He had just finished his eighth, he told us: it dealt with the amours peculiar to a winter sport hotel. Hence his presence here. After his brusque self-introduction, he proved most affable and treated us, without further request, to a discourse on his career, aims, and methods of work. The first half of the book is the novella ‘Mr. Norris Changes Trains’. It is also quite good perhaps somewhere closer to 4 stars than 5 stars. But its magic is not because of the story itself - Mr Norris gets himself into a lot of trouble with the Communists - but because Isherwood has an amazing gift at character development and painting scenes.

Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood | Goodreads

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; 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. In his introduction to an edition of Gerald Hamilton's memoir Mr Norris and I (1956) Isherwood wrote: As an outsider, nationally and sexually, Isherwood could see the culture of Germany and the country’s conditions that “insiders” could not see. He later explained that it was his sexual orientation and decision to leave England that offered him a unique perspective forming the foundation of his creativity and work. English author, Christopher Isherwood, intended to write a lengthy novel set in Berlin between the two world wars. Thankfully he failed. Instead, we have two short novels—Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin—that are often collectively called The Berlin Stories, novels which may be the definitive portrayal of a country rapidly descending into fascism as an authoritarian leader was poised to take power, novels that Time Magazine placed on the top 100 English language books of the twentieth century.

Mr Norris’s wig is almost as large a character as Norris himself. Bradshaw is a little obsessed by it. 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. Thanks! She's such a great writer, so it's been a pleasure to delve into her stories in more detail. Peninsula… While working as a private tutor in Berlin in the 1930s, the English author Christopher Isherwood wrote Mr Norris Changes Trains, a novel set in the city during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Despite the troubled times of its setting, Mr Norris is a warm and engaging story which charts the somewhat peculiar friendship that develops between two men following a chance encounter on a train. It is a very youthful book, full of the kind of blase naivete that isn't anything like innocence. It is full of prostitutes, pimps, criminals and communists.

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Isherwood, Christopher (1945). "Preface", The Berlin Stories. New Directions Publishing Corporation. The Berlin Novels by Christopher Isherwood is a compendium of two short works, Mr Norris Changes Trains (or The Last of Mr Norris), first published in 1935, and Goodbye To Berlin, published in 1939. The two book combination first appeared in 1946 I believe.

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Norris is closely connected with the Communist movement in Germany, a rising up of the working classes, which never reached a successful peak as the right wing forces of Nazism became ever more dominant and ubiquitous. Goodbye To Berlin, which is the inspiration for the stage and film musical, Cabaret, is a series of six vignettes documenting aspects of life in 1930s Berlin. Norris is forever conniving on how to raise funds, and lives an existence that is either feast or famine. For when Norris has money, he is exceedingly generous and gregarious - when he does not, he is evasive, secretive and wheedling. 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.