Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951 - Softcover

Isherwood, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099283247 ISBN 13: 9780099283249

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2001

Synopsis

Paperback. Pub Date: 2001 07 Pages: 432 Publisher: Vintage Christopher Isherwood settled in California in 1939 and spent the war years writing for Hollywood but by 1945 he had all but ceased to write fiction and even abandoned his Habit of keeping a diary. Instead he embarked on a life of frantic socialising and drinking. Looking back from the 1970s. Isherwood recreated these years from personal memories to form a remarkably honest mixture of private and social history. (20001211)

About this title

Review:

Christopher Isherwood is best known for publishing at least two minor classics, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. His first volume of diaries, published in 1996, also met with rave reviews, and the memoir about his struggle with his sexuality, Christopher and his Kind, was also highly praised. Set against these, it must be said that these Lost Years 1945-1951, re-created from memory and scraps of paper, are rather desultory and unsatisfying, and will tend to appeal to die-hard Isherwood fans rather than the general reader. Nevertheless, they do contain some good nuggets: a meeting with Georgia O'Keefe, described as "that sturdy old weather-beaten cedar root"; and there is an amusing moment when an inebriated Isherwood ticks off Greta Garbo for "arrogance, affectation and egomania". The other undeniable virtue of these memoirs is their searing honesty, both in matters sexual (random couplings, with "upwards of four hundred men", frankly described), and as regards the difficult and temperamental character of the writer himself. --Christopher Hart

Review:

"Isherwood's account is endearingly honest... a journal not only unusually objective but in parts shockingly frank. You are left feeling you have truly got to know Christopher Isherwood... A welcome supplement to Isherwood's Diaries and provides futher insight into a major literary figure" (Scotland on Sunday)

"In Lost Years Isherwood lays bare his mid-life crisis with critical self-candour, never losing his engaging manner nor his sense of humour... His diaries are the basis for all his creative work, and Lost Years is the most revealing so far" (Harpers & Queen)

"Positively compulsive" (Sunday Telegraph)

"Isherwood remains a curious and memorable writer... A master of translucent prose, the events and people of these years seem to be described by a narrator as perceptive as he is unobtrusive" (The Times)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0099283247
• ISBN 13: 9780099283249
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Bucknell Katherine