The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin (New Directions Book) - Christopher Isherwood

Posted : 9 months ago at Feb 25 23:55

Any book that gets, roughly, thirty pages into it and features one character drunk at a party walking in on another character getting beaten up by a dominatrix at the same party is a great book in my opinion. Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories takes two short novels, puts them together, and creates one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century. The setting is pre-World War II Berlin, and our narrator in both novels, which are vaguely and explicitly autobiographical, is a young English writer who speaks German and is looking for something. Perhaps just a good time, perhaps the meaning of his life, it doesn’t matter much. His adventures are so vastly entertaining, his characters so fully realized that we feel like we are right there with him. Provocative, racy and d...Read more

Posted : 1 year, 11 months ago at Dec 29 20:02

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." The Berlin Stories consists of two semi-biographical novels first published in 1935 and 1939 respectively. Goodbye to Berlin is a collection of short stories, consisting of the anecdotes from the writer's experiences in Berlin in the early 1930s during Hitler's rise to power. Written in the same time period, The Last of Mr. Norris resembles more like a novel but is still episodic in its storytelling. Although historically relevant in their time and place, Isherwood's stories concern mostly about the individuals he'd met in the city of Berlin and how the political atmosphere has affected them. What makes The Berlin Stories a good read is Isherwood's characters; they are eccentric and lively, not necessarily l...Read more

Rating : 8/10