Isherwood’s fellow lodgers include, the aforementioned prostitute Frl.
The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.”Īs Goodbye to Berlin opens Christopher is living in lodgings in Berlin, his landlady the wonderfully memorable and rather lovable Fraulein Shroeder, a kindly, gossipy middle aged woman who calls Christopher Issyvoo –and treats her lodgers more as friends, even turning a blind eye to the non-payment of rent and prostitution. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. “Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching.
The writing throughout is wonderfully evocative, with Isherwood revealing both a German landscape and society now lost. The novel, is told fairly episodically as it is presented in six overlapping stories, many of the characters disappearing and re-appearing at different times and in different places. In this novel Isherwood explores, politics, sexuality and German society of the 1930’s, it’s an excellent depiction of a society on the brink of enormous upheaval. I found there to be a great subtlety to the writing, a strong sense of place and several very memorable characters. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Obviously there is a large autobiographical element to the book which is based upon Isherwood’s travels in the Weimar republic of Germany during the 1930’s. Although the book is a novel, it reads more like a personal travelogue, the narrator sharing a name with the author. My first Christopher Isherwood book, and I don’t know what I was expecting, but it surprised me for a number of reasons. Goodbye to Berlin was chosen by my book group to read during August, we meet later this evening to discuss it.
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