Mr Norris Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood (Vintage classics)

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Startled and innocently naughty, they half reminded me of an incident I couldn’t quite place; something which had happened a long time ago, to do with the upper fourth classroom.

Although Mr Norris Changes Trains was a critical and popular success, Isherwood later condemned it, believing that he had lied about himself through the characterisation of the narrator and that he did not truly understand the suffering of the people he had depicted. Mr Jonathan Henley Norris does not hold a share or financial interest in this hospital, another Nuffield Health hospital or the company.

First Edition thus, with coloured frontispiece and 7 fine coloured plates (one double-page); patterned brown and yellow cloth, gilt back, brown top, brown endpapers, a near fine copy in publisher's board slip-case. Presumably the population, post the first world war, wanted desperately to believe in something good, and this is portrayed through William’s character and how he sees Norris. An historical novel about an obscure young Englishman who watches, without understanding, the last years of the Weimar Republic.

Our team are on hand to help answer any queries you might have about coming to KIMS Hospital or Sevenoaks Medical Centre.Turquoise cloth lightly sunned on the spine and rubbed at the extremities, with two small light spots on the front cover; edges lightly marked and discoloured; endpapers lightly foxed; half-title and last page of text offset; small light marks to the margins of about ten leaves; notwithstanding, an excellent copy with the very good unclipped dustwrapper (designed by Jack Banting) a little sunned, marked, rubbed and lightly chipped. Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon. I get the feeling from Max’s review that there are some differences between Cabaret and Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (which I’ve yet to read) so maybe you’ll be okay with the novels.

It is successful as a picture of pre-Hitler Germany, in a more general way as a study of a society moving towards dissolution, as an imaginative treatment of sex problems, and just as a highly amusing story. He imagines Norris to be guilty of nothing more than a little petty smuggling, a line of silk for his wife or a box of cigars here and there, certainly nothing more sinister. Isherwood's fictionalized account of life in Weimar Berlin is frequently combined with his later novel, Goodbye to Berlin in the single volume The Berlin Stories. He waxes regretfully poetic about the violence of the SA, and the way the whispers about that violence were drowned out by the propaganda machine.Norris is a serial fabricant, incapable of facing or telling the truth about his business dealings, his past or his financial realities; he’s a really amusing character. Mr Norris is enjoyable as satire, and an interesting insight into a place and time that had such a profound impact on the 20 th century and beyond. H.Auden and Stephen Spender, represents a kind of educated, literary, urbane Englishness, but with interests outside provincial England.

As a reader we are driven crazy with imagination – I found myself guessing he was numerous things from a Nazi in disguise to a murderer! Isherwood, and Norris choose the Left, even though Norris is not necessarily, ever, quite what he seems, and may have fingers in many pies, as he also has some friends whose political allegiance seem to belong more naturally to the right. The story is rather long-winded and tame for most of this novel and it seems to be going nowhere for far too long in my humble opinion, riveting it is not.Per me invece fu il suo secondo che lessi, ma quello per cui mi innamorai della sua scrittura e del suo mondo: infatti ho poi proseguito con un’altra manciata di sue opere ( La violetta del Prater, Un uomo solo, Ritratto di famiglia, Leoni e ombre, Incontro al fiume). Mr Norris's specialist interest involves oculoplastic (eyelid), lacrimal (watery eye / tear duct) and orbital (eye socket) surgery. It has left me with a very different view of the attitudes of Germany in the late 1930s and was very educational.