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Summary

Mr Vertigo is different from my other books,’ says Paul Auster. Asked how it fits into the cycle of complex novels followed by simpler ones, he says that that circle has closed: ‘Mr Vertigo constitutes a leap towards another place. After Leviathan, which was a very difficult book to write, very tough, an altogether strenuous effort, I wanted to engage in a much lighter project. Deep down, this desire to talk of levitation seems to me like a resistance to heaviness, to a certain weightiness of the previous novel.’ This desire to escape the ‘weightiness’ of previous novels may one day be read as the beginning of a second phase in Auster's novelistic career, a suggestion which his latest novel, Timbuktu, seems to confirm. Although both books contain certain motifs that can be traced back to Auster's earlier work, they are more notable for their difference from their predecessors. They therefore fall outside the scope of this book, since a detailed study of them would necessitate an entirely different set of theoretical parameters and critical perspectives.

Narrated in the first person, Mr Vertigo tells the story of Walter Claire-borne Rawley, a nine-year-old orphaned urchin who is picked up by the mysterious Master Yehudi in the streets of St Louis in 1924. Master Yehudi promises to teach Walt to fly, and, after a gruelling three-year apprenticeship, Walt lifts himself off the ground. Reinvented as Walt the Wonder Boy, he tours the country with his master and becomes famous but, as puberty sets in, he loses the ability to levitate. Having lost his mentor, he drifts aimlessly through life until, at the age of seventy-seven, he begins to write his memoirs, which he instructs his nephew to publish after his death. Although the novel is written in such a way that the opportunity arises, Auster deliberately avoids the questions he had asked in all his previous novels.

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Chapter
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The World that is the Book
Paul Auster’s Fiction
, pp. 157 - 165
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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