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Jan 05, 2009

Manny rated it:

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 of persuading you that it's worth your time to get through it. Not only is it 12 volumes long, but everyone calls Powell the English Proust. Why read some inferior Proust wannabe when you can get the More...

23 comments like (39 people liked it)

Jan 17, 2010

notgettingenough rated it:

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.

I smsed my partner – bridge, that is – at 7.30 this morning along these lines. ‘I’ve had a good sleep, so the bridge will be fucked, I might as well wear a sexy dress if you want.’ One nano second later I get back ‘Yes please’. What has happened is that a More...

39 comments like (17 people liked it)

Feb 13, 2012

David rated it:

“...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; so that before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the

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1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Dec 18, 2011

Bettie rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 25, 2008

Gary rated it:

This contains the first three novels of Powell's cycle.

A Question of Upbringing -- 4 out of 5 stars.
This first novel, of the overall twelve novels involved, comes across as little more than a high(er)-brow version of A Seperate Peace. And to me, that's not a bad thing. It's quite readable, if a bit dry in places, and manages itself very well.

It's essentially the first (230page) chapter of an overall novel that spans the life of the main character; so, this time is s More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Aug 08, 2007

Mike rated it:

Yes, it's long -- in total, twelve novels long. And yes, it's not an easy read -- Powell is incredibly erudite, and writes with an arch-irony that takes an immense amount of concentration. But it's also the most rewarding reading experience I've ever had.

The series is essentially the story of Nicholas Jenkins, and everyman who narrates his life's journey from the years immediately after WWI to the dawn of Thatcherism. Along the way nearly every type of personality and institution i More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 26, 2011

Trina rated it:

I loved listening to this First Movement of the four-volume saga, which starts in 1920s London. I really enjoyed getting to know the many characters, and I found their lives and adventures both amusing and at the same time touching. The "narrator" Nick Jenkins is a great observer while being himself quite interesting in his own right. I have always thought this might be too much of a comedy of manners, and it is that, but the characters and settings are much richer than that phrase More...

5 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 22, 2009

Ed rated it:

This and the other four volumes are actually a total of 12 novels following a welter of British characters from 1914 until the mid 1960s. I am about to start reading the whole sequence for the third time. There is also a great BBC dramatization on DVD: Dance to the Music of Time.

This is the British equivalent of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I guess I find it closer to life as it was lived in the 20th century and certainly to the idea of our lives as a dance that characters keep r More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 09, 2011

Ronald rated it:

A well-written story which follows a group of school boys through the two great wars of the 20th century and, for those who survived World War II, their integration into British society following that war. One of their classmates, Widmerpool, seems to pop up everywhere during the narrator's life, and to serve as a topic of humor. Widmerpool, despite his untiring efforts to be a respected member of British society, usually ends up being a type of schmurz. Unfortunately the library did not have a More...

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Apr 17, 2011

Barksdale rated it:

If one invests the time to read 12 volumes, one must love it, and I did on this my second reading of the series. The pace is a little slow at times, and the coincidences among characters so frequent and overlapping as to verge at times on the absurd. There a re many memorable characters, but the center of the tale is the narrator, Nichloas Jenkins, who, seemingly without trying, is everywhere anything happens and just happens to know everyone. He is never the center of attention, but dryly re More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

May 07, 2010

Timothy rated it:

My favorite novel of the 20th century is probably Anthony Powell's twelve-volume marathon, A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME, written between 1951 and 1975. Supremely civilized, enormous in design, an unforgettable picture of a way of life (and a class) that were disappearing even when Powell was one of the "bright young people" who were so visible in the 1920s in London, the books that make up Dance are also very funny.

I first read DANCE when I was in my early thirties, and the More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 10, 2010

carl rated it:

12 novellas, oh, about 3000 pages, covering 50 years of London
life with the who's who, socialites, writers, b-list celebrities,
politicos, and historical figures all thrown in, most of whom would
be unknown to any contemporary Londoner let alone the rest of us,
written by a snooty erudite, somehow it all works.

If you're in it for the long haul, I suggest an 'Invitation to the Dance'
by Hillary Spurling, a guide and glossary to all that is about to appear bef More...

4 comments like

Nov 15, 2009

Cyril rated it:

This volume encompasses the first three of the twelve novels that make up the total series. I believe that when these novels first came out they were serialized, and so our reading today is a different experience than what it was originally.

The whole volume is about 700 pages; not difficult reading, but it is long. The three novels present a first hand account of English life after World War I by the central character, Nick Jenkins. It is a first person account and the view of the wo More...

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Aug 18, 2011

Melissa rated it:

this writte while still reading...So far I find the narrator and area of examination rather unsympathetic. Lots of detail and minute observation of the social and romantic development of a young English man. I have a hard time warming up to the line of fiction that promulgates that women are such a mystery with their weak, unpredictable, violent animalistic and over civilized yet vicious natures. Two men in this book actually discuss how impossible it is to represent English women in fiction. Th More...

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Apr 18, 2011

Veronica rated it:

Okay, so I committed to a book per week and have, thus far, honored that commitment. I trudged through 783 pages of Ulysses and went on to read two trilogies; U.S.A. at 1,240 pages and The Studs Lonigan Trilogy at 961 pages, each of those three sagas in the allotted one week time frame, but the buck stops here folks. I mean c’mon, a series of 12 books in one week? I don’t think so and I don’t even feel that bad about it (perhaps all this reading is taking its toll). Since it took Powell 25 More...

1 comment like

Feb 22, 2009

W.H. rated it:

Powell's "Dance" is often called the English language Proust. I agree;-- he is as close as we come. Speaking about time’s relentless passage, his narrator compares certain stages of experience to the game of Russian Billiards as once he used to play it with a long vanished girlfriend in the early days of their affair. A game in which, he says,

“...at the termination of a given passage of time...the hidden gate goes down...and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps More...

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May 10, 2008

Whitney rated it:

I love long books, and so this series was very satisfying. You can read and read and read. Very British. Well written. I may read it again some day, along with Troloppe.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 12, 2011

Bette rated it:

I have very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, Powell gives a highly detailed picture of English life between the wars for a certain class of men. And some of it is quite funny. On the other hand, it was incredibly slow moving (though listening to large parts of it dramatized the book more than reading it). Nicholas Jenkins, the protagonist of the book, is very passive, more an observer than a truly well-rounded character. And his views of women are condescending and derogatory. More...

1 comment like

Feb 16, 2010

William rated it:

The narrative is elegant, often moving, and at times highly comic. It is a disguised autobiography: the narrator's life at school, Oxford, publishing, marriage, the Second World War, and leaving London for the country are all close to the author's experiences. But the cast of characters is amazing and some truly memorable grotesques lurk among the pages. Missing though is any spiritual dimension and also there is an irritating coyness about the narrator's personal life. As the marriages of nearl More...

1 comment like

Sep 17, 2011

Whitley rated it:

I count the Dance to the Music of Time as one of the most important literary achievements of the 20th century. I've read the entire sequence of novels twice, and found the second reading a richer experiences than the first, such is the density and complexity of Powell's amazing achievement. Powell has created the richest and most detailed fictional narrative in the English language, in my opinion. I will read the series a third time in a few years, because there is much hidden in the story, I fe More...

0 comments like

Dec 22, 2011

Carey rated it:

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 line like; "perhaps all girls were in a difficult mood that night", doing in a book hailed as the great modern novel. The humour and irony so prevalent in the book seem to be missing with his More...

0 comments like

Apr 02, 2009

James rated it:

Powell takes you back to a time and place, Britain and France in the 1920s, that no longer exists. He also describes a class culture that is unfamiliar to this reader who grew up in the Midwest. He does this with a prose style and a structure that, through episodes in the lives of four boys on the verge of adulthood, slowly builds a story that seems very true to life. You gradually learn about the relationships through the eys of the narrator, Jenkins, and by the time he says goodbye to his U More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Ann rated it:

Am reading this currently.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 25, 2010

Douglas rated it:

Having finished the first three novels, which in the University of Chicago edition comprise the “first movement” of Powell’s magnum opus, I’m committed now to the follow-through. And yes, even the sum of these first three is greater than its constituent parts considered separately. What can I say that hasn’t been said of Powell elsewhere? Nothing, I’m sure. But 750 pages into the ‘Dance,’ I can’t bear the thought of an intermission. Powell is a perfect enchanter. I just picked up the second More...

0 comments like

Jan 22, 2012

Lisa rated it:

A Dance to the Music of Time is a delicious book: I am loving every minute of reading it. Originally comprising 12 separate novels published from 1951 to 1975 it now comes in four volumes and I’ve only read the first volume so far, but I am hooked.

Sometimes compared to Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Lost Time), Anthony Powell’s masterpiece might also be called a comedy of manners. It is much easier to read than Proust, and not just because the sentences are More...

7 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 03, 2010

Sps rated it:

Like Saki, but less droll, more interior. Note that I didn't read the whole volume, only the first book (A Question of Upbringing) and a few pages of the second (A Buyer's Market).

NYT commenter:
"My English Escape

The one set of books I wouldn’t part with are the 12 volumes of Anthony Powell’s great tapestry of novels about English life in the 20th century, “A Dance to the Music of Time.” They got under my skin when I was in my 20s and I have r More...

0 comments like

Feb 22, 2010

Aubrey rated it:

Through much of the beginning of this book, I kept thinking of Proust and his introverted, neurotic narrator. I think that is because it is hard to get a good handle on Powell's narrator, Jenkins - and his naivete in viewing the rest of the characters and musings on the ways of the world are so much like Proust's narrator, whose name escapes me at the moment. This book though, had a lot more action to it (not hard), and the narrator was MUCH less depressing.

The story begins in a bo More...

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Mar 28, 2011

Miriam rated it:

I think this "Top 100 List" is starting to feel crazy. I think you get either Aldous Huxley's Point Counterpoint, or this series of 12 novels (of which I have now read 3). Same time period of England between the wars, same use of the idea of a theme and its variations. Don't get me wrong--it was an easy read, with some good insights on life. Easier to read with long sentences than James. The best thing is Widmerpool, the annoying secondary character that everyone has in their life More...

0 comments like

Feb 04, 2012

Tess rated it:

Subtle, witty and immensely entertaining. I started to affix post-it notes to mark favourite passages, but there were so many I finally gave this up.

A few turns of phrase or passages that particularly took my fancy at the beginning were:

"The house looked on to other tenement-like structures, experiments in architectural insignificance..."

"His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on the More...

7 comments like

Jun 17, 2008

Alisa rated it:

Some books take a while to get into. That first 50 or 100 pages that require faith or pigheadness to get through, and then all of a sudden the door opens, you're inside, and you're so glad you lasted.

Like that, only it took two and a half novels. I had to start book 2 two times, but I sailed right into book 3. Whenever Widmerpool is on the scene, I can't stop reading. He is so grotesque (at least through the narrator's eyes) but so very fascinating. In a way, he is the only character More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

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