How long does it take to read Mr. Vertigo?
Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster takes about 5 hours 48 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 48 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1994. 316 pages, about 86,900 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 39 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 48 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 37 minutes |
The page count is the median across 26 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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.
Subjects: Fiction, Magicians, Older men in fiction, Magicians in fiction, Older men, Vaudeville in fiction
