Mr Norris Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood (Vintage classics)

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The Berlin Diary и формально более автобиографичен, но мне понравился чуть меньше (за исключением главы Sally Bowles). Поэтому подробнее остановлюсь на первом.

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

I love Isherwood for his revisionism. He doesn't blame himself for not having seen the Holocaust coming. In fact, I think he finds this kind of foreshadowing (which was evident in the film) distasteful. Certainly he witnessed troubling acts of violence against Jews, and Communists. He describes these incidents, and the reactions of bystanders who muttered about the Nazis going too far this time without actually doing anything to stop them. "Allerhand," they say to one another, shaking their heads. How fascinating, Leslie, and I'm glad you found my post useful! Yes, I think something that conveys the dark, surreal… The idea was not mine, William. Rather a graceful tribute, don’t you think, to the Iron Chancellor?”

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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. The Laundauers- a Jewish family well to do store owners' family who Chris starts to be friendly with especially the daughter Natalia & the nephew Bernhard. Isherwood even has the oblivious Norris deliver a moment of ironic awareness of the situation in Germany. There are things about the story and its setting that made me think of Sex And The City and also Girls. Isherwood’s Berlin is full of bright young things and grifters who are living beyond their means in an effort to be somebody. It’s a shallow existence, and the only people who actually make something of it are the rich, because they don’t need to think about where the next pfennig is coming from. A good example of this is Fritz Wendel, who could be Charlotte in SATC or Marnie in Girls. I find a lot of my books after hearing about them on OTR, generally when I hear the book adaption presented on these older radio shows. I was first introduced to Christopher Isherwood this way & had no idea that he wrote the book behind the the theatrical "I Am a Camera" (1951) & Cabaret Broadway musical (1966) & film (1972). "Prater Violet" was portrayed on OTR but I decided on "The Berlin Stories" first since it sounded really interesting. I also have other works of his younger years on my to read list on Goodreads. Isherwood was an Englishman who later became a naturalized American citizen & born in 1904, so he was in his twenties when he was living in the Weimar Republic. Isherwood was a homosexual & it is interesting how he mentions some friends being gay but he only jokingly mentioned this about himself & we are uncertain of his sexual stance. He lives in the Berlin district that is friendly to the gay lifestyle since the turn of the twentieth century & thus attracts him to Berlin. This is not the important thing in my view but what I like is his analogy in one of his stories where he was like a camera recording events to be printed later & deciphered later. All his stories in this book are from his experiences with people he met in Berlin during the early 1930's. He gives the reality of the poverty, sexual morals decline, the rise of anti semitism, the competing ideologies (SDP, Communism & Naziism) & society in general in Germany. I learned more about the events unknown to me before that contributed to the rise of Hitler's Germany which Isherwood highlights.

Mr Norris Changes Trains - Wikipedia

The first half of the book is the novella ‘Mr. Norris Changes Trains’. It is also quite good perhaps somewhere closer to 4 stars than 5 stars. But its magic is not because of the story itself - Mr Norris gets himself into a lot of trouble with the Communists - but because Isherwood has an amazing gift at character development and painting scenes. I think,’ he continued at length, ‘I may safely claim that in the course of my whole career I have very seldom, if ever, done anything which I knew to be contrary to the law….On the other hand, I do and always shall maintain that it is the privilege of the richer but less mentally endowed members of the community to contribute to the upkeep of people like myself. I hope you’re with me there?’ (pg. 48) Miles, Jonathan (2010). The Nine Lives of Otto Katz. The Remarkable Story of a Communist Super-Spy. London, Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0-553-82018-8. Then I laughed outright. We both laughed. At that moment I could have embraced him. We had referred to the thing at last, and our relief was so great that we were like two people who have just made a mutual declaration of love. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-01-26 18:44:13 Boxid IA108712 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II Donor

The early days of their unusual friendship, in which it’s hard to tell who is using whom and for what purpose, are full of surreal moments. At a New Year celebration, Bradshaw becomes drunk while eating supper with his landlady and fellow lodgers, then heads to a party where he becomes aware of just how drunk he is. It was also interesting to read this book, knowing what was to happen in Germany and the world in the years following its publication. When published in 1935, although the Nazis were in power, the war was yet to start, the world was unaware of the atrocities that were to occur. While many of the characters in both books doubt war will ever happen, the narrator is less certain, predicting not only war, but ethnic mass murder. If only Neville Chamberlain had thought that way, things might have turned out very differently. 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. The Berlin Novels by Christopher Isherwood is a compendium of two short works, Mr Norris Changes Trains (or The Last of Mr Norris), first published in 1935, and Goodbye To Berlin, published in 1939. The two book combination first appeared in 1946 I believe. The first novella in this is, “Mr Norris Changes Trains,” where William Bradshaw encounters the sinister Mr Arthur Norris, on a train to Berlin. Despite Arthur’s obviously dubious behaviour, the fact that virtually everyone he meets warns him to stay away from him, and some bizarre acquaintances, William seems determined to befriend him. This did warm up once William heads to Switzerland, on a clandestine mission but, frankly, I wasn’t that interested, or involved, in what would happen.

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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. Mr Norris’s wig is almost as large a character as Norris himself. Bradshaw is a little obsessed by it. Proof, finally, that time is nonlinear! Liza Minelli's 'Sally Bowles' must have walked right off a 1973 screening of that great musical, 'Cabaret' and into Isherwood's Berlin of the early 1930s. Isherwood need not have even mentioned her name and we'd know Liza/Sally anywhere, anytime, any place when Isherwood writes: Norris is forever conniving on how to raise funds, and lives an existence that is either feast or famine. For when Norris has money, he is exceedingly generous and gregarious - when he does not, he is evasive, secretive and wheedling.

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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." I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am horrified to see that I am smiling. You can't help smiling, in such beautiful weather. The trams are going up and down the Kleiststrasse, just as usual. They, and the people on the pavement, and the tea The Things They Carried. Там сослуживцы собираются вокруг костра в походном лагере и травят байки. Один рассказывает историю, которая заканчивается так «и больше я его никогда не видел; конец». Как это конец, возмущается один из слушателей?! Ну так, я же говорю, больше никогда его не видел, не знаю, что с ним стало. А мне не важно, знаешь или не знаешь, раз уж ты рассказываешь историю, ты обязан рассказать ее до конца. Не знаешь – придумай, но читателя не томи.