When I met Paul Auster at the literary festival
where I was working, I only asked him to autograph one book – after all I was
there in some sort of official capacity as an interpreter, and I didn’t want to
run the risk of upsetting him by being your standard hysterical fan (but do
writers actually have hysterical fans?!?). The book I asked him to autograph
was a Turkish copy of Mr Vertigo, a
wedding present for a friend of mine who was divorced within a year. Moral of
the story: I should have just got an autograph for myself.
But I digress. Mr Vertigo is, together with Sunset
Park, my favourite novel by Paul Auster. Master Yeuhdi is right up there in
terms of mentoring figures with Melquiades, Ephraim Gursky. The rest of Master
Yeuhdi’s family is also a great inspiration, both for Walt and for the reader,
with the highly educated Aesop and the loving Mother Sioux.
The book’s back cover simply presented it as a
story of a levitating kid, but it’s so much more than that: there is the
already mentioned mentorship, but also friendship, race and racism, and the
circle of life that closes itself wonderfully with the old Mrs Whiterspoon.
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