Word: isherwood
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...being hip isn't usually thought to be one of them. Up-and-coming artists, especially ones from abroad, used to flock to London, Amsterdam or New York City rather than Hamburg, Munich or Cologne. As for Berlin, it hasn't been on the international cool list since Christopher Isherwood lived in the city in the early 1930s and chronicled the demise of its rambunctious culture under the Nazis. If foreigners came to visit, they were hippies, spies, U.S. Presidents or peeping tourists curious to catch a glimpse of communism from a safe distance. (See pictures of Barack Obama visiting...
...movies (Bridget Jones's Diary) and on TV (as the dreamboat Mr. Darcy in the BBC's 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice). But until now, at 49, he never got that Role of a Lifetime that actors pray for. George, in Tom Ford's adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel, is it. The movie brought Firth the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival and was bought for U.S. distribution by the Weinstein Company...
...Saint-Exupéry and Byron are very different from Christopher Isherwood, whose stay in Berlin seems to have been motivated chiefly, as one person put it, by the ready supply of German boys. Weimar was the place to be in the early interwar years, and Isherwood was there, writing a gloriously camp version of the rise of Nazism...
...very best pages here are without doubt the first 400, which Isherwood polished into a sharp-eyed narrative, and in which the shock of discovery between the kindly British ironist and California's odd circles of philosophers, quacks and movie stars was most electric. Isherwood's gift was for bringing a clear-eyed sympathy and an irreverent open-mindedness to even the most outlandish scenes. Almost every page, in Isherwood's best moments, is alive with immortal incident (Dylan Thomas pawing Shelley Winters at The Players restaurant, or a local hostess mistaking Stravinsky for "a comic on the Molly Goldberg...
...singular strength of the book is that Isherwood brings this happy mix of earnestness and mischief to the realm where it is most essential and most rare: the search for God. When he determined to dedicate himself to the Swami, he made it plausible by remembering that he "hated anything which sounded like 'religion'" and "had always regarded Vedanta philosophy, or yoga, as the ultimate in mystery-mongering nonsense." Here is the perfect skeptic's guide to faith, in which even the most vaporous of concepts is rendered with a brilliant everyday lucidity ("The Ego...is like...