Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin

Fascinating and riveting. It’s really good to read in later life classics or near classics – or at least books which when you indicate you have not read them, literate friends are surprised.

The style is strange and difficult to pin down – and connected closely to/something of an evocation of, the famous phrases used at the start about being ‘a camera and merely recording’ with the concomitant implied complete lack of judgement – and, to a degree, emotional involvement. It’s a unique style, and quite fascinating. I wonder of there has been any literary analysis of exactly how Isherwood achieved this…And I feel that we see the characters ‘through a glass darkly’.

The best moments in the book were remarkably vivid passages of description and the page numbers following are from my edition (Vintage Classics). P. 169 and the near-horrific account of the patients at the sanatorium crowding desperately round the departing visitors, P.204 and the final paragraph description of a lake at night, P.212ff and the party evocation so vivid and other-worldly and on pp. 226-27 the verbal creation of the whole city of Berlin.

And on P 223 ff the description of the men’s’ discussion vividly recalled the cartoon grotesquerie of Grosz.

The whole final section was magnificently chilling – and with some blackly comic moments – and I was full of admiration for how the creators of the musical creatively used this book for their w