PRATER VIOLET — Christopher Isherwood — Random House ($2).
"You have never been inside a film studio? ... It is really [the same as a] palace of the 16th Century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women . . . incompetent favorites . . . great men who are suddenly disgraced . . . insane extravagances . . . unexpected parsimony . . . enormous splendor, which is a sham . . . horrible squalor hidden behind the scenery . . . vast schemes abandoned because of some caprice . . . secrets which everybody knows and no one speaks of. There are even two or three honest advisers. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, and tear their hair privately, and weep."
"You make it sound great fun."
"It is unspeakable," said Bergmann. ...
Viennese Movie Director Friedrich Bergmann is the grandiose, poignant, reluctant hero of Christopher Isherwood's new novel. When Prater Violet appeared last summer in the glossy pages of Harper's Bazaar, it caused a mild critical flurry. Now published in book form, Prater Violet is likely to draw as much critical attention as any other novel of the season. Even in a period of thriving fiction, Prater Violet would rate respect: with the Anglo-American novel at its lowest ebb in years, Prater Violet looks like a fresh, firm peach in a dish of waxed fruits.
Son of a British Army lieutenant colonel, 41-year-old Christopher Isherwood made his mark in the early '305 as an intellectual leftist and collaborator with
Poet W. H. Auden on plays (The Dog Beneath the Skin; Ascent of F-6). In 1930 Isherwood went to Berlin, emerged later with his third novel, The Last of Mr. Norris, and a volume of stories, Goodbye to Berlin, that established him as one of Britain's most talented story tellers. In 1939 he landed in Hollywood, where he has divided his time between scriptwriting and translating Hindu religious teachings (BhagavadGita, The Song of God—TIME, Feb. 12).
Last week Author Isherwood finished work for Warner Bros, on screen versions of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, and his good friend Somerset Maugham's Up at the Villa. Larry, youthful hero of Maugham's best-selling The Razor's Edge, is.said to be modeled on Isherwood. He is now at work on a novel about physically and spiritually "displaced persons."