It was Christopher Isherwood a little (stopper). On cover sintra diary, Where he appears with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, he appears to be on his knees. I’ve looked in my books, and online, for its actual length, but haven’t been able to find it (smells of a conspiracy of silence to me). However, those who knew him well suggested that his charisma and charisma had partly to do with size. The dwarves have (our) a lot to make up for.
Isherwood belongs to the upper-middle-class generation that came of age after World War I; This means that his youth in Cambridge was spent among the ghosts of the dead. Perhaps for this reason, his attitude was always anti-British, anti-adult (“perhaps his most negative and intense motive was ancestral hatred,” he says in his book). passing friends) And anti-bourgeois. Yes: in his works, the ridiculous arbiters of Victorian morality (represented here by the “hideous” Mr. Lancaster) are a large part of the draw.
Isherwood was also a homosexual and a seducer of young men. General public. A natural rebel in all sexual, social and artistic aspects of his existence. And early. In the introduction to Christopher and his people (1976, my favorite by the author), Gore Vidal swaggeringly describes him as a “superstar.” In the egg.” Annoyingly talented, like a Molly Nelson song.
The author invented himself through novels and memoirs, which can only be distinguished by the presence or absence of pseudonyms
The author created himself through novels and memoirs, two categories that cannot be differentiated in his works except by the absence or presence of pseudonyms. In fact, all of Isherwood’s books talk about his life, and with a certain detachment too. The phrase is famous Goodbye to Berlin (1939): “I am an open-shutter camera, completely passive, recording without thinking.” Isherwood never falls into the myth of the self, nor does he allow the first person to obstruct what is observed or make him lose distance (here he defines his hero as a “detached being” and “almost alien”). Vidal was able to describe him with the appropriate term “objective narcissist.” Stephen Spender went so far as to suggest that the author had no opinions as such, and that people were only interested in it as material for his work.
Example of the latter: in “Mr.” Lancaster, the first story of passing friends, The frustrating sailing journey takes on a different meaning for the narrator from the moment “every piece fell into place, and the composition appeared instantly before my eyes. Vaguely, but with great excitement, I recognized the outlines of a new novel.” Original title of the work (There on a visit: “Here I am a visitor” refers to that fleeting, observant but marginal position that defines the natural writer and “tourist to the core” (this is how his friend Paul defines him in the story of the same name).
Passing friends It is Isherwood’s seventh novel. It was published in 1962, more than 20 years after the Berlin Stories, but the reader should not be afraid to find Isherwood sophisticated. As his fans know, the author’s style has not changed one bit over the years. From the moment he shook off the modernist influences of his first two books and wrote Mr. Norris changes trains (1935) His voice remained unchanged until the funeral.
This voice is sober, colloquial, easy. Cyril Connolly described it as “super easy to read”. The novelist explained: “The writer must adapt to the language that the largest number of people understand, the colloquial language, but his talent as a novelist will appear in the accuracy of his observations, the fairness of his positions, and the construction of his book.”
The only thing the writer changed, in all honesty, was his unsentimentality: Isherwood One man (1964) or that the present volume no longer notes the “negative” coldness of the beginnings. Through the four stories that make up this novel, the author takes sides, is surprised, angry, and even sexually revolted (something that would have been unthinkable in the earlier stories, when his role in the “smoldering” scenes was that of the vase).
Passing friends In all that has been mentioned up to this point, it is an important addition to the author’s translated bibliography, and a gift to the loyal reader of his works.
Passing friends
Christopher Isherwood
Translated by Maria Belmont
Cliff, 2025
383 pages. 26 euros