Goodbye to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood

...for his 'Berlin Novels' - Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains - that he is, rightly or wrongly, best-known. In comparison to some of his very strong later novels, 'Mr Norris' may perhaps be seen as rather overrated, but, in the case of 'Goodbye to Berlin', its longevity as a popular novel is certainly deserved. Of course, the term 'Berlin Novels' is, in truth, a misnomer; for, in his self-elucidated role as a slowly reeling camera, Isherwood ...
...fragmentary snapshots of Berlin as it was in the early thirties, in the chaotic years between the end of the financial slump and the beginning of governmental Nazism. He has long been recognised as one of the great stylists of the twentieth century, and nowhere is this more evident than here, in his 'Berlin Diaries', opening, famously: 'From my window, the dark, solemn, massive street...' Like this, as from a window, Berlin is observed, captured, ...

emma-regina 10.01.2005 · Read full review
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Review of Goodbye to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood

...the title of his novel Goodbye To Berlin has wriggled itself into my brain, though, why so I´ve found out or rather remembered only now. Goodbye To Berlin (published 1939) is a short book with only 254 pages, these are divided into 6 parts, the first and the last have the title A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930 and Winter 1932-3), the texts in between are four stories told in the first person perspective by a character called Christopher Isherwood. In ...
...I have given my own name to the ´I´ of this narrative, readers are certainly not entitled to assume that its pages are purely autobiographical, or that its characters are libellously exact portraits of living persons. ´Christopher Isherwood´ is a convenient ventriloquist´s dummy, nothing more.´ If the author has altered, rearranged, changed what happened to him and what he experienced in Berlin, he certainly did it only slightly from all we know ...

MALU 05.04.2005 · Read full review
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Review of Goodbye to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood