Reviews for Christopher and His Kind

The average rating for Christopher and His Kind based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-04 00:00:00 Mishka Khorasheh Christopher Isherwood wrote several books about his experiences in the 1930s, including his Berlin Stories. But on the first page of Christopher and His Kind, he tells us that he wasn't completely honest in these earlier works, that he left out important details about himself, and that he now intends to, um, set the record straight. To tell his story, he draws on both memory and documentary evidence in the form of letters, diaries, and passages from his novels. The book has a definite "meta-" quality, in the sense that he uses "Christopher" to describe himself in the 1930s, "I" to describe himself in the present, and "Isherwood" to describe the narrator of Berlin Stories. (I see other reviewers complaining this is weird and difficult to follow, but this wasn't my experience.) So what's the book about? Like any memoir, it focuses on the subject's day-to-day life: we see him interact with famous friends; move from place to place (he winds up in China at one point); react to historical events (Hitler, etc.); and write books, plays, and film scripts. We also see his private life, which (not to put too fine a point on it) revolves around twinks, specifically 16-17 year-old boys. "Why do I prefer boys?" he asks early-on. "Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move..." Clearly not for the faint of heart. Of course, from our 21st-century perspective, we can't help asking a couple of questions here: (a) Um...isn't that illegal? (b) You know teenage boys create a whole lot of drama, right? The answer to both questions is Yes, although it's (b) rather than (a) that causes most of Christopher's problems. Well, (b) plus a little thing called Fascism. So is the book worth reading? Absolutely. First, as a chronicle of gay life in the 1930s, with descriptions of the boy bars, dance halls, and hook-up culture of the time. Second, as the story of a gay man accepting who he is - not all at once and not without difficulty - and realizing, "My will is to live according to my nature, and to find a place where I can be what I am..." This place, of course, turns out be California - but that's the story for another book.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-03-06 00:00:00 Michael Mclaughlin "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.