Prater Violet

Prater Violet
by Christopher Isherwood

Prater Violet
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Book Summary Information

Author: Christopher Isherwood
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-04
ISBN: 0816638616
Number of pages: 144
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press

Book Reviews of Prater Violet

Book Review: A great read - Highly recommended
Summary: 5 Stars

I had searched for a quote from this book for years, one that best sums up all my feelings about the film industry. Having discovered the quote, I read the entire novel and was enraptured by it. I read it in one sitting and couldn't put it down. The characters are fantastically developed and paint a rather bleak yet accurate portrayal of past and present film personalities. And I quote:

"You have never been inside a film studio? ... It is really [the same as a] palace of the 16th Century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women . . . incompetent favorites . . . great men who are suddenly disgraced . . . insane extravagances . . . unexpected parsimony . . . enormous splendor, which is a sham . . . horrible squalor hidden behind the scenery . . . vast schemes abandoned because of some caprice . . . secrets which everybody knows and no one speaks of. There are even two or three honest advisers. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, and tear their hair privately, and weep."

Summary of Prater Violet

Fiction

The classic novel on the golden era of film, now back in print!

Originally published in 1945, Prater Violet is a stingingly satirical novel about the film industry. It centers around the production of the vacuous fictional melodrama Prater Violet, set in nineteenth-century Vienna, providing ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. The novel features the vivid portraits of imperious, passionate, and witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter-the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood.

"Prater Violet, in my view, is one of the best short novels in English written in this century." Stanley Kauffmann

"Prater Violet is the most charming novel I have read in a long time. . . . a novel about movie writers, which is yet a novel about the life of every serious artist." Diana Trilling

"A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles the episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence." Edmund Wilson

A major figure in both twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) is also the author of Down There on a Visit, Lions and Shadows, The Memorial, The World in the Evening, and A Meeting by the River, all available in paperback editions from the University of Minnesota Press.

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