Customer Reviews

Prater Violet (Modern Classics)

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I reread this lovely novel earlier this year. In a way, it's better than Berlin Stories because of its conciseness and the humor is more sophisticated. What had been funny looms like familiar smells over everything when history steps in. I laughed so much and felt so much as I read and that is the reason why we must keep reading Isherwood and slowing down time so that we can perceive when one is being amusing or humble or genuine, without artifice.

For those who never wanted "Berlin Stories" to end, "Prater Violet" will be a welcomed treat. Isherwood's fictions were, for the most part, only thinly veiled memoirs - indeed he plays a part in most without even the contrivance of altering his name. However, whether they be fact or fictions, these stories are original and delightful. Isherwood's adventures in the film colony of London prove irresistible. Each of the characters, Chatsworth, Ashmeade and the great director Friedrich Bergmann, are drawn with wit and clarity. What is most remarkable is how fresh this material is considering it was published in 1945. A very fine and rewarding short novel.

Isherwood's short novel is autobiographical fiction about being hired to write a screenplay for a movie called "Prater Violet" during early World War 2. There's lots of world politics, of course, as well as the politics of the worldwide movie industry (Hollywood included). Isherwood's writing is superb, and fills this brief space with a lush garden of a story. Here's a quote: "This business about the box office is just a sentimental democratic fiction. If you stuck together and refused to make anything but, say, abstract films, the public would have to go and see them, and like them..."

one of the best fictional portraits of a movie director, right up there with "white hunter, black heart." and isherwood's quiet, unforced, amused style is a joy.

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."

The size of this book is in indirect proportion to the impression or stamp it makes. I don't know if it beats "The End of Mr. Norris" and "I am a Camera" in terms of virtuosity and fluidity in terms of storyline, character, but one amazing thing is looking at the date - 1946 - and being completely taken aback at how modern Christopher Isherwood is. There's a contemporary feel to everything he does and Prater Violet highlights them all. Sorry this review isn't more specific but I've called on plotpoints in this book in tough (personal) situations and feel I at least owe it a (general) review.

This novel chronicles the making of a film called "Prater Violet" in war-torn Berlin. An interesting aspect of the novel is that Isherwood is one of the central characters himself. The novel is filled with emotions as its characters live their lives in WWII Germany.