Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 746 pages
- Published by: University Of Chicago Press June 15, 1995
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0226677168
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0226677163
-
Book Dimensions:
8 x 5.3 x 1.3 inches
- Weighs: 1.8 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.
Product 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.
In the background of this second volume of
A Dance to the Music of Time, the rumble of distant events in Germany and Spain presages the storm of
World War II. In England, even as the whirl of marriages and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures gathers speed, men and women find themselves on the brink of fateful choices.
Includes these novels:
At lady Molly's Casanova's Chinese Restaurant The Kindly Ones "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
There are two hazards in reading Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (12 books in 4 volumes or "Movements). First, you may be too bored to continue (so buy only the first volume to start). "Nothing" happens in the first two volumes I've read. Fans of action, suspense, romance, light, or even historical novels may be most unhappy with this series. For the many characters living through the 1920's and '30's described in the first two movements, life is an endless round of parties and conversations over food, through which the characters, in ever mutating combinations, drift while insightfully discussing each other. In a sense this is high-brow and high-toned soap opera. Only in Book 6, as World War II impinges on the characters, does an outside structure of events impose itself on the actions and reactions of the characters. Previously they have seemed largely to float in an hermetically sealed world of university-educated gentlemen and their women (mothers, wives, and ex-wives). In this upper class void no chronological dates are supplied, although if you are an octogenerian the names dropped may supply a framework to the intricate sets of flashbacks and occasional anticipations Powell employs. We learn much about the main characters, but rarely see them at work or play, and never domestically or with children. The second hazard is that you may be forever spoiled for reading anything less well crafted. The next author you read after Powell may seem shallow, simplistic, juvenile, obvious, crude, banal, overheated, or even vulgar. Powell's writing is objective, distanced, understated, intricate, subtle, acute, and highly precise; the apotheosis of ordinary detail. Powell's strength lies in closely observed and particularized character development, our understanding of each person altering slightly from one vignette, glimpse, or reference to the next. Allegedly a masterpiece of comedic writing, "Dance" is not, however, funny, farcical, or obviously, satirical. I really think it takes an English person to see and enjoy fully the comedy of manners I sense behind the prose. I felt I was always on the outside, vaguely aware that people might be not quite right, or "dotty," except for one passage in Book 5 where I laughed out loud. I probably need an "Annotated Powell." You can see I'm deeply conflicted about this series: it is marvelously well-written yet I am not well entertained. An honest reviewer admitted that Powell "evokes a wry poetry from drabness and boredom." It took me 5 years to finish the first Movement, and dogged determination to read the next, and still I want to read one more! Just not immediately.
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