Adieu à Berlin

'Brilliant sketches of a society in decay' George OrwellChristopher Isherwood is the narrator of Goodbye to Berlin. His story obliquely evokes the gathering storm during the rise to power of the Nazis, as seen through the eyes of a series of individuals: his landlady Fräulein Schroeder; Sally Bowles, the English upper-class waif; the Nowaks, a struggling working-class family; and the Landauers, a wealthy, civilised family of Jewish store owners, whose lives are about to be ruined.Wry, detached, impressionistic in approach, yet vividly eloquent about the brutal effect of public events on private lives, Goodbye to Berlin has long been recognised as one of the most powerful and popular novels of the twentieth century.Biographie de l'auteurChristopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing his first novels,All the Conspirators andThe Memorial. Between 1929 and 1939 he lived mainly abroad, spending four years in Berlin and writing the novelsMr Norris Changes Trains andGoodbye to Berlin on which the musicalCabaret was based. He moved to America in 1939, becoming a US citizen in 1946, and wrote another five novels, includingDown There on a Visit andA Single Man, a travel book about South America and a biography of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. In the late 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works:Kathleen and Frank,Christopher and His Kind,My Guru and His Disciple andOctober, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.