Christopher And His Kind

Excerpt: This is the story of a phenomenon. I will begin by calling him simply that, rather than 'holy man', 'mystic', or 'saint', all emotive words with mixed associations which may attract some readers, repel others. A phenomenon is always a fact, an object of experience. That is how I shall try to approach Ramakrishna... I only ask you to approach Ramakrishna with the same open-minded curiosity you might feel for any highly unusual human being. Christopher Isherwood unfolds a fantastic story with a calm finesse...

Writing at a distance of nearly 40 years from the earlier 'Christopher', Isherwood has succeeded in evoking a comically harassed figure in a tragic decade.

Welcome to sunny suburban 1960s Southern California. George is a gay middle-aged English professor, adjusting to solitude after the tragic death of his young partner. He is determined to persist in the routines of his former life. A Single Man follows him over the course of an ordinary twenty-four hours. Behind his British reserve, tides of grief, rage, and loneliness surge—but what is revealed is a man who loves being alive despite all the everyday injustices. When Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man first appeared, it shocked many with its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in maturity. Isherwood's favorite of his own novels, it now stands as a classic lyric meditation on life as an outsider.

A bestselling modern classic—both poignant and funny—narrated by a fifteen year old autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, this dazzling novel weaves together an old-fashioned mystery, a contemporary coming-of-age story, and a fascinating excursion into a mind incapable of processing emotions. Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. Everyday interactions and admonishments have little meaning for him. At fifteen, Christopher’s carefully constructed world falls apart when he finds his neighbour’s dog Wellington impaled on a garden fork, and he is initially blamed for the killing. Christopher decides that he will track down the real killer, and turns to his favourite fictional character, the impeccably logical Sherlock Holmes, for inspiration. But the investigation leads him down some unexpected paths and ultimately brings him face to face with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. As Christopher tries to deal with the crisis within his own family, the narrative draws readers into the workings of Christopher’s mind. And herein lies the key to the brilliance of Mark Haddon’s choice of narrator: The most wrenching of emotional moments are chronicled by a boy who cannot fathom emotions. The effect is dazzling, making for one of the freshest debut in years: a comedy, a tearjerker, a mystery story, a novel of exceptional literary merit that is great fun to read.

Consisting of four accounts of encounters with four male characters, each of them visited by a different Christopher Isherwood, and each set in a different time and place—Berlin in the 1920s (overlapping the time period of the Berlin Stories), the Greek Isles in the early 1930s, London in the late 1930s and California in 1940—this acclaimed novel explores Isherwood's fundamental concerns with the choice of a way of life, and its implications for love, sex, spirituality and self-fulfillment. Published in 1959, when Isherwood had already become something of a literary rock star, Down There on a Visit is a very funny but also sad and deeply personal book that charts Isherwood's life of carnal indulgence and his first interlude with what would become a serious involvement with Eastern mysticism.

A timeless story of decaying middle-class English life after wwI and the generation that tried to escape its values Christopher Isherwood was only twenty-one when he began his first novel, All the Conspirators. in his introduction to the American edition, Isherwood explains: “All the Conspirators records a minor engagement in what Shelley calls ‘the great war between the old and young.’ And what a war it was!” in many ways this novel (like the classic Berlin Stories) is a period piece growing out of a particular historical situation—clashes between parents and children with all their passionate moral struggles. Isherwood’s vivid portrayal of an older generation trying to hold on while a younger generation tries to wrench free still resonates and disarms.

This book maps Christopher Isherwood's intellectual and aesthetic reflections from the late 1930s through the late 1970s. Drawing on the queer theory of Eve Sedgwick and the ethical theory of Michel Foucault, Carr illuminates Isherwood's post-war development of a queer ethos through his focus on the aesthetic, social, and historical politics of the 1930s in his novels Prater Violet (1945), The World in the Evening (1954), and Down There on a Visit (1962), and in his memoir, Christopher and His Kind: 1929–1939 (1976).