it.

Rating:
Summary: An Alleghory For Human Life
Review: In his book "Mr. Vertigo" Auster once again reveals an incredible talent. A talent for painting a picture with the same clarity with which he writes. In a very real sense, this book is an alleghorical story of most all human life. To summarize his message, it seems he is telling us this:

1) You are born and childhood is mystical, magical, and all things seem possible.
2) You hit puberty, and life is turned a little upside down from what it was before.
3) You recover from the shock and go on and build a life.
4) Somewhere in the process of building this life, something happens and life itself again gets twisted on its head.
5) You rebuild your life.
6) You hope you retire in peace.

While the meaning of the alleghory is poignant, the manner that Auster paints the picture contains even more virtuosity. The story starts very whimsically, with a sense of magic. And then, as usual, there is clearly a lose of innocence, and an experiencing of multiple severe personal tragedies.

These tragedies ultimately lead his protagonist onto the next phases of his life, as they do with most people. And in each phase, he rebuilds that life. And often, because of factors that have nothing to do with his own actions or beliefs, that world is destroyed, and sometimes it is destroyed, because of his actions and beliefs, but each time, he rebuilds, he realizes that he is rebuilding a better life, than the one before.

Auster displays his usual incredible sensitivity and insight. He lays out the mental processes with great aplomb. And he takes the reader through an experience that in many ways, the reader is able to use as an analogy for their own life.

This book is one of Auster's classics and all Auster fans should not miss the opportunity to read it.

Rating:
Summary: Another interesting Auster book
Review: Mr. Vertigo is a wonderful picaresque tale of the rise to fame - and the subsequent decline - of Walt Rawley, "ragamuffin from honky-tonk row", unwanted by his charge, Uncle Slim. Walt's world is transformed beyond belief when a mysterious stranger, Master Yehudi, who has observed that Walt has "the gift", makes him an extraordinary offer: to teach him to fly.

Under the fierce discipline of Master Yehudi, Walt is subjected for a year to a harsh regimen of rigorous training in which he suffers physical pain and mental agony in a series of gruelling endurance ordeals ("buried...burned...mutilated") that test to the limit his strength of mind and body, each trial marking a progression towards his ultimate goal of mastering the art of levitation, walking on air. Walt works at perfecting his levitation technique for three years before going on the road, on tour across America, with Master Yehudi organising a hectic schedule of performances. Walt dazzles audiences coast-to-coast with his amazing displays of "anti-gravitational feats" that, though implausible, are convincing in their description and detail - and are marvellously entertaining as a result! The secret of Walt's success is his mastery of "loft and locomotion", a mystifying technique of levitating that Auster elucidates and de-mystifies so smoothly and plausibly that we readily suspend our disbelief and slip easily into the world he creates. As Walt reaches the height of his powers, public acclaim turns him into a national celebrity. Known as "Walt the Wonder Boy", he is now the master of his art.

Walt's powerful narrative, recalling in old-age events that took place many decades before, takes us on a fast-paced trip through 1920's Americana - Lindbergh's solo flight, the carnival, vaudeville, the early days of motor-car and motion picture. Walt's astounding breakthrough feat of levitating over a small pond in Kansas (at precisely the same time as Lindbergh's historic solo flight across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis) is a metaphor for American spirit and enterprise heralding an age where there are no limits to what may be achieved. ("It was as if the sky had suddenly opened itself up to man") On the road to stardom, Walt runs into trouble involving a Ku-Klux-Klan lynching and a kidnapping by mean and nasty Uncle Slim who is rankled by Walt's astonishing success: sour, grouchy, deeply resentful at the thought of Walt raking in the dough, Slim hankers after what his twisted mind considers his by right - a slice of the rich pickings he thinks will accrue from Walt's new-found celebrity status.

The latter part of the novel marks a dramatic downward shift in Walt's fortunes: his world plummets from the fabulous to the criminal to the mundane. With the onset of puberty, just as he is about to hit New York, the climax of the tour, Walt is suddenly brought down to earth when he discovers his "gift" of levitation is on the wane, diminishing in power. Once again "subject to the laws of gravity", Walt metaphorically spirals downwards from miraculous performer to mob-connected hood, gradually fading into the obscurity of a humdrum existence - and for a time, alcoholism - far removed from those heady, intoxicating days when he was "an unstoppable force" taking America by storm. Alone, moving deeper into old-age, Walt is rescued by the sudden idea of writing his story - this book. Go with the flow and enjoy this entertaining, well-written tale! Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Unique...
Review: Mr. Vertigo was very well written, the story was unique and the characters are colorful. The build up of the story was very well put together, but at the end I did have to wonder what all the fuss was about. The final 3rd of the book when the focus was on Walt as an adult was such a huge switch from the first half that it was difficult to adjust to and keep up with. In the same respect the concept of this book is so "out there" that the pages keep on turning... It certianly is worth reading, but you have to concentrate.

Rating:
Summary: Not at all the real Paul Auster
Review: Nikola Ruzicic ([e-mail])This one really upset me! Mr. Vertigo doesn't have the strength of the other Paul Auster novels (Moon Palace or Leviathan). As it might be considered "good" by some standards it is nonetheless mediocre or even bad in comparison to the real Paul Auster. The story by itself might be considered "Austerian" but the development certainly isn't. It is too conventional for Auster and still to abstract for anything else. The characters are certainly well described in the first part but they tend to lose their strength in the second. As he covers the first 18 years of the life of Walt (the main character) in about 2/3 of the book he shrinks the rest of it to a mere short story that might as well be sold separately. He does this in other books but there the shortness aquires a significance as part of something bigger whereas in Mr. Vertigo it even makes the whole a lot weaker. I hope this was the first and last of Auster's adventures into mediocrity and given his previous books I think we can forgive him, though ... Rating 5 because it is much better than many other books but ... it isn't worth Paul Auster.

Rating:
Summary: Ingenius
Review: Origianl. Ingenius. Fun. And oh so catchy. A quick and delightful read. As enjoyable, if not more, than Harry Potter.

Rating:
Summary: Auster's Fable
Review: Paul Auster is usually a steadfastly metaphysical writer, procuring post-modern ideas from his books with the regularity of an oil derrick. He's usually so preoccupied with the subtext of his works that the universes he creates come off as nondescript and inconsequential, and his prose remains, well, austere. The purpose of this preamble is to prepare you for the marked departure that is "Mr. Vertigo".

The universe here is quite definite: America in the early twentieth century. The prose is decidedly un-austere. Auster attempts to authentically capture the lingo and rhythms of the 1920s and 1930s. Either that, or he has created a grand parody of the way people spoke. Either way, the dialogue here is colourful, flavourful, but sometimes peculiar. Paul may have bit off more than he can chew. Examples such referring to St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean as 'The Dizmeister' try and inject style into corners where style isn't needed. Was the name Dizzy not interesting enough? A minor quibble, that. (Dean also serves as an analogy-within-analogy; his meteoric rise and fall rivals that of our protagonist.) For the most part Auster has a grand command of the language he uses.

But all this does not deny the fact that this book is still a pretty powerful analogy. It is a picaresque, following the adventures of Walter Claireborne Rawley, a.k.a., Walt the Wonder Boy. Rescued from a scamp's life by the mysterious Master Yehudi, Walt is taught to fly. This curious skill -- the only piece of Auster-esque magic in a book that takes great pains to mimic its reality -- takes them on adventures all over the country. And herein lies the analogy. As Walt's powers and fame grows, so to do those of the young country on the verge of its own modern breakthroughs. Walt's adventures parallel the rise and fall of American culture in its infancy: from Vaudeville, to the Circus, to motion pictures; from a run in with the Ku Klux Klan, to an allegiance with Prohibition-era Chicago gangsters. Walt lives a kind of Forrest Gump-type existence. The cherry on the sundae is his love for and near ruin at the hands of that most American of pastimes, baseball. "Mr. Vertigo" is about America finding its wings, and Auster weaves its story with Walt's with near-seamless precision.

On a deeper level, it should not be overlooked that Master Yehudi is seen, several times, reading from a book of Spinoza. My elementary understanding of the man's philosophies, with thanks to Bertrand Russell, indicates that Auster intended these passing mentions to have some weight. The relationship between Master Yehudi and Walt is analogous to God's relationship to Man. This is best seen in the (evil) training Walt must undergo in order to lift-off. There are also references to bondage by outside sources, freedom stemming from self-determination, and happiness in the face of misfortune, that readers of both Spinoza and "Mr. Vertigo" will find familiar. And finally, we get a philosophical explanation of why the boy can fly: "Everything that happens is a manifestation of God's inscrutable nature, and it is logically impossible that events should be other than they are," says Spinoza. So, Master Yehudi says, "In order to lift you off the ground, we have to crack the heavens in two. We have to turn the whole bloody universe inside out." Familiarity with Spinoza is unnecessary (I only achieved mine in hindsight) but it might just enhance your experience with the novel.

Auster still manages to throw in some po-mo theorizing, this time on the nature of the book as a piece of fiction. To begin with, one of the characters, a poor black boy with designs on getting into university, is named Aesop. He writes a memoir (or is it a fable?) at one point, about which Walt says, "I laughed at some parts, I cried at others, and what more can a person want from a book than to feel the prick of such delights and sorrows?" Auster does his best to inject such sorrows and delights into his book. He also adds meta-fictional moments to the narrative: "If this were a movie, here's where the calendar pages would start flying off the wall," Walt says, just as his career is about to take off, around the time when that cinematic cliche was forming. And most tellingly of all, here's Walt (speaking words you'd expect Auster to believe) on his newly minted status: "I wasn't just a robot anymore, a wind-up baboon who did the same set of tricks for every show -- I was evolving into an artist, a true creator who performed as much for his own sake as for the sake of others." This book is Auster's most accessible work, and the above confirms that he knows exactly what he is doing.

If I've sounded like a book report at times, I apologize, but Auster's writing lends itself to this kind of reviewing. It is concerned with the ideas that surround its fictions, so why shouldn't I take a stab at cracking the codes those ideas are trying to hide? It brings me enjoyment to do so, and I suspect those of you reading this who also have a patient and curious mind will enjoy this book as well.