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A Single Man
A Single Man
A Single Man
Audiobook4 hours

A Single Man

Written by Christopher Isherwood

Narrated by Simon Prebble

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

When A Single Man was originally published, it shocked many by its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in midlife. George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, and determines to persist in the routines of his daily life; the course of A Single Man spans twenty-four hours in an ordinary day. An Englishman and a professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way, and his internal reflections and interactions with others reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness. Wry, suddenly manic, constantly funny, surprisingly sad, this novel catches the texture of life itself.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 22, 2009
ISBN9781615730599
A Single Man
Author

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and autobiographer. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel that inspired the musical Cabaret; A Single Man (1964), adapted into a film by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir which “carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement.” Isherwood died in 1986.  

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Reviews for A Single Man

Rating: 4.057798106422019 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an excellent performance of one of the best books I've ever read. A masterpiece.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book focuses on how one lives alone.
    How one can live alone, while others can’t.

    The feeling of being alone, the thoughts that comes when one is grieving, and how human interaction - whatever it may be, is still valuable.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I liked the writing, the story and the narration. Somehow my review disappeared
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Isherwood as an island or one day in the life of a rather boring and closeted professor. Death in Venice set in California.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I so preferred this to the movie (not that I didn't love the movie too). With the movie, it's so pretty and so glossy it almost acts as a barrier to George's grief, which I suppose I appreciated because Firth's portrayal is so tempered I was almost too afraid of George's grief bleeding through the screen and leaving me in tears.

    The book is without that glossy barrier. You get a sense of George's emotions, all of them so very obviously curled over at the edges with loss as he navigates the every dayness of life during one particular day, almost an outsider to himself. I wasn't too thrilled by the last Isherwood I read, but this one had me one page in. The language, the narrative style, the unexpected humour mixed in with the sadness - it's just absolutely perfect writing.

    Adored this. Heartily recced.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In which a European in exile in 1964 manages to accurately convey the inner workings of those of us Antipodeans in 2012.

    I've not yet seen the (apparently wonderful) film based on this book, which was probably a blessing, as I was able to approach it uninitiated. In a scant 150 pages, Isherwood details one mundane-yet-important day in the life of an English professor in the U.S. Digging deftly to the root of George's mind, Isherwood captures his moments of intelligence and pain, of arrogance, lust, self-loathing, confusion, alienation, connection, nostalgia, heartbreak, discovery. It's a taut little character study, which approaches a variety of '60s counter-culture/neo-romantic issues (social alienation, the rise of that loathsome word 'tolerance', man-made boundaries preventing connection), yet - because his focus is so clearly on George's character - Isherwood avoids that painfully on-the-nose attitude that so dates other writers of the era (if I cough Kerouac's name out of the corner of my mouth, will a thousand hipsters descend upon my house with torches and pitchforks?).

    A beautiful little work. It worries me somewhat that I feel Isherwood has here predicted my future. And if not, all the better: he has allowed me an insight into a genuine mind. A complete human being laid bare in 150 pages. Perhaps the moral is to invite your neighbours over to dinner more often. Perhaps it's simply to say "yes" when asked. Or perhaps it is that we cannot expect any more. It's not the dinner, or the asking, or what we say when we're there, or even what we mean. It's about washing ourselves free of the rituals in which we drape our lives, or at least of questioning the rituals before we abandon ourselves to them. It's how we remove the past from its pedestal without removing its meaning. It's going forward knowing that, in some ways, everything we have learned is important to us, yet in other ways, we have learned nothing at all.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A brief, terrifying and funny meditation on loss, living and what the point of it all is. On how we manufacture meaning in our lives, how we manage to keep on going when we've past our peak and how to live a life while facing up to these big and daunting questions.

    There's no real plot here, just the unfolding of a day in the life of George, a gay, middle-aged university lecturer whose partner has recently died. He's by turns bitter, funny, joyous, angry and resigned - it's a beautiful character study.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Quite stunning complexity and depth for such a slim volume. Interesting contrast, too, to the visual beauty of the movie (which I shouldn't have watched first, of course, but which is wonderful as well and seems to stand alone and apart from the book). I didn't really see this as a visual book. Timeless and thought-provoking.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A novel that is by turns funny, dark, thought-provoking, hopeful and sad. At all times the author maintains a refreshing and unusual intimacy of focus. We follow the George, a middle aged professor through his day, listening to his thoughts and seeing his life first hand. George is struggling with the sudden death of his partner Jim - a loss only exacerbated by his inability to truly share it with anyone. All his neighbors think that Jim is on an extended visit to his parents. What is most touching is that even as George tries and fails to connect with those around him, we witness his passion for living and the simple joy he takes in his habits. This novel encompasses a single day, leaving the reader feeling deeply connected to George and touched by his life. Beautifully crafted and executed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood; (4*)A Single Man is the recounting of one day in the life of George, a professor, from the moment he wakes up to when he goes back to bed. Isherwood's prose is beautiful and he writes with the ability of one who sees humanity in and with all of it's blights and imperfections.This day in the life of George, who is grieving the unexpected and untimely loss of his life partner Jim, proves itself to be mundane and yet moving at the same time. There is a sense of melancholy and loss that pervades this work from George's awakening in the morning through dressing for work. The reader 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 does not quite feel accepted. (I found this part of the book to be very relatable to any reader who feels parts of their lives to be rejected or to be a nonentity of society.)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 focuses on the mundane details of George's day to day life. It describes his walk to the university, lecturing the students, the small interactions he has with people. I think that is the strength of the book. The story is a very intimate portrayal of grief, loneliness and how these emotions can touch even the smallest of parts of one's life.It's a stark narrative. George felt as if he could be my neighbor, my friend, my brother.I found the book to be engaging, sensitive, and haunting; a very reasonable portrayal of the subject matter.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nothing like the film in term of tone and some key facts - the whole attitude of the writer was not really translated into the film at all. For its time it was ahead of itself I would say. The detached tone of the opening tends to undercut your interest in the main character. And like other readers, I couldn't detect much humour.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An intimate, poignant novella describing a single day in the life of George, an English college professor living in California. A year after the death of his partner Jim, he is still trying to recover from the loss. Isherwood's writing is excellent, portraying George's roller coaster of emotion; a melancholy spirit that would dearly love to feel joy again.The Guardian puts this at number 83 on the 100 Best Novels list. It is well-deserved.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis and during the ongoing nuclear arms race, Isherwood wrote this exploration of death and loss. Like 9/11, the crisis of 1962 demarcated an old world from a new and frightening one. The complacency of the '50s in the U.S. was suddenly lost forever and replaced with the anxious realization of the fragility and transience of life itself. It's in this context that Isherwood's satire of California dreamin' finds its mark.It's a complex book, rich with allusions. George navigates his day obsessed with death, thinking constantly of his dead partner, Jim, and lecturing his class about Tithonus, the Greek figure who was immortal but not ageless and about Aldous Huxley's novel "After Many a Summer".The reference to Huxley's novel is not casual, for "A Single Man" owes so much to it as to be in dialogue with it. "After Many a Summer" also exists at the border between two eras, 1939 definitively ending a fragile peace and beginning six years of horrific destruction. Its subject is death, and Huxley provides a context for a contemplation that millions of people would soon be forced into.Tennyson's poem "Tithonus" is a companion to his similar poem "Ulysses", the opening lines of which describe a person not unlike George. The patient, faithful Charlotte sufficiently resembles Penelope, while George's students – with the exception of Kenneth – neither appreciate nor understand him. Kenneth, by the end of the novel, stands in nicely for Telemachus, Odysseus' son.From Tennyson's "Ulysses", it is a short walk to Joyce's "Ulysses", the formal model for Isherwood's book. "A Single Man" occupies a single day as we follow George through his mundane schedule, revealing to us George's world along the way. The Socratic dialogue near the end of the novel explicitly imitates Joyce. Kenny's intimate visit is an exact parallel to the meeting of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom at the end of Bloom's long day, the transition from one generation to the next. Is Isherwood making an homage to Joyce? or, like Virginia Woolf in "Mrs Dalloway", is he demonstrating that you don't need 750 pages of verbal fireworks to evoke a whole life through the events of a single day?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    George is a British college professor struggling to cope with the death of his partner, Jim. Times being as they are, most people see Jim as George's friend and roommate. And he's not sure he can share the truth with everyone.

    As we follow George through a day in his life, we see that he's not the only one with questions about how he'll get through. His friends and even his students are searching for answers they're not sure they will ever find. And even if George might be tempted to help them with their burden, he knows that at the end of the day he needs to focus on himself.

    --

    I'd seen the movie before reading the book, which can sometimes be a challenging position for me. What I really enjoyed, though, is that it seems to tell a bit of a different story. In the book, we spend all of our time in George's head. We get a much deeper understanding of his motivations and fears than I think comes across in the film. And it gives it all a different sort of meaning to a reader.

    I'd recommend this for fans of introspective literature, character studies, and books that provide a glimpse of what it was like to be gay just a few short decades ago...
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Grief doesn’t disappear, it only dulls. And in its persistent pull, we learn not to crush it but to hold it, transform it, cope with it in a cascading myriad of ways. Although it doesn’t always work we soon learn to live with it a little better each time it reappears as it captures us in its rough, clammy arms. Isherwood communicates a moving understanding of loss in A Single Man. Emptiness though subdued is very much felt in the novel where the monotony of the daily creeps on the life of someone who wakes up each day faced by his lover's eventual mortality. As memories enhance the aftermath of death and enduring through the comfort of books, the forgetfulness brought by a mind occupied by work doesn't seem to fill the void for the sake of filling it, there is an utter need to connect if only to make loneliness a bit bearable. Not only to connect again with the departed through objects they used to touch and people they used to know (even if this person was someone they cheated you on with) but to also pour one's self to someone new. But a kind of restraint traps because of how homosexuality can make the chance to completely mourn and share its agony difficult. Whilst the tenderness and affection that lingers from the space left by someone is heartbreakingly embraced by the prose of A Single Man, I find it dated; its depiction of female characters questionable. Rare times like this, I would be brave enough to say the film is better than the book which also includes this line in the script: "You know the only thing that has made the whole thing worthwhile has been those few times that I was able to truly connect with another person."
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A SINGLE MAN offers a succinct and vivid portrayal of one day in the life of a single man's depression.Unfortunately, this successful writing of nearly unrelieved depressing reading interwoven with the horrors of living in Los Angeles is enough to depress the jeebers out of many of us.The man's split person is early revealed as "... am-now-I-here..." = "it" - = a "live dying creature" vs his role presented to the public world as simply newly single "George."For reasons not developed, he stays obedient to other's expectations.The author's description of the shift from "... am ..." to "UP" will likely affect many reader's own perceptions of their own rising sequence.On the downside, once a reader has acknowledged the force of the writing about a major depressive state,is the killing of ant for no reason and the way over done digestive and bodily functions, from pyloric spasms on up really necessary?Worse still (after the plot has thankfully quickened from breakfast to being old and "merging into traffic"),a horrible interlude of imagined torture pretty much ruins the plot and character.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I tried to read this book a couple of pages every day, but it deserves to be read in as few sessions as you can manage. When you sit down and commit your time to it, as I did after the first 50 pages, it will come alive. Isherwood is a great writer. So many great sentences and philosophical touches. As a writer myself it is a nice book to study the craft. My first Isherwood book but it wont be the last.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As well-written as anything else that Isherwood put together - he was a natural talent, clearly - this is that rarest thing: a book that is slightly inferior to the film that (much) later followed. For one thing, the ending resolves more clearly and dramatically in Tom Ford's masterful film rendition. That said, 'A Single Man' is a great read, and well worth the investment - especially if you want to appreciate how authentic the big screen version was.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was one of the first LGBITQA books that I read when I was young, and so for that, I am grateful.

    I like Isherwood's writing style and his characterisation of George. George feels raw, angry and vulnerable in this novel, and I wondered how much of it was autobiographical, if any. This book is personal and I appreciated the fact that Isherwood went to so much trouble to describe George's thoughts when he was driving to work, or when he was at work, or when he was on the phone.

    There was something really sensual about this book - as in, I think it tried to engage all of the five senses. Sometimes, I feel that it went a little flat, but overall I enjoyed it. It's a short, sad little snapshot of a life. But I think there was something missing in this book, and I can't quite describe what it was, but... I'll have to give it 3.5 stars, overall. c:
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    “What’s so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people —well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?” Set just after the Cuban missile crisis the book is about the final day in the life of George, an English professor of literature working in California. George is living alone after the recent death of his lover Jim in a car crash. He is lonely and his only company is literature (“These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It’s just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood”). He feels resentment towards a society that considers him, a gay man, to be a “monster”.To those who believe that “Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife,” he says, “Jim wasn’t a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim.”George at home is barely functioning but whilst teaching he seems to really come alive as he tries to share both his knowledge and passion for literature. However, he also challenges his students to question the social orthodoxies of the time (“a minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack it”).As the day progresses,in an attempt to stave off his loneliness George visits an old English friend, similarly alone, going to the bar where he met Jim for the first time, and spending the night with one of his students. George is up-lifted when he realises that he is in the minority 'the living' but there is a deeply felt pain running through George’s internal monologue and only when drunk does he truly open himself up to another person. “What I know is what I am.”The novel has the big obsessions of its time in nuclear war and sexual revolution as well as more localised things like campus politics. But there is also a study of the minuscule as the book opens and ends with a pretty vivid description of the body's own functions of just waking up and living. The prose is tight (my copy only runs to 142 pages) and well written giving a real insight into the meaning of loneliness.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    So much about this book rang true to me. One day in the life of a man that I didn't really like but found fascinating.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A SINGLE MAN, by Christopher Isherwood.I've never read anything by Isherwood before, but ever since this book and its film adaptation was much in the entertainment news, I've wanted to read it. Now I have, and I found it quite moving in a very effective and decidedly unsentimental fashion.Protagonist George is a fifty-something homosexual college English prof in southern California at the end of 1962, just after the Cuban missile crisis standoff. His long-time lover, Jim, has recently died, leaving him devastated, feeling isolated and alone, unable to discuss or express his grief because gay relationships were still very much "in the closet" then. The story covers a single twenty-four hour period in George's life as he goes through his usual day of teaching - an Orwell novel to a group of largely indifferent students - going to the gym, then to the supermarket, followed by a very long night of drinking, feeling a bit sorry for himself, and trying to figure things out. After a long evening of dinner and drinking with a woman, Charlotte, who is a neighbor and a friend, possibly the only one who knew about George's relationship with Jim, and the depth of his grief. There is a sad scene here, where Charlotte entreats George to tell her again about the dream George and Jim had of buying a pub in England and living there. Charlotte's husband left her years ago and now her only son has left home for good. Her "Tell me again - PLEASE, Geo!" struck me as even more poignant in its echoes of Lenny and George and the story of the farm, and the "bunnies" in OF MICE AND MEN.George's long night culminates with more drinking with one of his students, a naked swim in the Pacific surf, followed by a truth-telling encounter between the two at George's home. A short book that can be read in just a few hours, A SINGLE MAN is a fascinating glimpse into the life of one gay man, angry, grieving, and lonely. Isherwood has been gone now for nearly thirty years, but many of his books remain in print and continue to be read. That tells you something. He was a gifted and searingly honest writer. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This review is way too late in the writing!So many of us get caught up in life as we see it through our own eyes, and though we may, on the surface, empathize with our fellow humans we know face challenges, whether they be due to race, religion, or sexual orientation, it's still hard to really put ourselves in their place. This story is an exercise in empathy, sharing the quiet, lonely struggles of a man living in a world that doesn't fully embrace who he is.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A beautiful little novella that's far more focussed on character, thought and ambience than it is on plot - and is thus difficult to describe or review in any meaningful way. This was my first Isherwood - and most definitely not my last - and is pretty much a 'day in the life' of George, a British college professor living in Los Angeles. He is still mourning the (fairly) recent loss of his partner Jim, and finds himself irreparably estranged from the world: from his neighbours and colleagues, because of his sexuality, and from his students, because of his age. He spends his time perfecting his outer façade, searching for understanding, reflecting on life, and fielding the neuroses of his larger-than-life friend Charlotte. It's gorgeously written and quietly devastating, and I plan to watch the film soon because if it's even NEARLY as good as this, it's going to be something special...
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of the most astounding books I have ever read. Isherwood masters stream-of-consciousness without throwing the reader off course. The mind of George, our main character, is so distinct and engaging to read. An utter treat.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a very short book. It takes the reader into the life over a 24 hour period of the main characters life after the death of his partner. A great representation of the normalcy of gay relationships and the grieving process in general. I haven't seen the movie yet.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It’s not so many days since I returned from the holiday I read this on, and already great chunks of the plot are disappearing from my mind like the coat tails of a dream you can’t quite grasp in the morning. It started with the protagonist, ageing homosexual lecturer George (I remembered that bit) waking up and not being totally sure who he was. It was an effective rendering of those confusing first few moments after the alarm clock goes off, and we see him as though from above, as he gets a grip on who he is and where he is. And though we then get to follow him through his day, I never did lose the detachment of those first few paragraphs. The novel is short, the encounters he has with various acquaintances are fleeting, and there is the feeling that none of them are going to reappear so why invest anything in remembering them. And in the end very few of them do reappear.It wasn’t badly written, but unless there was some underlying metaphor running through the whole thing that I missed, I can’t see what the point was. I might have to watch the film one day, if only to discover whether there really was a plot lurking in there, just outside the field of my vision.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    "Now a major motion picture" the cover of this edition proclaims and, this being one of the few times when I've seen the film before I've read the book, it was naturally narrated in my head by Colin Firth. The film was beautiful, but I loved the novel even more. It's very intimate, sad in places, of course, but at other points it is simply joyous - giddy with happiness - and very funny.

    "just plain happiness - das Glueck, le bonheur, la felicidad - they have given it all three genders but one has to admit, however grudgingly, that the Spanish are right, it is usually feminine, that's to say, woman-created." How could a linguist not love a passage like that?

    I've rented the movie and borrowed the book from the library, but I'm going to have to go shopping and buy a copy of the book (if not both). I'm going to want to revisit George again.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The book sucks you in with its atmosphere of existential loneliness and 'tristesse'. These feelings are highly recognisable, yet this story is also a portrait of a California in the early '60s which was on the cusp of the sexual revolution. As yet, WWII is still a vivid memory, the threat of atomic destruction looms, and gay love still "dare not speak its name". In this context he author is coping with the loss of his partner (in a traffic accident in another state), wondering what sense to make of his life now through dry and detached observations. There is no false self-pity or sentimentality in him, as is shown in vivid contrast when he interacts with the two other living characters that he meets in this book. I read this in a contemporary Dutch translation, meaning that the language seemed rather antiquated (eg "mieters"). I look forward to re-reading in the original.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am reviewing the audio edition which is beautifully read. I think Single Man is among the best of Isherwood's. It is enrapturing and much better than the recent movie made of the book. A Single Man is worth a detour.