My Guru And His Disciple - Softcover

Isherwood, Christopher

3.9

267 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816638640 ISBN 13: 9780816638642

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2001

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"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, script-writing conferences at M-G-M, and intellectual sparring sessions with Bertolt Brecht alternated with nights of fasting at the Vedanta Center and a six-month period of celibacy and sobriety. Seldom has a single man been endowed with such strong drives toward both sensuality and spirituality, abandon and discipline. . . . In these pages, Isherwood has reinvented the spirit of devotion for the modern reader." Edmund White, New York Times Book Review

"This book is a humbling tribute to someone who revealed to Isherwood inner grounds for spiritual awareness." Alan Hollinghurst, New Statesman

A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) is the author of Down There on a Visit, Lions and Shadows, A Meeting by the River, The Memorial, Prater Violet, A Single Man, and The World in the Evening, all available from the University of Minnesota Press.

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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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