Prater Violet is Christopher Isherwood's fictional first person account of film-making. The Prater is a large park and amusement park in Vienna, a city important to characters in the novel for several reasons. Though Isherwood broke onto the literary scene as a novelist, he eventually worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter. In this novel, Isherwood comments on life, art, commercialization of art and Nazism. Written in one continuous, expressive breath, Prater Violet follows Isherwood's involvement in the creation of an eponymous film. Much of the novel records the remarks of film industry... workers and Isherwood's conversations with a brilliant Austrian film director, Friedrich Bergmann. Only at the conclusion of the novel does Isherwood significantly separate his voice from dialogue to provide a deeper philosophic commentary on his frustration with life. He asks, "What makes you go on living? Why don't you kill yourself? Why is all this bearable? What makes you bear it?" . Set in pre-Second World War era England, both Nazism and filmmaking are on the rise. Characters in Prater Violet are used to personify various aspects of the enigmatic creative process.
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