The first of the novels packaged together as The Berlin Stories, this novel begins with our narrator (clearly some kind of stand in for Isherwood, though more in the vein of The Single Man than of Prater Violet) noticing a curious man in the train car. The scene is marked not quite with the element of desire, but there’s something to it in terms of being attracted attention-wise to someone standing out.
The novel then takes place in the various meetings and events surrounding the friendship between the narrator and Arthur Norris, an espoused Communist living in Berlin the in the 1930s, when, as the novel tells us, is not the safest time or place to be an Communist. And the so the novel traces this friendship over the course of many months as the tense atmosphere of the time and place become more and more tense.
The novel is an absolute curiosity in a lot of ways. It’s quite cryptic at times and the subtleties of their friendship is in stark contrast to the overtness of the danger. In addition, this is not just a novel about the interregnum between the wars, but it’s a novel written and published within the interregnum, and this caught-between feeling of the 1930s (which to me feels like a lost decade in general) is entirely baked into the very writing of this novel. It doesn’t feel hapless or doomed the ways that Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March or Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity do, and maybe that’s because Isherwood is English and can just leave, unlike the Austrian writers, but there’s that same sense of disruption penetrating so much of this book. (Edit: Obviously the other big difference is that they are Jewish writers and Isherwood is not).
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16810.The_Berlin_Stories?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=C9olaUujaF&rank=1)