Mr Norris Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood (Vintage classics)

Product Information

Mr Norris Changes Trains (published in the United States as The Last of Mr. Norris) is a 1935 novel by the British writer Christopher Isherwood. It is frequently included with Goodbye to Berlin, another Isherwood novel, in a single volume, The Berlin Stories. Inspiration for the novel was drawn from Isherwood's experiences as an expatriate living in Berlin during the early 1930s, [1] and the character of Mr Norris is based on Gerald Hamilton. [2] In 1985 the actor David March won a Radio Academy Award for Best Radio Actor for his performance in a dramatisation of the novel for BBC Radio 4. [3] Isherwood’s The Berlin Novels explore the chaotic and troubling world of pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany. The vignettes read like a collection of photographic snap-shots, illuminating the various characters Isherwood knew in 1930’s Berlin, as it has a strong autobiographical connection, Isherwood’s prose is simple and straightforward, his characters are a collection of various misfits and miscreants who populate the Berlin in which Isherwood lurched from one sordid adventure to another. From the unforgettable Sally Bowles to the lachrymose Bernhard Landauer, Isherwood has a gift for creating well-rounded and memorable characters within short spaces of time; that is his gift as a writer, his characters are often symbolised by their physical features or their odd quirks and eccentricities which Isherwood so cleverly conveys; A supreme example of a radiant prose rhythm married to the most delicious dialogue – a portrait of the subtly ruinous Mr Norris. Sebastian Barry, Week

Mr Norris changes trains : Isherwood, Christopher, 1904-1986

Nie Wieder Krieg! he shouted, holding up one of them by the corner of the cover, disgustedly, as though it were a nasty kind of reptile. Everybody roared with laughter. That's the thing: the younger, more circumspect Isherwood was terribly observant. He may have gone for the boys, but he couldn't help seeing everything else that was in front of his eyes, the plight of other marginalized members of society especially. His portrait of the "severely repressed homosexual" Bernhard Landauer, modeled, Isherwood tells us, on Wilfrid Israel, is complex, poignant. And yet it was dishonest, the older Isherwood admits. He's very hard on himself, for misrepresenting Wilfrid to make the story come out better ("The killing of Bernhard was merely a dramatic necessity. In a novel such as this one, which ends with the outbreak of political persecution, one death at least is a must. . . and Bernhard is the most appropriate victim, being a prominent Jew.") and for the more serious sin of having projected onto the character his (Christopher's) own insecurities. He immortalised Berlin in two short, brilliant novels both published in the Thirties, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye To Berlin, inventing a new form for future generations - intimate, stylised reportage in loosely connected episodes Daily Express This subtle treatment adds to the other obvious tension in these novels: the Nazi rise to power in the early 1930s. Both books are littered with insights and observations that are terrifyingly prescient in retrospect and relevant to today. In THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS, the narrator describes the exhaustion of a public primed for a fascist takeover: "The Hessen Document [documents discovered in 1932 that outlined Nazi plans for a forceful coup] was discovered; nobody really cared. There had been one scandal too many. The exhausted public had been fed with surprises to the point of indigestion." And when the narrator urges a Jewish friend to take the Nazi threats on his business more seriously ("The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they're capable of anything. That's just why they're so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment.") it's impossible not to think of the talk show hosts, comedians, and majority of America who treated Trump's 2016 presidential campaign -- and presidency -- as a circus sideshow. We returned to the sitting-room, followed by Hermann with the tray. “Well, well,” observed Mr. Norris, taking his cup, “we live in stirring times; tea-stirring times.”The idea was not mine, William. Rather a graceful tribute, don’t you think, to the Iron Chancellor?” Arthur Less похож на героя Ишервуда. Мистер Норрис своими манерами и речами напоминает какую-то тетушку из прошлого века, которая без устали поит всех чаем, соблюдает приличия и отличается очень деликатным здоровьем и душевной организацией – что не мешает ей выступать на партийных съездах с пламенными речами, косвенно участвовать в вербовке и контрабанде и иметь злобного демона в качестве секретаря. Мудрым высказываниям Артура могла бы позавидовать вдовствующая герцогиня из Аббатства Даунтон. Isherwood, who once wrote, that “he liked to imagine himself as one of those mysterious wanderers who penetrate the depths of a foreign land, disguise themselves in the dress and customs of its natives, and die in unknown graves, envied by their stay-at-home compatriots” died at the age of 81 on January 4, 1986. This was again a new author for me and I found I quite enjoyed reading this. The first of the novellas the Last of Mr Norris reminded me very much of Travels with My Aunt. Mr Norris (who our narrator—a version of Isherwood—meets on a train) is a reprobate, and his dealings (and connections), almost always dubious. But our narrator takes to him in a sense and finds himself amidst (sometimes as a mere observer, but at others more involved) Norris’ life and friends—all with varying degrees of eccentricity—as Norris drifts from periods of relative luxury to penury, to places seedy or politically charged, but mostly from trouble to trouble (which seems to follow no matter where he goes. His adventures (and misadventures) are colourful, at times not particularly appealing, at others somewhat funny, but you can’t help but also feel a little sadness. After Neddermeyer’s arrest, in 1939, Isherwood emigrated to the United States with his friend, W. H. Auden. After a move to California, Isherwood continued to write books, worked on scripts for Hollywood, and taught English at what is now California State University. He also became a disciple and practitioner of a mystic Hindu sect.

Mr Norris Changes Trains – What I Think About When I Think Mr Norris Changes Trains – What I Think About When I Think

The early days of their unusual friendship, in which it’s hard to tell who is using whom and for what purpose, are full of surreal moments. At a New Year celebration, Bradshaw becomes drunk while eating supper with his landlady and fellow lodgers, then heads to a party where he becomes aware of just how drunk he is. He was extremely nervous. His delicate white hand fiddled incessantly with the signet ring on his little finger; his uneasy blue eyes kept squinting rapid glances into the corridor. His voice rang false; high-pitched in archly forced gaiety; it resembled the voice of a character in a pre-war drawing-room comedy. He spoke so loudly that the people in the next compartment must certainly be able to hear him. (pg. 8)His decision to leave the traditions and structure of England was not based solely on his desire to explore his sexuality by having lots of sex with lots of men, but was also a conscious rejection of family and country. He was in search of a new direction. In fact, most of his best writing is about foreigners, outsiders, and exiles rejecting the world of their birth.

Mr Norris Changes Trains - Penguin Books Australia Mr Norris Changes Trains - Penguin Books Australia

Disguise is a subtext to the wider story. Characters are either not quite what they seem, or are employing a persona to get what they want from others or, like Bradshaw, don’t quite know yet who they are. A charming city of avenues and cafés, a grotesque city of night-people and fantasts, a dangerous city of vice and intrigue, a powerful city of millionaires and mobs - all this was Berlin in 1931, the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. I love Isherwood for his revisionism. He doesn't blame himself for not having seen the Holocaust coming. In fact, I think he finds this kind of foreshadowing (which was evident in the film) distasteful. Certainly he witnessed troubling acts of violence against Jews, and Communists. He describes these incidents, and the reactions of bystanders who muttered about the Nazis going too far this time without actually doing anything to stop them. "Allerhand," they say to one another, shaking their heads.

Berlin had affected me like a party at the end of which I didn’t want to go home,” Isherwood once said. By writing it down, it never ends. He passes it down to us like that recipe to cherish. Reading it is akin to eating a favorite dessert. When Christopher Isherwood left London for Germany in 1929, he was leaving the stifling moral environment of England for the freewheeling, decadent streets of Berlin where he could live more freely as not only a gay man but a young writer. Over the next several years he lived and wrote in Berlin, exploring the city's underground culture and keeping notes on the interactions he had with the city and its inhabitants; these notes he planned to transform into a massive, sprawling novel that would be called THE LOST. He was unable to do it. Instead, he carved those diaries into two separate short novels, THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS (originally titled MR. NORRIS CHANGES TRAINS) and GOODBYE TO BERLIN. These two books are often bundled together as one under the title of THE BERLIN STORIES.

Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood - Waterstones

I really loved this novel. The two central characters are superbly drawn. Even though it’s abundantly clear that Mr Norris is something of a swindler, he is hugely likeable with it. I couldn’t help but feel somewhat protective towards him, a little like Bradshaw does when he meets him on the train. Alongside Bradshaw and Norris, the novel also features a cast of colourful characters, all of whom are drawn with great care and attention to detail: there is Mr Norris’ menacing secretary, Schmidt, a thug and a bully, a man who seems to show scant regard for his employer at the best of times; there is Baron von Pregnitz (known to his friends as ‘Kuno’), a man with a penchant for boys’ own adventure stories; and finally there is Bradshaw’s landlady, Frl. Schroeder, a motherly type who takes quite a fancy to Mr Norris with all his charms. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-01-26 18:44:13 Boxid IA108712 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II Donor

By 1933, Isherwood could see the rapidly increasing danger of fascism and the possibility of war. He and his German draft-evading boyfriend--his first great love, Heinz Neddermeyer--left Germany in May and spent a few years wandering Europe searching for a place to live where they would not be harassed and Neddermeyer could avoid arrest. In 1937, however, Neddermeyer was expelled from Luxembourg and forced to return to Germany where the Gestapo arrested and sentenced him to hard labor and military duty. After the war, Neddermeyer married and moved to Switzerland. He and Christopher did not see each other again until 1952.