SOURCE: A review of Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood. Times Literary Supplement (4 March 1939): 133.

In the following review, the anonymous critic offers a mixed assessment of Goodbye to Berlin.

Four of the six sketches or diary fragments that make up this “roughly continuous narrative” have already appeared in print, one of them in book form. As the narrative now stands it has an uneven quality and leaves a mixed impression. The best of it is very good—clever, honest, anxious, ribald, sometimes pungent, touched with the perplexity and the striving for sympathy, if not with sympathy itself, that together seems to enclose Mr. Isherwood's characteristic mood of seriousness. In that mood Mr. Isherwood is plainly determined to describe at first hand only and is as plainly on guard against ready-made feelings. He puts himself in the witness-box and takes what he might possibly call the novelist's oath: he...