Earn Christopher And His Kind Edited By Christopher Isherwood Offered In Physical Book

fascinating view of Hitler's rise to power through the eyes of a group of friends, but Isherwood's style of narrating in both first and third person tends to distance you from it emotionally.
Sometimes this is effective, but there are also times when it is to its detriment,
Abandoned atpages. Wasn't feeling the love. I can't be doing with Christopher referring to himself as Christopher and describing people who weren't really called what they were called in a previous book!!! Nope, haven't got time for that.
I can't say for sure why I am continually drawn to Christopher Isherwood autobiographies, but he did lead an interesting life.
"Christopher and His Kind" starts in Berlin before the outbreak of WWII, The genesis of what would become "Cabaret" is here but the story is more focused on his relationship with his first love, a German named Heinz.
Once it is clear that the Nazis are taking over and Heinz is in danger of being conscripted in Hitler's army, the two take flight, seeking refuge and sanctuary in various countries.
Along the way they meet various literary luminaries including E, M. Forster who becomes a friend and supporter, We also see the attitudes towards homosexuals in various cultures, from Britain to Japan, My only problem is that I keep envisioning Michael York as Isherwood which isn't really fair to either of them, Young Christopher Isherwood spent much of thes in continental Europe, including a few years in Berlin, He wrote a novel and some short stories based on his experiences there,
Middleaged Christopher Isherwood wrote this book about young Christopher Isherwood, in the third person and gave details of what young Christopher was up to and how he came to write the stories.

The style of talking about himself in the third person is rather offputting until you get used to it, but it does work.
The older author can look back and make sense of the younger man's experiences, while the younger one keeps the immediacy of those experiences.
It is a very candid autobiography and includes details of his homosexual affairs and liaisons with teenage boys, which he could not have been quite as open about at the time although he did not try to hide them from his friends and family.
The most ironic part of being a reader of "Christopher and His Kind" is that one regrets having not read the rest of his oeuvre while simultaneously experiencing the dragging feeling that one really doesn't want to read the rest of his works.
While this work is certainly speckled with important thoughts about prewar gay life and vibrant recountings of the fear and anxiety that rifled much of the European continent in thes, it is weighed down by the oblivious bourgeois narcissism of, who would later become, one of Britain's foremost writers of the decade.


Perhaps the most difficult part of the book is Isherwood's decision to give a thirdperson retelling supposedly as a way to demarcate a distinction between his older self and his much younger naive self.
In the end, this makes it difficult both for the reader to emotionally connect with young Christopher and, in turn, it makes Christopher Isherwood himself come off as described above.
This coupled with the fact that Isherwoodthenarrator regularly intercedes into the telling of Isherwoodtheprotagonist, made this a book that was both emotionally shallow and difficult to connect with which is surprising considering what should have been deeply emotional source material involving friends and lost lovers.


While I appreciate this work for its significance to gay literature and history and for its truthful tellings of prewar Europe, it lacked the depth needed to draw readers in and keep them connected.
Whether or not I pick up another Isherwood I have

already read "A Single Man," but any others, . . is still to be determined,.stars.

Reread AGAIN in April, partly during a visit to Berlin where I stood outside the house that Isherwood lived in and took inspiration for sitelinkGoodbye to Berlin from.
I still love this man and his selfabsorbed writings very much, and it was fun to view this book through a wideangle lens this time, since both times I've previously read it I've been looking for very specific things.
God this is dense though, Great, if you're as interested in Isherwood as I am, but a lot if you're not, Will this be the last time I read this book Probably not, Isherwood is always calling me back,



Reread in Mayfor my upcoming Isherwood dissertation yaaaaaay, Reading Christopher and His Kind for a second time really highlighted to me just how problematic Isherwood is in a variety of ways the bit where he calls his boyfriend the nword because he's tanned is uncomfortable as HELL, but also what an engaging, reflective, and generally brilliant life writer he is.
Also: it really showed me that it pays to have read Isherwood's other work before you dive into this so that you actually understand what he's on about most of the time! I ended up enjoying this far more the second time than I did the first.
I still can't quite bring myself to award it the perfectstar rating, however,



This is one of the single most interesting books I've ever read, It's part memoir, part literary criticism, part history, and almost part fiction since it interacts so inextricably with Isherwood's fictionalised accounts of this time period as well as what actually happened.
I would imagine that this book is an absolute gift to Isherwood scholars, as it reveals both the present man and the past man AND provides an illuminating insight into his work.
Honestly, Christopher and His Kind is just utterly fascinating, It is long, yes, and it can be confusing in places Isherwood uses the firstperson pronoun 'I' to mark his present self who is looking back on the events of, and refers to the version of himself living these events as 'Christopher' even more confusingly, the fictional character 'Christopher Isherwood' from sitelinkGoodbye to Berlin pops up a few times, and he is referred to as 'Isherwood'.
Personally, once I got used to this division of different Christophers, I didn't find it too hard to follow, but I imagine that it would be quite jarring to other readers, especially if you read it slowly or in dispersed chunks.
I also think that readers who are unfamiliar with Christopher Isherwood might struggle here, as it engages so directly with his other published work rather than presenting itself as a straightforward memoir.
I personally had only read sitelinkGoodbye to Berlin before this, which was fine as that's probably the text that Isherwood hearkens back to the most, but there were times that I felt I was missing out by not having read more of his work.
Christopher and His Kind, then, is a highly unusual book, but it is one that I absolutely loved, I was interested in Isherwood before I read this, but that interest has increased tenfold having read it,

In the most basic terms possible, Christopher and His Kind is a detailed memoir of Christopher Isherwood's time living as an expatriate in Berlin, explaining why he went there and what he did once he was there.
Except it's not just that, really, It's also a commentary on Germany in thes, detailing the country's slide into fascism and the consequences of this for especially gay people living in Germany there's one particularly interesting segment on Magnus Hirschfeld and his institute for sexology research, which was producing pioneering work on homosexuality and particularly transgender people at the time before its archives were destroyed during Nazi book burnings.
It also isn't just a book about Germany, as, once Isherwood falls in love with a German named Hans, who attempts to avoid conscription and prevent Nazis from discovering he is gay by leaving the country, he ends up travelling to various different parts of the world, before ultimately ending up in America with his best friend W.
H. Auden, aiming to start a new life, Really, I guess that you could call this a travel narrative, but, again, there's so much more to it than that.
What makes this book so fascinating is that it provides incredibly detailed insight into numerous different things: Isherwood's past and present lives, Isherwood's writing, Isherwood's famous friends Auden, Stephen Spender, and E.
M. Forster among others, Isherwood's German lovers 'Otto' and Hans, gay life in thes, Nazi Germany, and various other countries and cultures.
It encompasses so much, despite its narrow time frame and focus on just one life, and it is for this reason that it is utterly fascinating to read.


Another thing that I really enjoyed about this book was the selfreflexivity of it, I think that in calling himself 'I' and his past self 'Christopher', Isherwood clearly demonstrates how much he had changed as a person from the time written about to the time of writing, and that shows in moments of the narrative too.
Isherwood's narrative voice is often critical of Christopher's decisions and behaviour, and comments upon what he would have done differently if he could live those years again.
Not only does that show growth and acknowledgement of imperfections, but it also creates a really interesting duplicity in the image of Isherwood that you gain from reading this book: you see what he did then and what he thinks about it now, creating a rounded and realistic portrait of the man overall.
As an autobiography, I think that this book absolutely excels in presenting so many complex, varied versions of Isherwood that you feel that you truly know him by the time it is finished.
This is not to say that I think that Isherwood was a perfect person who successfully called out all of his old questionable behaviour, because he wasn't.
Some of the things that he goes on record saying and doing in this book would be called problematic by modern standards, particularly his taste for younger men, which continued throughout his life the last line of Christopher and His Kind is more than just a little icky.
However, I do think that he's honest, and that makes his memoir ever more compelling than one that glamorises or censors the truth would be.


Overall, this made for an incredibly interesting reading experience, and I'm still brimming with ideas nearly a month after reading it.
Isherwood currently sits right near the top of my list of writers that I might like to write on when dissertation times rolls around again, and, if I do decide to write on him, I imagine that this book will be invaluable to me.
It just contains so much, and everything within it is super interesting, That's the crux of the matter, really: Christopher and His Kind feels like a book that encompasses everything that interests me, and, as a result, it was a complete joy to read.
.