Mr Norris Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood (Vintage classics)

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Not to do so meant that "The Narrator would have become so odd, so interesting, that his presence would have thrown the novel out of perspective. The downside to all these classics being read is that it reminds you of those you haven’t yet got round to! So begins a friendship conducted in the seedier quarters of the city, where Norris runs a dubious import-export business and lives in excited fear of his bullying secretary,his creditors, and his dominatrix girlfriend, Anni.

Mr. Norris Changes Trains | novel by Isherwood | Britannica

Just as the Baron’s monocle is holding up the mask of politeness which hides the Baron’s sexual depravity, so Mr Norris’s sad, shifty light-blue eyes symbolise his shifty yet sympathetic character and Sally Bowles’s ugly, uncomely hands with their unflattering green nail polish show us the superficial and supercilious nature. Norris Changes Trains, about life in Germany in the early 1930s; Down There on a Visit, an autobiographical novel; and Where Joy Resides, published after his death in 1986. The whole city lay under an epidemic of discreet, infectious fear; I could feel it, like influenza, in my bones.Set as it is in the Berlin of the early 1930s, the novel takes the reader to the restaurants and nightclubs of the city, the atmosphere heavy with a mix of dust, perspiration and cheap perfume. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing his first novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial.

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

Looking back with full knowledge of what the Nazis did, it’s hard to acknowledge that a lot of people at the time would have embraced their less heinous policies, in the way a lot of people in the US embraced the values represented by Trump and a lot of people in the UK embraced the lies told by Cameron, Johnson and Gove before and during the EU Referendum.When Mr Norris is summoned to an interview with the police about his activities, Bradshaw waits for him on a bench “shared by a fat Jewish slum-lawyer”. There is tragedy lurking in the words of a young Jewish woman who says "My father and my mother and I, we are not unhappy. The plot, too, is underrated (though very different, I was put in mind of the works of Isherwood's friend Raymond Chandler while reading).