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

The Berlin Stories

Posted : 9 months, 1 week ago on 25 February 2009 11:55 (A review of The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin (New Directions Book))

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 doomed could describe any of the groups of characters we meet here, but Sally Bowles has taken the greatest amount of attention, and for good reason. She is one of the most fully realized females in all of film, and she is even more saucy, cruel and narcissistic in her original form. She is endlessly fascinating. Between the two novels, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (UK title)/The Last of Mr. Norris (USA title), which is the vaguely autobiographical one, and Goodbye to Berlin, which is the explicit, I prefer the explicit. The journalistic approach gets really gripping as the Nazi regime comes into more prominence as the stories go on before ending just before they took complete control. I would love to know what happened to most of these characters afterwards. Especially Sally, although sometimes tells me she and the queer boys didn’t end well. Too beautiful to live, too eager to die.

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[Book] The Berlin Stories

Posted : 1 year, 11 months ago on 29 December 2007 08:02 (A review of The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin (New Directions Book))

"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 likable but always memorable. Characters like Arthur Norris and Sally Bowles stay with the reader long after their stories have ended (not necessarily finished since they continue to live on beyond the pages). Isherwood's writing is causal and lively, and he describes his characters with such a force that it's easy to believe they are real, and they might as well have been. An enjoyable read.

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