{"id":75,"date":"2018-08-03T17:14:05","date_gmt":"2018-08-03T15:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/readerwitch.com\/?p=75"},"modified":"2018-08-03T17:14:05","modified_gmt":"2018-08-03T15:14:05","slug":"goodbye-to-berlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/2018\/08\/03\/goodbye-to-berlin\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>When an author says goodbye to his characters<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Genre:\u00a0semiautobiographical novel<br \/>\n\u2b50\ufe0fStars from Goodreads: 3.94<br \/>\n\u2b50\ufe0fStars from me: 5<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">The last time I felt this scent of Berlin was during school Chemistry classes where the curriculum was going one way, and I was going the other, swallowing up novels of <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/2ADTc6M\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Erich Maria Remarque<\/a> at the back of the classroom, barely acknowledging the lessons.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">It felt strange now, decades later, to suddenly smell that Berlin again, in Isherwood\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/2O9bmz4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Goodbye to Berlin<\/a>\u00a0novel. Isherwood, of course, is very different. He and Remarque have similar Berlin but different characters. Isherwood zooms in on people, while Berlin as they knew it, is disappearing. It\u2019s 1930s and these people don\u2019t know what\u2019s coming. Those who feel it, push it away from their consciousness. Nobody believes in the possibilities of the atrocities that are about to happen. They are carrying on with their lives. It feels eerily relevant and familiar to be reading that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">The storylines are snippets of lives: a Jewish rich family and a gay couple. Your skins crawls because you know what\u2019s coming for them. The book doesn\u2019t get to this, at least not in details. It\u2019s not a book on history. It doesn\u2019t even seem to have any global agenda. The book is about the people Christopher Isherwood knew and Berlin that he had to say goodbye to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The book that focuses on people whose life will soon change and Berlin that will stop being the city they knew. <a href=\"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/2018\/08\/03\/goodbye-to-berlin\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":77,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[47,96,200,275,289,325,497,500],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/screen-shot-2018-08-03-at-16-57-45-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}