Throughout all of this, Isherwood has maintained an observant and dispassionate style of reporting events, refusing to make value judgements about the often bizarre and self-destructive behaviours of several of the characters, although his political inclinations are pretty clear. I really loved this novel. The two central characters are superbly drawn. Even though it’s abundantly clear that Mr Norris is something of a swindler, he is hugely likeable with it. I couldn’t help but feel somewhat protective towards him, a little like Bradshaw does when he meets him on the train. Alongside Bradshaw and Norris, the novel also features a cast of colourful characters, all of whom are drawn with great care and attention to detail: there is Mr Norris’ menacing secretary, Schmidt, a thug and a bully, a man who seems to show scant regard for his employer at the best of times; there is Baron von Pregnitz (known to his friends as ‘Kuno’), a man with a penchant for boys’ own adventure stories; and finally there is Bradshaw’s landlady, Frl. Schroeder, a motherly type who takes quite a fancy to Mr Norris with all his charms.

Mr. Norris changes trains : Isherwood, Christopher, 1904-1986 Mr. Norris changes trains : Isherwood, Christopher, 1904-1986

Isherwood's writing is precise, witty, and thoroughly enjoyable. What is most interesting about both novels is his delicate handling of homosexuality, which was illegal in his native England at the time of publication (even in Berlin the patrons of the gay bars are perpetually on the lookout for raids). Though it is quite apparent to even the least sophisticated reader that the majority of the male characters in these novels are either bisexual or homosexual, Isherwood never explicitly lets on to it, a stylistic tightrope-walking act that provides an underlying tension throughout. The whole city lay under an epidemic of discreet, infectious fear; I could feel it, like influenza, in my bones. It is somewhat more political than Mr Norris, given that it was written later and Hitler's power and influence was more pervasive.Yet she had been through as bad a time as any average Berliner: serious illness, poverty -- forcing her to move to this much smaller flat, where she nevertheless had to have one lodger in the only spare bedroom and sleeping in the kitchen ---then the war, and the last awful year of bombing, when she and the other tenants almost continuously in the cellar. "There were forty or fifty of us down there. We used to hold each other in our arms and say at least we'd all die together. I can tell you, Herr Issyvoo, we prayed so much we quite religious." As an outsider, nationally and sexually, Isherwood could see the culture of Germany and the country’s conditions that “insiders” could not see. He later explained that it was his sexual orientation and decision to leave England that offered him a unique perspective forming the foundation of his creativity and work.

Mr Norris Changes Trains – What I Think About When I Think Mr Norris Changes Trains – What I Think About When I Think

Otto turned up at Arthur’s about a week later, unshaved and badly in need of a meal. They had let him out of prison the day before. When I went round to the flat that evening, I found him with Arthur in the dining-room, having just finished a substantial supper. A supreme example of a radiant prose rhythm married to the most delicious dialogue – a portrait of the subtly ruinous Mr Norris. Sebastian Barry, Week Home » England » Christopher Isherwood » Mr. Norris Changes Trains Christopher Isherwood: Mr. Norris Changes Trains Only a week since I wrote the above. Scleicher has resigned. The monocles did their stuff. Hitler has formed a cabinet with Hugenberg. Nobody thinks it can last till the spring. The newspapers are becoming more and more like copies of a school magazine. There is nothing in them but new rules, new punishments, and lists of people who have been "kept in." This morning Goring has invented three fresh varieties of high treason." While working as a private tutor in Berlin in the 1930s, the English author Christopher Isherwood wrote Mr Norris Changes Trains, a novel set in the city during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Despite the troubled times of its setting, Mr Norris is a warm and engaging story which charts the somewhat peculiar friendship that develops between two men following a chance encounter on a train.That's the thing: the younger, more circumspect Isherwood was terribly observant. He may have gone for the boys, but he couldn't help seeing everything else that was in front of his eyes, the plight of other marginalized members of society especially. His portrait of the "severely repressed homosexual" Bernhard Landauer, modeled, Isherwood tells us, on Wilfrid Israel, is complex, poignant. And yet it was dishonest, the older Isherwood admits. He's very hard on himself, for misrepresenting Wilfrid to make the story come out better ("The killing of Bernhard was merely a dramatic necessity. In a novel such as this one, which ends with the outbreak of political persecution, one death at least is a must. . . and Bernhard is the most appropriate victim, being a prominent Jew.") and for the more serious sin of having projected onto the character his (Christopher's) own insecurities. Anyone who still wonders how events can spin out of control should read. "[T]hese people could be made to believe in anybody or anything." And "The newspapers are becoming more and more like copies of a school magazine. There is nothing in them but new rules, new punishments, and lists of people who have been - "

Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood | Goodreads Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood | Goodreads

Isherwood's immortal novel about political high-tension, passion and literary talent in 1930s Berlin I wanted to bask in Isherwood's good memories and forget the rest. But Isherwood doesn't let me. There is tragedy lurking in the words of a young Jewish woman who says "My father and my mother and I, we are not unhappy." Sleepwalkers, all of them. Or did they understand what really makes life good? Caring and kindness and love exist here, too. The Berlin Diary и формально более автобиографичен, но мне понравился чуть меньше (за исключением главы Sally Bowles). Поэтому подробнее остановлюсь на первом. I'm reading this alongside Isherwood's memoir, Christopher and His Kind for an upcoming column on the film Cabaret. So you might say I'm getting all the ins and outs of Weimar Germany, and set to music, no less! (*slaps own cheek* Did I say that?) In 1929, at the age of 25, Isherwood went to Berlin for a week to stay with his college friend, the poet, W. H. Auden. By his third visit that year, Isherwood decided to make Berlin his home. As he later wrote, “To Christopher, Berlin meant boys.”Isherwood even has the oblivious Norris deliver a moment of ironic awareness of the situation in Germany. Mr Norris’s wig is almost as large a character as Norris himself. Bradshaw is a little obsessed by it. Initially Isherwood planned to write the novel in the third person, but when he decided to narrow the novel's focus to Norris he changed to first person. He believed that this would allow the reader to "experience" Mr Norris as Isherwood had experienced Gerald Hamilton. [8] First published in 1935 and 1939, the two related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which make up The Berlin Stories are recognized today as classics of modern fiction. Mr Norris Changes Trains (published in the United States as The Last of Mr. Norris) is a 1935 novel by the British writer Christopher Isherwood. It is frequently included with Goodbye to Berlin, another Isherwood novel, in a single volume, The Berlin Stories. Inspiration for the novel was drawn from Isherwood's experiences as an expatriate living in Berlin during the early 1930s, [1] and the character of Mr Norris is based on Gerald Hamilton. [2] In 1985 the actor David March won a Radio Academy Award for Best Radio Actor for his performance in a dramatisation of the novel for BBC Radio 4. [3]

The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood | Goodreads The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood | Goodreads

Isherwood shows Berlin on edge. It is a world of rented rooms, where the land lady may provide breakfast and draw the baths for those who scrape to pay a marginal rent. Former gentlemen, beautiful women and unemployed laborers have become grifters. There is gravitation to some philosophy which could be communism, nazism, nihilism, etc. Fritz was a German-American, a young man about town, who spent his leisure time dancing and playing bridge. He had a curious passion for the society of painters and writers, and had acquired status with them by working at a fashionable art dealer’s. The art dealer didn’t pay him anything, but Fritz could afford this hobby, being rich. We returned to the sitting-room, followed by Hermann with the tray. “Well, well,” observed Mr. Norris, taking his cup, “we live in stirring times; tea-stirring times.”A charming city of avenues and cafés, a grotesque city of night-people and fantasts, a dangerous city of vice and intrigue, a powerful city of millionaires and mobs - all this was Berlin in 1931, the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. Further amusement came in the form of Bradshaw’s bitchy description of a writer he encounters while attempting to assist Norris in one of his secret plots. M. Janin is the celebrated author of sensational erotic fiction. In 1945, Isherwood published Prater Violet, fictionalizing his first movie writing job in London in 1933-1934. In Hollywood, he spent the start of the 1950s fighting his way free of a destructive five-year affair with an attractive and undisciplined American photographer, William Caskey. Caskey took the photographs for Isherwood’s travel book about South America, The Condor and The Cows (1947). Isherwood’s sixth novel, The World in the Evening (1954), written mostly during this period, was less successful than earlier ones. The second book follows a bit of a different format. While it still revolves around the same narrator, almost all the supporting characters are different. The second book reads more like a diary or journal, with six different entries, each about people the narrator spends him time with in Berlin. Most famous of these is no doubt Sally Bowles, who Liza Minnelli won an Oscar for portraying in "Cabaret," but there's also his relationship with Peter and Otto, a gay couple struggling with their relationship in a soon-to-be-Nazi-run Germany, and Natalia Laundauer, a wealthy Jewish heiress, who's family isn't prepared for the fate we all know now they must have met. Like Arthur Norris from the first story, the characters in the second book are so well written and developed. They all at times seem oddly likable, but strangely repugnant.