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Bezig met laden... Prater Violet (1946)door Christopher Isherwood
Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. This novella is only the second book of Isherwood’s that I’ve read, and I enjoyed it even more than the first, Goodbye to Berlin. It’s an interesting feature of his work that he blurs the line between memoir and fiction. As in Goodbye to Berlin, in Prater Violet Isherwood writes in the first person as a character named Christopher Isherwood and bases the tale on his own experience, in this case, his first foray into film. Nevertheless, it is a novel that reads like a novel. It has the freedom and snappy dialogue of the best fiction. Friedrich Bergmann, Viennese intellectual director, is a memorably-depicted figure. The character of Isherwood is only slightly less successful, perhaps because one has seen the type of the effete university-educated product of a middle-class home unable to act on his sympathy for the down-trodden before (most recently, in my case, in the author's Berlin collection). Still, this portrait is an interesting variation on the theme. While some of the supporting characters are sketchy, others are vivid; I think of Lawrence the technician, Chatsworth, the producer, and Ashmeade, Cambridge poet-turned-studio intriguer. The juxtaposition of the self-important, insular, crisis-ridden studio and the percolating instability of central Europe under the shadow of Fascism works for me. I was glad that the one was not clumsily portrayed as the counterpart to the other. The points of contact Isherwood evokes are sufficient, and deftly handled. A very good read. A truly delightful read, with enticing insight into Art and the process of creation in relation to Man, the roles he plays under cold, artificial lights, the paths he moves along, and the chill mathematics of show-business and of the falling dominoes of history that tamper with the artistic temperament. Gripping questions related to the human condition such as love and friendship are explored in more depth on a few pages than they usually are in thick volumes. Bittersweet truths about who we might be and what we are doing with ourselves often come in deliciously manageable bite-sized chunks.
In "Prater Violet," the Isherwood character who calls himself Christopher Isherwood and who is the focussing eye of all these narratives works in London on the script of a movie with an Austrian Jewish director. The director is a man of real talent: imaginative, energetic, and resourceful, a Viennese mixture of Jewish irony, worldly cleverness, and old-fashioned Goethean culture, whose soliloquies are brilliant examples of the author's mimetic gift. But in England, Imperial Bulldog Pictures sets him to making one of those idiotic films about the romance of gay old Vienna... It is to be hoped that Mr. Isherwood, with his recent experience of the Coast, will go on to give us the story of the more streamlined and larger- scale American methods of wrecking talent and suppressing issues.
Isherwood's story centers on the production of the vacuous fictional melodrama Prater Violet, set in nineteenth-century Vienna, providing ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. The novel features the vivid portraits of imperious, passionate, and witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter: the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.912Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1901-1945LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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Well, gotta go read more Isherwood now. ( )