The Berlin Stories
by Christopher Isherwood
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Book Summary Information
Author: Christopher IsherwoodIntroduction: Armistead Maupin
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-10-29
ISBN: 081121804X
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: New Directions
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780811218047
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Book Reviews of The Berlin Stories
Book Review: Character Studies
Summary: 3 Stars
The first part of this book is a seemingly fictional account of a narrator's friendship with Arthur Norris, a Berliner living on the shady side of life, leading a fascinating and mysterious existence. Soon the narrator, a humble tutor of English much like the author himself, is drawn into a world of underground organizations, secret missions, and wild parties.
The second part of this book is a series of vignettes, focusing on specific people the author met while in Berlin. The characters are bright and vivid, and through their stories the reader is able to get a glimpse of what life was like in Berlin as the Nazi party first started to gain popularity and people decided where their loyalties would lie.
I really liked the characters examined in this book, and enjoyed the bit of history I was able to glean from their stories. I think I would have liked the second part more, though, if the author had been able to draw these characters together into a cohesive story. The diary-style writing was detailed and intriguing, but I didn't have the same investment in the characters that I would have had if I'd felt like they had some sort of story that was going somewhere.
Summary of The Berlin Stories
A classic of 20th-century fiction, Berlin Stories inspired the Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film Cabaret.First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two astonishing related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which are recognized today as classics of modern fiction. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming, with its avenues and caf?s; marvelously grotesque, with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous, with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy, with its mobs and millionaires-this is the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable Sally Bowles, whose misadventures in the demimonde were popularized on the American stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am A Camera and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret; Mr. Norris, the improbable old debauchee mysteriously caught between the Nazis and the Communists; plump Fr?ulein Schroeder, who thinks an operation to reduce the scale of her B?ste might relieve her heart palpitations; and the distinguished and doomed Jewish family, the Landauers.
Christopher Isherwood was a diverse writer whose accomplishments included The Mortmere Stories (Edward Upward Series), A Single Man and a translation of The Song of God (Bhagavad Gita). But many critics hailed The Berlin Stories, the reissue of two of his best novels, as his finest. In the book, a man named Christopher Isherwood, who is and is not the author, writes a story of exile, combining the best of Isherwood's real life with the best of the life he imagined.
Isherwood, Christopher Books
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