WHERE JOY RESIDES: A Christopher Isherwood Reader...

WHERE JOY RESIDES: A Christopher Isherwood Reader edited by Don Bachardy & James P. White (Noonday Press: $12.95). As the late Christopher Isherwood was a writer with exceptional powers of observation, it seems appropriate that he is best known for the phrase “I am a camera,” from the opening of “Goodbye to Berlin” (1939). Fifty years after their initial publication, the so-called “Berlin Stories” remain the definitive portrait of the doomed culture of the Weimar era. The vivid impressions of the young W.H. Auden in “Lions and Shadows” (1938) included here were later expanded in “Christopher and His Kind.” A long-time resident of Southern California, Isherwood offered a tartly damning vision of L. A. in “A Single Man” (1964), his favorite among his novels: “He stops the car and stands at road’s rough yellow dirt edge, beside a manzanita bush, and looks out over Los Angeles like a sad Jewish prophet of doom, as he takes a leak. Babylon is fallen, is fallen that great city. But this city is not great, was never great, and has nearly no distance to fall.” The weakest passages in this collection are taken from the heartfelt “My Guru and His Disciple” (1980): Isherwood’s devotion to Swami Prabhavananda apparently prevented him from realizing just how ordinary (and uninteresting) these protestations of piety are. An excellent anthology for readers unfamiliar with the author’s work.