Written as a memoir (the narrator is a writer called Christopher Isherwood), this book follows the fortunes of Christopher as he works with a famous Austrian film director for Imperial Bulldog Pictures, making a film called Prater Violet.
Written in 1946 just after the Second World War but set before, during and after the Austrian Civil War in which Austria became a fascist state, the book makes the Prisoner of Zenda-style plot of the film, and the book's plot of the making of the film, metaphors for the political turbulence in the background.
Isherwood is most famous for writing Goodbye to Berlin, another short work of fiction in which the author becomes a character.
Selected quotes (page references are for the Penguin Modern Classics edition of 1969)
- "Ashmeade simply smiled behind his decorative mask." (p 25)
- "This morning, he was no longer an emperor but an old clown, shock-headed, in his gaudy silk dressing-gown. Tragi-comic, like all clowns, when you see them resting back-stage after the show." (p 28)
- "For all my parlour socialism, I was a snob. I didn't know how anybody spoke, except public schoolboys and neurotic bohemians." (p 37)
- "The coming was was as unreal to me as death itself ... because I couldn't imagine anything beyond it." (p 45)
- "The dilemma of the would-be revolutionary writer ... This writer is not to be confused with the true proletarian writer ... His economic background is bourgeois. He is accustomed to comfort, a nice house, the care of a devoted slave who is his mother and also his gaoler." (p 51)
- "If it breaks, it's Bulldog." (p 67)
- "The incentive is to fight anarchy. That's all Man lives for. Reclaiming life from its natural muddle. Making patterns." (p 71)
- "Like nearly all famous people, she seems a size smaller than her photographs." (p 77)
- "It was that hour of the night at which men's ego almost sleeps. The sense of identity, of possession, of name, of address and telephone numbers, grows very faint." (p 121)
- "There is one question which we seldom ask each other directly: it is too brutal. And yet it is the only question worth asking our fellow-travellers. What makes you go on living?" (p 122)
- "J isn't really what I want. J has only the value of being now. J will pass, the need will remain. The need to get back into the dark, into the bed, into the warm naked embrace." (p 124)
- "It is the usual sex-triangle between a girl with thick legs, a boy, and a tractor." (p 126)
Also by Christopher Isherwood and reviewed in this blog:
December 2022; 126 pages
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