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

The Berlin Stories

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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Added by JxSxPx 9 months ago on 25 February 2009 11:55