Mr Norris Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood (Vintage classics)

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How does the author's use of introspection versus action contribute to the overall tone and message of the novel? I always say that I only wish to have three sorts of people as my friends, those who are very rich, those who are very witty, and those who are very beautiful. You, my dear William, belong to the second category.” Yes, I’d write about it a great deal. It is an exceedingly interesting subject, and I couldn’t, or I thought I couldn’t, go into it. It’s interesting because it’s so much more than just “homosexuality”; it’s very precious in a way, however inconvenient it may be. You see things from a different angle, and you see how everything is changed thereby. After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1933 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood – eBook Details

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

This same detached observer is present in GOODBYE TO BERLIN. Indeed, Isherwood tells us as much in the opening paragraph of the novel: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." This is misleading, as Isherwood's narrator actually thinks quite a lot throughout the novel (and of course there is no such thing as narrative objectivity), leveling incisive judgments across the book's six chapters as he introduces us to Berlin's 1930s red-light district and a cast of alternately quirky and doomed characters, including the infamous Sally Bowles, who would go on to be immortalized in the film Cabaret. As with THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS, the hysteria-tinged nightclubs, underground bars, and restaurants of Berlin are the main characters of GOODBYE TO BERLIN, and there is a permeating sense of nostalgic melancholy that lends the novel a poignancy in light of what the reader knows -- and the narrator suspects -- will happen to everyone. Goodbye to Berlin is one of the best stories - actually series of stories - that I’ve ever read. George Orwell described Isherwood’s work on Berlin in the early 1930’s as “brilliant sketches of a society in decay”. It makes up the second half of this book. The whole city lay under an epidemic of discreet, infectious fear; I could feel it, like influenza, in my bones. Anyone who still wonders how events can spin out of control should read. "[T]hese people could be made to believe in anybody or anything." And "The newspapers are becoming more and more like copies of a school magazine. There is nothing in them but new rules, new punishments, and lists of people who have been - "This time, the narrator is given the name Christopher Isherwood, although the author warns that the reader can not assume that everything is autobiographical. He'd gone to Berlin in 1929 for one reason: the boys. He couldn't say this in the 1930s, when the stories were first published, or even in the 1950s, when a new edition came out. He said it in Christopher and His Kind. He was determined, finally, to be honest, to out himself fully. A Single Man marks the beginning of this process. "I think it’s the only book of mine where I did more or less what I wanted to do," he said in a 1972 interview in Paris Review. Book Genre: 20th Century, British Literature, Classics, Cultural, European Literature, Fiction, Gay, Germany, Historical, Historical Fiction, LGBT, Literature, Novels, Queer I'm reading this alongside Isherwood's memoir, Christopher and His Kind for an upcoming column on the film Cabaret. So you might say I'm getting all the ins and outs of Weimar Germany, and set to music, no less! (*slaps own cheek* Did I say that?)

Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood

English author, Christopher Isherwood, intended to write a lengthy novel set in Berlin between the two world wars. Thankfully he failed. Instead, we have two short novels—Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin—that are often collectively called The Berlin Stories, novels which may be the definitive portrayal of a country rapidly descending into fascism as an authoritarian leader was poised to take power, novels that Time Magazine placed on the top 100 English language books of the twentieth century. I also had the pleasure of watching Fosse’s Cabaret for the first time shortly after reading this book. It is loosely based on the character Sally Bowles and a few of the characters including Chris. It was delightful, especially the Cabaret scenes with Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli. But the book is better. Isherwood’s time in Germany was during the Weimer Republic (1918-1933). Berlin, however, was the flourishing intellectual, scientific, and artistic hub of the Weimer Republic, and even the world. By 1920, it had become the largest city in Europe, but was also a city caught in the political and financial instability of the age. That instability was magnified by the Versailles Treaty which ended World War I. Home » England » Christopher Isherwood » Mr. Norris Changes Trains Christopher Isherwood: Mr. Norris Changes Trains Isherwood, Christopher (1945). "Preface", The Berlin Stories. New Directions Publishing Corporation.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.

Mr. Norris changes trains : Isherwood, Christopher, 1904-1986 Mr. Norris changes trains : Isherwood, Christopher, 1904-1986

Goodbye to Berlin has several short stories which have some overlapping in other stories due to the people he is writing about show up there when significant but fresh in content.

Isherwood even has the oblivious Norris deliver a moment of ironic awareness of the situation in Germany. Not all of the diary is riveting material. I could have done without the 1931 summer with Peter and Otto. However, it does serve as an introduction to the Nowak family Isherwood later lodges with. It also allows us to glimpse the ferrety doctor on the island who offers the unsolicited observation that Peter has a “criminal head.” His remedy is discipline. “These boys ought to be put into labour-camps.” (89). So much for the voice of “respectability.”