Welcome home.

It took me a long while to actually sit down and read it, but I am so thankful that I did.

Isherwood’s classic tale from Germany’s Weimar period in the 1930s touches me everywhere I like to be touched. It was loosely (yet intelligently) structured, simply (yet deliciously) written, and engaged both my fictional fantasies and political sympathies.

Where I expected to read sordid tales of bohemian degradation, instead I found colorfully belieavable characters in a world becoming something other than they imagined. The Nazi shadow that slowly enveloped these stories was much more powerful to me than any propagandistic piece. Isherwood’s dispassionate reporting made all of the episodic incidents blend together in the way that August Sander’s whole portfolio seems to be the complete picture of truth.

But what is most interesting to me is the way that he is so intimately involved despite his lack of acting upon the plot. Writing himself into the tales, yet never attempting to glorify his role, was brilliant.

I have ordered and am anxiously awaiting the delivery of his actual memoirs from his time in Germany. I can’t wait to compare the “fiction” versus the “reality” of his experiences.

Even if I suspected it before, Isherwood is now officially my literary sugar-daddy.