Mr. Vertigo

It is, at first, an ordinary story about a boy named Walt, an intelligent street urchin. Walt, an orphan, has nothing left on the miserable city streets the day he meets his future flying instructor, Master Yehudi. Thus begins a new and incredible life in which a nine-year-old boy transforms into a kind of urban Peter Pan, or better yet, a floating Huckleberry Finn. His mentor, Master Yehudi, supposedly a Jew from Budapest, is a convincing symbol of that old, twisted Dylanian America.

As in his other novels, Paul Auster will also in Mr. Vertigo” skillfully plays with American mythology, and skillfully inserts fictional historical coincidences into the novel's plot (for example, Walt's first levitation will take place at the same time as Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic). Walt, who learned to fly so quickly and became a great media star, will even more quickly fall ill with a fatal disease for his work: vertigo. And the same master Yehudi, who so successfully initiated Walt into the world of levitation, will have to return the boy Walt to the world of ordinary life when the magic of flying completely disappears.

Although the novel Mr. Vertigo” gives a beautiful depiction of American life in the twenties, Auster did not write an epic story this time either. For him, the American twenties are just a starting point for a novel discussion of one of the most important phenomena of the 20th century, and that phenomenon is called progress. Walt's fame, as well as the glory of progress in the novel Mr. "Vertigo" (premiered ten years ago) will be very short but so incomprehensibly painful that no one will ever be able to forget it.