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 panorama 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
I think that this book needs more action. The characterizations are insightful, but on the whole the book is boring. I am having a very difficult time to keep reading. I want to believe that because there are so many books in the series that it must get better, but I may give up after the first book.
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Posted July 26, 2012
"A Dance to the Music of Time" is better than Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" (perdue is "lost," not "past"!!!!) There is a steady supply of "laugh-out-loud" moments, a great understanding of the underlying springs of human nature, and Anthony Powell (which he apparently pronounced "pole") captures what England was like after World War I.
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Posted November 11, 2008
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Posted November 11, 2008
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Posted April 29, 2009
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Posted February 12, 2010
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Posted December 17, 2008
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Overview