indie’s Reviews > Goodbye to Berlin > Status Update

"His matter-of-fact boredom gradually infused reality into the preposterous conversation."

"I noticed that her fingernails were painted emerald green, a colour unfortunately chosen, for it called attention to her hands, which were much stained by cigarette-smoking and as dirty as a little girl’s. She was dark enough to be Fritz’s sister. Her face was long and thin, powdered dead white. She had very large brown eyes which should have been darker, to match her hair and the pencil she used for her eyebrows."

"The muscles of Frl. Mayer’s nude fleshy arms ripple unappetizingly."

"[The whistling] reminds me that I am in a foreign city, alone, far from home. Sometimes I determine not to listen to it, pick up a book, try to read. But soon a call is sure to sound, so piercing, so insistent, so despairingly human, that at last I have to get up and peep through the slats of the Venetian blind to make quite sure that it is not — as I know very well it could not possibly be — for me."

“Christopher Isherwood” is a convenient ventriloquist’s dummy, nothing
more.