Prater Violet - Christopher Isherwood

Penguin Modern Classics, 1969, softcover, 127 pages, condition: very good.

Prater Violet (1945) is Christopher Isherwood's fictional first person account of film-making. The Prater is a large park and amusement park in Vienna, a city important to characters in the novel for several reasons. Though Isherwood broke onto the literary scene as a novelist, he eventually worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter. In this novel, Isherwood comments on life, art, commercialization of art and Nazism.

A short novel without chapter divisions, Prater Violet follows Isherwood's involvement in the creation of the eponymous film. Much of the novel records the remarks of people working in the film industry and Isherwood's conversations with a brilliant Austrian film director, Friedrich Bergmann. Only at the conclusion of the novel does Isherwood significantly separate his voice from the stream of dialogue to provide a deeper commentary and to ask, "What makes you go on living? Why don't you kill yourself? Why is all this bearable? What makes you bear it?"