Just completed Christopher Isherwood’s The Memorial a few days ago. Loved it.

Fell in love with Isherwood’s style of writing, once I discovered his Literary brilliance last year- i.e through Mr. Norris Changes Trains, a good insight into Berlin life prior to the Second World War, loosely based on Isherwood’s own experiences. For he supposedly firsthand witnessed Hitler’s Germany as the anti-semitic ideals were being ingrained into ignorant minds. Meanwhile the narrator seemingly divided as to which was better, the nazis or the communist, as this was before the war.

Then earlier this year I read A Single Man, a tragic account of a middleaged lonely man’s last day on earth. I watched the movie based on this book a couple of years ago, A Single Man (2009). Loved that too, but the book (as always is the case) is better, and somewhat different. End result is the same though.

The Memorial, which is divided into four segments with 4 to 5 chapters in each, the segments I enjoyed the most was the middle segments. Book 2 dealt with each character in each chapter dealing with the death of the character called Richard, who was killed in the First World War, and each recalling their own past and how Richard played a major part in their lives, then Book 2 is set in Cambridge and the next generation.

Just Love Isherwood. Before I discovered him, Agatha Christie and D.H. Lawrence were my two favourite writers. Now they have taken second and third place respectively.

Bookworm Nuwan