About the Book:
HARD
TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of copies are still
available.
A lost treasure of this major writer.
In September 1947, long before mass tourism and with no knowledge
of Spanish, Christopher Isherwood and the photographer Bill
Caskey left for a six-month tour of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia,
and Argentina. Isherwood's account of this journey, The
Condor and the Cows, is one of very few classic travel
books on South America and was among the books Isherwood considered
his best.
Based on his trip journal and loosely structured by the vagaries
of his travels, these pages, and Bill Caskey's fine and revealing
photographs, give us an Isherwood who dreams of voluntary exile in the
tropical paradise of Curaçao and dines out on stories of Nazis in
Berlin, missionaries in China, and movie stars in Hollywood. He
describes the surprising and sometimes unnerving people and places he
encounters through telling, cinematic details – of Inca drinking
vessels, the Spanish colonial city of Cuzco (which he calls "one
of the most beautiful monuments to bigotry and sheer brutal stupidity
in the whole world"), a bullfight in Bogotá, the towering ruins
of Machu Picchu. Unsentimental, rich, and wonderfully rendered, this
expanded edition includes additional photographs by his then-partner
Bill Caskey and a new foreword by Jeffrey Meyers.
What people say:
"A very entertaining
narrative. One is immensely grateful to the writer for having
suffered the discomforts of dreary journeys by train, dangerous
drives along precipices, and repellent accommodations in order to
tell us, in pleasantly assimilable prose, what is to be found in
these inaccessible places." — Edmund Wilson, New
Yorker
"It makes the big, sad,
mist-shrouded, sun-parched continent to the south of us come alive
with an emotional impact, a vividness, and sense of tangible
reality." — New York Times
"Isherwood's eye and wit are
as lively as ever – the same quick sympathies, the squirrelish
scrutiny, the open nerves and senses. His gift and his eye are a
poet's, and these permit his final pages to rise to an eloquence and
vision of their own." — The Nation
"Isherwood has conveyed the
crowded effervescence of being there, he has persuaded on, that on
such a trip, this is exactly what the normal, nonplussed traveler
would have seen and heard on a journey that was undramatic and
unromantic, but was heady, disturbing. The Condor and the
Cows is not the Isherwood we have known, it is a larger,
cinematic version, but the smaller, agile, eel-quick figure is there
inside, and the two have made them an irresistible feature."
— V.S. Pritchett, New Statesman and Nation
About the Author:
Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was a British-born
American writer who worked in many genres, including fiction, drama,
film, travel, and autobiography. He was born in Manchester, England,
and lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933 and immigrated to the United
States in 1939. A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the
gay rights movement, he was the author of nine novels, four volumes of
autobiography, plays, film scripts, and travel books. His Berlin novels
remained popular for half a century and are considered classic
descriptions of the Nazi period.
