by Anthony Powell
It took me a year to read this entire saga. Four volumes each comprising three books make up Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, originally published as 12 books over the course of 24 years. We've gone from Nick Jenkins' boyhood, in which he has memories of the outbreak of World War I, to...
To paraphrase Hitchcock: Movies are life with all the boring parts cut out. This book is all about the boring parts, but that's ok. The boring parts, where we hang out with our friends, muse on sexuality and the world we live in and ruminate on the behavior of the creatures of that world, comprise t...
“...at the termination of a given passage of time...the hidden gate goes down...and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected...
My least favourite of all the series, at times dragged on and on, glimpses of misogyny, ludicrous story of Widmerpool joining a cult, but still through it all, wonderful writing, and a great sense of time passing.
I am so far loving this - the language, the ideas, the characterisation all combine to make a wonderful portrayal of the march of time. My only bugbear is I feel he either does not like women or that I shall have to read further to get decent portrayals of any woman in the novel. I mean what is a l...
I’ve been somewhere tonight that Ant has never been and frankly, I’m thinking maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s better to discuss how posh people lay the cutlery for dinner parties than life at the bottom. And I have only myself to blame. [Much, much later: the rest of this entry has been cut on the grou...
blurberoonies - ANTHONY POWELL’S magisterial cycle of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, was published between 1951-75. There are 12 volumes altogether, totalling some 3,000 pages. It is an original and compelling saga owing much to Proust, PG Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. The title comes from the ...
The First Movement is about Class, the Second is about Love, the Third is about Duty. Now we're at the end, so what is the Fourth Movement going to be about except Death?I have read the series several times, and I'm still not completely sure about the Fourth Movement. It isn't as much fun as the oth...
I've been meaning for some time to post a review of Dance to the Music of Time, which is pretty much my favorite book ever, but it's hard to know where to start. If you've read it, you know it's a masterpiece, and anything I say is irrelevant. If you haven't read it, I'm faced with the daunting task...
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