Home | Best Seller | FAQ | Contact Us
Browse
Art & Photography
Biographies & Autobiography
Body,Mind & Health
Business & Economics
Children's Book
Computers & Internet
Cooking
Crafts,Hobbies & Gardening
Entertainment
Family & Parenting
History
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Detective
Nonfiction
Professional & Technology
Reference
Religion
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports & Outdoors
Travel & Geography
   Book Info

enlarge picture

The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin  
Author: Christopher Isherwood
ISBN: 0811200701
Format: Handover
Publish Date: June, 2005
 
     
     
   Book Review



Christopher Isherwood was a diverse writer whose accomplishments included The Mortmere Stories (Edward Upward Series), A Single Man and a translation of The Song of God (Bhagavad Gita). But many critics hailed The Berlin Stories, the reissue of two of his best novels, as his finest. In the book, a man named Christopher Isherwood, who is and is not the author, writes a story of exile, combining the best of Isherwood's real life with the best of the life he imagined.


The New York Times Book Review, Alfred Kazin
He writes his language--it is not always our language--with the tonal exactitude and humorous economy of a man who can be conventional, so distinct is his verbal inheritance. Isherwood's writing has the music of the old English fineness in it. It never presses or stammers ... he is a man who touches his language with affectionate brush strokes in exile.


The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature
Collection of two previously published novels written by Christopher Isherwood, published in 1946. Set in pre-World War II Germany, the semiautobiographical work consists of Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935; U.S. title, The Last of Mr. Norris) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The Berlin Stories merge fact and fiction and contain ostensibly objective, frequently comic tales of marginal characters who live shabby and tenuous existences as expatriates in Berlin; the threat of the political horrors to come serves as subtext. In Goodbye to Berlin the character Isherwood uses the phrase "I am a camera with its shutter open" to claim that he is simply a passive recorder of events. The two novels that comprise The Berlin Stories made Isherwood's literary reputation; they later became the basis for the play I Am a Camera (1951; film, 1955) and the musical Cabaret (1966; film, 1972).




The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin

FROM THE CRITICS

Alfred Kazin

He inspires the same good faith in his readers that is so much the secret, in himself, of his gift for creating character; of looking at the human problem with love and openess. He writes so well because he has been in exile for some time. England also has its refugees, its meditative wanderers standing outside the high world of nationalism and official political opinion. They are voluntary refugees, but involuntary defenders of whose depths only all their lives and all their works will make clear to them.-- Books of the Century; New York Times review, February 1946

     



Home | Private Policy | Contact Us
@copyright 2001-2005 ReadingBee.com