Christopher and His Kind Book

"he must never again give way to embarrassment, never deny the rights of his tribe, never apologize for its existence..."

christopher and his kind provides a fascinating depiction of (privileged) gay life in western europe in the tinderbox years before ww2. what struck me thoroughly was how relatively uninhibited isherwood and his close circle of gay friends were. if i do come across gay characters set in this period, i'm used to them being deeply repressed and thoroughly self-hating, often torn between family/duty and love - it was refreshing to read that here it wasn't really the case. while persecuted by society, they still lived and loved relatively openly.

interestingly isherwood uses 'christopher', rather than the first person, for what is essentially an autobiography. in all of the books of his i've read so far, you get a real sense of isherwood having lived each moment through what he could later write about it - placing himself as a character ('christopher') in his own autobiography is an extension of that. it also somewhat mischievously makes the book even harder to categorize, to its merit.

also worthy of mention, and something that (for some reason) i wasn't quite expecting, was the sheer amount of famous people who pop up in. it's almost ridiculous! w.h. auden, e.m. forster, virginia and lenoard woolf, benjamin britten, thomas mann and his family, to name just a few.

to get the most out of this book, i think you have to read isherwood's earlier works - he goes into them in quite some detail, fleshing out the real people behind his eccentric cast of characters, and filling in the (gay) details left unsaid or subverted in his earlier fiction.

part travelogue, part memoir, part fiction, part revisionist history, i don't think i've ever read anything quite like it.