Though there is a feeling of sadness in most of their stories, most of these people are eccentric in their own ways (may be more so than the first book), and they are all unique and interesting—they struggle but their struggles draw one in, make one read on.

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

They drew back -- harmless, after all, as mere ghosts-- into the darkness, while our bus, with a great churning of its wheels, lurched forward towards the city, through the deep unseen snow.What makes the book feel much more sombre is the fact that you can’t get the thoughts of what is to come out of your mind as you read.

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

Isherwood is someone whose name is seldom heard these days but as you indicate is well worth reading. His decision to leave the traditions and structure of England was not based solely on his desire to explore his sexuality by having lots of sex with lots of men, but was also a conscious rejection of family and country. Whilst I wasn’t quite fanciful enough to expect Liza Minnelli and the Kit Kat Klub to be lurking among these pages, I did expect something a bit more… well, more. Setting off with two suitcases and a one-way ticket, Isherwood began his embrace of “the mystery-magic of foreignness. When I went round to the flat that evening, I found him with Arthur in the dining-room, having just finished a substantial supper.With the Nazis on the rise, Norris plans one last coup, with the help of Bradshaw, to put his finances on sound footing.

Norris Trains by Christopher Isherwood - AbeBooks Norris Trains by Christopher Isherwood - AbeBooks

As he gets to know Bradshaw, Norris reveals a little of his childhood and the years he spent travelling around Europe with his adoring mother prior to her death. The downside to all these classics being read is that it reminds you of those you haven’t yet got round to! A charming city of avenues and cafés, a grotesque city of night-people and fantasts, a dangerous city of vice and intrigue, a powerful city of millionaires and mobs - all this was Berlin in 1931, the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power.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. 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. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. George is a gay middle-aged English professor, adjusting to solitude after the tragic death of his young partner. In Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood masterfully uses dialogue to tell the story of the lively, erratic, optimistic Sally Bowles.

Mr. Norris Changes Trains | novel by Isherwood | Britannica

It is a heartless fairy-story about a real city in which human beings were suffering the miseries of political violence and near-starvation. I learned more about the events unknown to me before that contributed to the rise of Hitler's Germany which Isherwood highlights.Caskey took the photographs for Isherwood’s travel book about South America, The Condor and The Cows (1947). I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed the accounts of wild raves and Isherwood’s uncanny prescience, but ultimately I expected more from a time so enriched with flourishing creativity and political instability. Bradshaw decides to have some fun with this awkward fellow Englishman to help pass the time on his journey and as a result becomes embroiled in his life and mysterious mercantile machinations. It’s a shallow existence, and the only people who actually make something of it are the rich, because they don’t need to think about where the next pfennig is coming from. And if, in my letters to England, I sometimes referred to him as ‘a most amazing old crook’, I only meant by this that I wanted to imagine him as a glorified being; audacious and self-reliant, reckless and calm.