The Berlin Stories - Christopher isherwood

This is a hard one to categorize. The Berlin Stories is a collection of two previously published novellas, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, the latter of which is itself a collection of smaller stories surrounding, and closely related to, the principal novella, Sally Bowles. Despite this slightly hodgepodge origin, the book works as a thematic whole, and could in its way be construed as a single episodic novel with a consistent narrator, albeit one who changes names midway through. For Mr. Norris Changes Trains is narrrated by one William Bradshaw, a clear standin for the author, whereas the stories of Goodbye to Berlin discard the pseudonymic pretense and are simply narrated by Isherwood. There is even a character who appears in both books—the landlady, Frl Schoeder—offering further continuity.

Despite the name swap, there is no real difference in behaviour or voice between Bradshaw and Isherwood. They are effectively the same character, and both books have a very similar flavour, dealing as they do with misfits in the simultanerously glamorous and squalid Berlin of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Politics plays a part, but it is largely relegated to the background, despite isherwood (sorry, Bradshaw) and many other characters being closely involved with the German Communist party. The real focus instead is on the people, largely outsiders, with strange jobs and stranger hobbies, orbiting on the outer ridges of Berlin society. Many are apparently based on real people—including Mr. Norris and Sally Bowles, the standout pedestal protagonists of Trains and Goodbye, respectively. What their attitudes were to being so intimately captured in prose, I’m not sure.

Isherwood’s writing is superb, rich and elegant, evokative without being too showy. He has a way of capturing minute, superficial details in people that brings out something deeper from them—Sally’s nails, Norris’ teeth. I would be interested in reading his other works at some point.

Incidentally, I struggled whether to classify this as fiction or non-fiction. The works are clearly presented as novels, but based as they are on real people and event,s you could make an argument either way. In the end, I chose to call it fiction, for the simple reason that Isherwood catalogued it as such. Plus, it reads more like a novel, regardless of how much if any of it was invented.

The Complete Fiction of HP Lovecraft - HP Lovecraft

I read this book in two chunks a year and a half apart, so my recollection of it varies a bit. I ordered it shortly after the birth of my son—read into that what you will—and made it through half before taking a break. I came back to it last month and finished the rest.

Though a writer principally of short stories and novellas—only the Case of Charles Dexter Ward is commonly classified as a novel, and even that has a novella-like feel—there is nevertheless in Lovecraft’s work sufficient through-line, both in plot and theme, that make much of his oeuvre feel like a single extended work. There actually is some tonal variety, especially in his earlier pieces, including some surprising satiric turns that I wouldn’t have expected, but as his Mythos grows so too does its hold on his fiction, until just about every story could be seen as a new facet of some multi-sided nightmare gem.

Characters in Lovecraft stories inevitably glimpse beyond the gossamer curtain of supposed reality and pay heavily for the act, either in their sanity or with their lives, and yet there is something in his writing that keeps this fairly repetitive approach from feeling formulaic or stale. I suspect this is the sheer richness of his imagination, for while the outcome may be familiar, the varied and troubling methods in which it does never cease to interest me. I also appreciate the secondary theme, less ocnstant but still recurrent, of tainted bloodlines, which I can’t help but feel says something about Lovecraft’s view of his own lineage. Perhaps that’s cheap psychoanalysing, but considering his well-documented racism and obsession with the past, there seems to be in him some lurking fear of a darkness folded in the backmost crannies of his genes.

Lovecraft is sometimes mocked for his prose, which can get a little overwrought at times, but for the most part I think his style suits the story, and lends a grandeur to the Mythos that simpler prose couldn’t match, His characters, for sure, are cardboard, but this feels less like a flaw than simple disinterest. Its the events themselves that form the focus of his story, not the person they are happening to. Though he may be an acquired taste, his impact on horror and science fiction can’t be denied, and his works remain among my favourites in the genre.