Prater Violet
 


Prater Violet

Christopher Isherwood

Isherwood poster

Prater Violet

$15.95 Paper
ISBN: 0-8166-3861-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3861-1

 

The classic novel on the golden era of film.

Originally published in 1945, Prater Violet is a stingingly satirical novel about the film industry. It centers around the production of the vacuous fictional melodrama Prater Violet, set in nineteenth-century Vienna, providing ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. The novel features the vivid portraits of imperious, passionate, and witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter-the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood.

"Prater Violet, in my view, is one of the best short novels in English written in this century." —Stanley Kauffmann

"Prater Violet is the most charming novel I have read in a long time. . . . a novel about movie writers, which is yet a novel about the life of every serious artist." —Diana Trilling

"A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles the episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence." —Edmund Wilson

A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, Christopher Isherwood (1904­1986) is the author of Christopher and His Kind, Down There on a Visit, Kathleen and Christopher, Lions and Shadows, A Meeting by the River, The Memorial, My Guru and His Disciple, A Single Man, and The World in the Evening.

144 pages | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 | 2001