My guru and his disciple - Hardcover

Isherwood, Christopher

3.9

267 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0413469301 ISBN 13: 9780413469304

Publisher: Eyre Methuen, 1980

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About the Author:

Christopher Isherwood (1902-86) lived in Berlin from 1928 to 1933 and immigrated to the United States in 1939. Translator, biographer, novelist, and playwright, Isherwood is the author of over twenty books.

Review:

"In some ways, Isherwood's most ambitious book. There is a sense of wholeness and of the joy of spiritual quest. We can believe such a believer." -- Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe

"My Guru and His Disciple is a classic of spiritual literature." -- Kirkus Reviews

"My Guru and His Disciple is a sweetly modest and honest portrait of Isherwood's spiritual instructor, Swami Prabhavananda, the Hindu priest who guided Isherwood for some thirty years. It is also a book about the often amusing and sometimes painful counterpoint between worldliness and holiness in Isherwood's own life. Sexual sprees, all-night drinking bouts, a fast car ride with Greta Garbo, scriptwriting conferences at M-G-M, intellectual sparring sessions with Berthold Brecht alternated with nights of fasting at the Vedanta Center, a six-month period of celibacy and sobriety, and the pious drudgery of translating (in collaboration with the Swami) the Bhagavad-Gita. Seldom has a single man been endowed with such strong drives toward both sensuality and spirituality, abandon and discipline; out of the passionate dialectic between these drives, My Guru and His Disciple has been written. What emerges is a record of a religious adventure that would have delighted Kierkegaard, for Isherwood rejects conventional piety-all the humdrum apparatus of worship-in favor of a direct, even jaunty appreciation of how preposterous, certainly precarious, spirituality can be today... In these pages Isherwood has reinvented the spirit of devotion for the modern reader." -- Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review

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