A Single Man
by Christopher Isherwood
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Book Reviews of A Single Man
Book Review: A drop in the ocean of consciousness
Summary: 5 Stars
All the praise this novel receives just greatly deserved. The prose is beautiful and Isherwood writes with the ability of one who sees humanity in all its foibles, insecurities, masks, moments of beauty and madness. He can capture the essence of the smallest move of the mind and emotions, the twists and turns of conflicting thoughts and contradictory emotions.
A day in the life of George, the English professor who is grieving the loss of his love, Jim, proves itself to be mundane, yet moving. There is a sense of melancholy and loss that pervades each scene, from George's awakening in the morning, after which he puts on his external "self" as he puts on his suit for work. One gets the impression of a soul clothed in a body, clothed in a suit, clothed in persona designed to function in a world in which he does not quite fit, and is not quite accepted.
The lecture on Huxley's "After Many A Summer Dies the Swan" is both enjoyable and insightful. George's passion breaks through his reserved demeanor as he tells his students: "But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?"
The closing sections of the book are perhaps the most beautiful: "The waters of consciousness - so to speak - are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such a variety of creatures coexist at all? Because they have to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And, throughout the day of the ebb tide, they know no other.
"But that long day ends at last; yields to the nighttime of the flood. And, just as the waters of the ocean come flooding, darkening over the pools, so over George and the others in sleep come the waters of that other ocean - that consciousness which is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything, past, present and future, and extends unbroken beyond the uttermost stars. We may surely suppose that, in the darkness of the full flood, some of these creatures are lifted from their pools to drift far out over the deep waters. But do they ever bring back, when the daytime of the ebb returns, any kind of catch with them? Can they tell us, in any manner, about their journey? Is there, indeed, anything for them to tell - except that the waters of the ocean are not really other than the waters of the pool?"
Book Review: A single man as Everyman
Summary: 5 Stars
Because of "Cabaret," Christopher Isherwood is mostly remembered for his "Berlin Stories" and its inimitable Sally Bowles. But "A Single Man" is, I think, far and away his masterpiece--a Southern Californian counterpoint to "Ulysses" and (especially) "Mrs. Dalloway." But, if you're intimidated by stream-of-consciousness prose, don't let the references to Joyce and Woolf put you off; this novel is nearly a breezy Malibu beach read by comparison.
Isherwood details twenty-four hours in the life of an aging college professor who had lost his younger lover the previous year. "Waking up begins with saying 'am' and 'now,'" opens the first chapter, which describes the emerging corporal awareness of this initially anonymous id and which closes with the line, "It knows its name. It is called George."
The novel sticks to the mind of its protagonist as he embarks on his daily rituals: preparing for a class he must teach (Huxley's "After Many a Summer" is the subject and the students' apathetic ignorance provides much of this section's mirth); lunching with his colleagues; visiting a dying friend in the hospital; going to the gym and flirting with its teenaged patrons.
His routine begins to leave its expected track when he meets an old friend for dinner and they get uproariously drunk. Afterwards, he intends to head home but, "How to explain, then, that, with his foot actually on the bridge over the creek, George suddenly turns, chuckles to himself, and with the movement of a child wriggling free of a grownup," he heads to the local "nonconformist" dive--and runs into one of his students.
Like Clarissa Dalloway readying for a party, George lives a lonely, lackluster existence occupied with petty details, inconsequential annoyances, and unanticipated pleasures. But Isherwood instills every sentence with beauty, every character with immediate empathy, and every encounter with so much tension that "A Single Man" is, indeed, Everyman. The unique particulars of George's declining years may not be familiar to many of us, but the struggle between hopefulness and disenchantment is.
Book Review: A Pefect Novel
Summary: 5 Stars
This was my fourth reading of this brilliantly perfect novel. I am deeply moved each time I reach this book; I cannot imagine how it would have affected me had I read it in 1964 when it was first published. This novel covers one day in the life of George, an English professor at a nondiscript college in California. The time is just before the Christmas season, that time in America dreaded by many of us who live alone. His lover Jim has recently died in a traffic accident. George is an outsider on many levels. He is British living in America, he is gay living in a heterosexual world, he is brillliant among mostly dull, uninteresting and uninterested college students, he is a man of good taste surrounded by tasteless neighbors.Isherwood makes brillilant observations about people: that straight women friends often refuse to give up on making their gay male friends. "Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers." And George says what I have been saying for years, that all too often minorities hate all other minorites. Another observation is that middle-aged gay men look better than their straight counterparts: "What's wrong with them [straight men] is their fatalistic acceptance of middle age, their ignoble resignation to grandfatherhood, impending retirement and golf. George is different from them because. . . he hasn't given up." Finally, Isherwood describes poignantly the unawareness of friends: "How many times, when Jim and I had been quarreling and came to visit you--sullking, avoiding each other's eyes, talking to each other only through you [haven't we all been in that awkward position]-- did you somehow bring us together again by the sheer power of your unawareness that anything was wrong?" There are countless gems like these through out this wonderful book.
A perfect novel about loss and loneliness, A SINGLE MAN constantly gets named near the top of "best gay" lists of books as well as one of the great novels of the 20th Century, both distinctions it richly deserves.
Book Review: a quiet and subtle page turner
Summary: 3 Stars
From the back of the book: "In this brilliantly perceptive novel, a middle-aged professor living in California is alienated from his students by differences in age and nationality, and from the rest of society by his homosexuality. Isherwood explores the depths of the human soul and its ability to triumph over loneliness, alienation, and loss."
As you can perhaps tell from the plot summary, this book doesn't have a plot. It is actually not my kind of book at all, and yet despite my misgivings I found myself enjoying the story more than expected.
A Single Man is the recounting of one day in George the professor's life, literally from the moment he wakes up to when he goes back to bed. It's slice of life fiction, the snapshot of time. George is in an unusual situation: his longterm partner Jim has recently passed away and he is in a society where being gay is seen at best as an oddity.
George's only recourse to his bereavement is to keep on going as he always has, and find a safety net in that routine. As such the book very much focuses on the mundane details of George's day to day life -- his walk to university, lecturing the students, the small interactions he has with people.... And I think that's a strength of the book. The story is a very intimate portrayal of grief and loneliness, and how these emotions can touch even the smallest things.
The writing is sparse, succinct, and most of all very honest; we get to see George, warts and all. And yet there is a distance, too -- George is still numb, and being an intellectual he views things often dispassionately. The end result is a touching and dark portrayal of the human condition which reaches out even to the modern reader with its fumbling attempts to create relationships in order to give some meaning to existence.
In sum, it's a stark narrative, but a quiet and subtle page turner. George feels like he could be your next door neighbour, your friend, or even you.
Book Review: Waking up begins with saying 'am' and 'now'
Summary: 5 Stars
Like other reviewers here my interest in this book was sparked by the realization that a film version was being released. I have had my copy of 'A Single Man' for a few years now, but had not yet read it.
I have now completed several of Isherwood's novels in the past few years, and while I just 'liked' a few, I've loved most. This novel falls into the latter category.
Chronicling a single day in the life of an aging professor in the 1960's who has lost his lover to a car accident, George wakes in his home and prepares to go about an 'average' day since Jim's death....dress, eat, go to work, return home. However, interspersed with these normal routines George also processes his grief over the loss of his lover....visits a mutual 'friend' of his and Jim's, who is ill, and accepts a last minute dinner invitation from another friend who also finds herself alone, and finds himself the object of a decidely 'clandestine' interest from one of his students.
What struck me the most about this fine example of mid 20th century gay literature was the absolute 'normality' of a day in the life of this gay man when just to be gay was thought 'clandestine' and needed to be unspoken. Had this novel been more widespread back when it was released, in 1964, it might have helped to illustrate the fact that gays and lesbians, and gay couples, are really just as average, mundane, and downright normal as their heterosexual counterparts.
Nevertheless, Christopher Isherwood was a pioneer in gay literature. More importantly, however; he was a fine novelist. This slim yet powerful volume is proof positive of both these thoughts.