Editions

Prater Violet

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099561132

  • Length: 144  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 9mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 106g

  • RRP: £8.99

Prater Violet

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

An impatient phone call from the temperamental Austrian director, Friedrich Bergmann, introduces a young Christopher Isherwood to the film industry. Isherwood's job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. In the real Vienna of 1934 the Austrian Right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught and his prophecy of the coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on set grow, studio intrigues and competing egos threaten to derail the whole project.

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099561132

  • Length: 144  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 9mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 106g

  • RRP: £8.99

Reviews

  • That young man holds the future of the English novel in his hands

    Somerset Maugham

  • Isherwood’s prose fizzes and bubbles lightly like an alka-seltzer in water before sinking like a brick in the pit of your stomach. It sits with you and stays with you.

    Dust for Prints.com

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About the Author

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher 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 and The Memorial. Between 1929 and 1939 he lived mainly abroad, spending four years in Berlin and writing the novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based. He moved to America in 1939, becoming a US citizen in 1946, and wrote another five novels, including Down There on a Visit and A 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 and October, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.

Christopher Isherwood

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