Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 732 pages
- Published by: University Of Chicago Press May 31, 1995
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0226677141
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0226677149
-
Book Dimensions:
7.8 x 5.2 x 1.6 inches
- Weighs: 1.6 pounds
From Library Journal
Powell's epic of 20th-century England is actually composed of 12 novels divided into four "movements," although they can be read individually as separate works. The novels were originally published from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by
Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times,"
A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.
Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of
A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins--a budding writer--shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widermerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. Considered a masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich parorama of life in England between the wars.
Includes these novels:
A Question of Upbringing A Buyer's Market The Acceptance World "Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--
Chicago Tribune"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway,
New York Times"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven,
New Yorker
Reader Reviews
First, although I adore this series, I would like to demur from the description of this series as a comedy. Certainly there are many comic situations and laughable characters, but Powell's (pronounced POE-UHL, not POW-UHL) comedy is intended less to make uslaugh than to make ussmile. I know many novels that are far funnier than this one, and if that were the book's only virtue, it would not enjoy the status that it does. Above all, this is a work that limns in almost tedious detail the interrelations and interworkings of a segment of English society in the 20th century. These first three books take you from the early twenties into the early thirties. Despite the series great length, there is nothing epic about the scale of the novels except for the overall length of of the series as a whole. The scenes are all horribly mundane. A party here, a dinner there, a chance meeting in a bar, more parties, more dinners. But as the parties and dinners multiply, and as one social encounter builds upon another, the series does indeed take on an epic quality. This new edition is far more attractive than the old mass market edition of the series, but I do wish that someone would have taken the effort to supply an appendix (perhaps to the final volume) that would (as in some editions of Trollope and Proust) explain who all the characters are and to whom they are related. By the sixth volume in the series, I began to find it extremely difficult to remember precisely where each character fit in the social world as a whole. The greatest virtues of Powell's series are his richly delineated characters (of which there are at least fifty to a hundred who are to some degree significant) and his marvelously elegant prose. I believe that anyone who loves novels would love this series, in particular those who have enjoyed Proust.
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