Faces in My Time

To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell #3

by Anthony Powell

Faces in My Time: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, Volume III, by Powell, Anthony

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

People best know British writer Anthony Dymoke Powell for A Dance to the Music of Time , a cycle of 12 satirical novels from 1951 to 1975.

This Englishman published his volumes of work. Television and radio dramatizations subjected major work of Powell in print continuously. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Powell among their list of "the fifty greatest British writers since 1945."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony...

Reviews

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admit, I'm starting to flag on the Powell memoirs. On the upside, it turns out that he visited California and watched a movie just across the road from where I live--really, he could have seen what is now my apartment, walked under my windows. And Powell's uncanny ability to meet and befriend important writers before he'd written anything particularly important is very impressive, particularly his hanging out F. Scott Fitz. On the downside, much of the stuff on his war years is very dull compared to the brilliance of the war sections in DMOT. Anyone who tells you that nonfiction is more gripping than fiction because it's 'real' has plainly not compared this with 'Military Philosophers.' But it's a pleasant read, and there's no shortage of Olde Englishe eccentricities.

One odd thing I did get out of this volume, though, is that Powell as memoirist is not much different from the narrator of DMOT: they're both almost completely effaced, and function as little more than the cracker on which we can pile the cheese of people and events of the twentieth century. That's not a bad thing, it might even be a good thing, and it beats the pants off memoirs which are all about the author's psychological hang-ups.

[David]

Lots of details parallel to Dance in this volume of Powell's memoirs. The war years are followed by the (more or less) moment of genesis for the major novel. I sometimes wonder about the class issue in Powell. Interesting to be reminded that Powell and I both met Field Marshall Montgomery (though I was 8 and the Field Marshall was 81, so it wasn't close to a peer relationship!) So much of "who has met whom" depends, as Jenkins suggests in the Dance on the consequences of being the person one chances to be.

[Michael Robb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This, the third instalment of Anthony Powell's autobiography, is a good read for Powell fans and certainly has made me want to re-read the Dance To The Music of Time series.