Imprint: Vintage Classics
Published: 23/05/2013
ISBN: 9780099561231
Length: 320 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 20mm x 129mm
Weight: 224g
RRP: £10.99
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOW
In 1939, as Europe approaches war, Isherwood, an instinctive pacifist, travels west to California, seeking a new set of beliefs to replace the failed Leftism of the thirties. There he meets Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk, who will become his spiritual guide for the next thirty-seven years. Late-night drinking sessions, free love, and the glamour of writing for the Hollywood studios alternate with meditation, abstinence and the study of religious texts in a compelling tug of war between worldliness and holiness.
Imprint: Vintage Classics
Published: 23/05/2013
ISBN: 9780099561231
Length: 320 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 20mm x 129mm
Weight: 224g
RRP: £10.99
Isherwood has reinvented the spirit of devotion for the modern reader. If I had to propose a candidate for canonization, Isherwood - wry, self-conscious, scrupulously honest - would get my vote
A masterpiece of spiritual memoir
What emerges is a record of a religious adventure that would have delighted Kierkegaard... Isherwood rejects conventional piety - all the humdrum apparatus of worship - in favor of a direct, even jaunty appreciation of how preposterous, certainly precarious, spirituality can be today.
The sacred and the profane collide like never before