Christopher Isherwood – författare

Klassiska Berlin-romaner samlade i en volym

»Två synnerligen läsvärda klassiska verk, välskrivna, mångbottnade - och skrämmande.« Betyg 4 av 5 - Inger Littberger Caisou-Rousseau, BTJ

Christopher Isherwoods roman Mr Norris byter tåg från 1935 leder fram till den berömda Farväl till Berlin, 1939; i båda faller skymningen över Europa och världskriget tycks ofrånkomligt. Den gåtfulle Mr Norris färdas med tåg från Holland till Tyskland, iförd en illasittande peruk och med ett föga trovärdigt pass. Väl framme i Berlin blir hans hemligheter direkt livshotande: han är inte bara masochist, utan också kommunist. Det desperata nöjeslivet och utlevelsen i 1930-talets Berlin blir den gemensamma nämnaren med Farväl till Berlin, en roman i sex löst sammanhållna kapitel som utmynnar i Hitlers maktövertagande. Berättaren, som delar namn med Christopher Isherwood, kom dit för pojkarna och friheten men lämnar en stad på randen till undergång. Här samlas de två romanerna för första gången i en volym på svenska, i översättning av Birgitta Hammar (Mr Norris byter tåg) respektive Leif Janzon (Farväl till Berlin) och med ett nyskrivet förord av Torbjörn Elensky.

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD var en engelsk författare, född 1904 och död i Kalifornien 1986. Under åren 1929-1933 bodde han i Berlin. Farväl till Berlin, hans mest kända roman, filmatiserades av Bob Fosse 1972 som Cabaret, med Liza Minnelli i huvudrollen som nattklubbssångerskan Sally Bowles.

This second volume of Christopher Isherwood''s remarkable diaries opens on his fifty-sixth birthday, as the fifties give way to the decade of social and sexual revolution. Isherwood takes the reader from the bohemian sunshine of Southern California to a London finally swinging free of post-war gloom, to the racy cosmopolitanism of New York and to the raw Australian outback. He charts his ongoing quest for spiritual certainty under the guidance of his Hindu guru, and he reveals in reckless detail the emotional drama of his love for the American painter Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior and struggling to establish his own artistic identity.

The diaries are crammed with wicked gossip and probing psychological insights about the cultural icons of the time—Francis Bacon, Richard Burton, Leslie Caron, Marianne Faithfull, David Hockney, Mick Jagger, Hope Lange, W. Somerset Maugham, John Osborne, Vanessa Redgrave, Tony Richardson, David O. Selznick, Igor Stravinsky, Gore Vidal, and many others. But the diaries are most revealing about Isherwood himself—his fiction (including A Single Man and Down There on a Visit), his film writing, his college teaching, and his affairs of the heart. He moves easily from Beckett to Brando, from arthritis to aggression, from Tennessee Williams to foot powder, from the opening of Cabaret on Broadway (which he skipped) to a close analysis of Gide.

In the background run references to the political and historical events of the period: the anxieties of the Cold War, Yuri Gagarin''s spaceflight, de Gaulle and Algeria, the eruption of violence in America''s inner cities, the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, the moon landing, and the raising and lowering of hemlines. Isherwood is well known for his prophetic portraits of a morally bankrupt Europe on the eve of World War II; in this unparalleled chronicle, The Sixties, he turns his fearless eye on the decade that more than any other has shaped the way we live now.

Candid and revealing, the final volume of Christopher Isherwood''s diaries brings together his thoughts on life, love, and death. Beginning in the period of his life when he wrote Kathleen and Frank, his first intensely personal book, Liberation: Diaries 1970–1983 intimately and wittily records Isherwood''s immersion in the 1970s art scene in Los Angeles, New York, and London—a world peopled by the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and David Hockney, as well as his Broadway writing career, which brought him in touch with John Huston, Merchant and Ivory, John Travolta, John Voight, Elton John, David Bowie, Joan Didion, and Armistead Maupin. With a preface by Edmund White, Liberation is a rich and engaging final memoir by one of the most celebrated writers of his generation.