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 MGM, 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 owed 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.
Sobre o autor(a)
Isherwood, Christopher
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD foi um dos escritores mais famosos de sua geração. Nascido na Inglaterra em 1904, abandonou a Universidade de Cambridge e se mudou para a Alemanha em 1929, onde escreveu Adeus a Berlim — livro que inspirou o musical Cabaret. Ele emigrou para os Estados Unidos com W. H. Auden em 1939, instalando-se na Califórnia, onde obteve a cidadania americana e, anos depois, começou a se relacionar com o artista Don Bachardy. Isherwood escreveu cinco romances, incluindo Um homem só — que foi adaptado para o cinema por Tom Ford em 2009. |