Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood

A classic novel about the golden age of film. It is based on Isherwood's experience of co-writing the 1934 Berthold Viertel film Little Friend.

Originally published in 1945, Prater Violet is a stingingly satirical novel about the film industry. It centers around the production of the vacuous fictional melodrama Prater Violet, set in nineteenth-century Vienna, providing ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. The novel features the vivid portraits of imperious, passionate, and witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter-the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood.

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

Christopher Isherwood

Reviews

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

'That young, holds the future of the English novel in his hands'

Somerset Maugham