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A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement (Dance to the Music of Time)

by Anthony Powell

A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement (Dance to the Music of Time) Cover

Staff Pick

I started Anthony Powell's 12-novel cycle, A Dance to the Music of Time, with hopes of finishing it within a year. Four months later, I was done. While it can be a bit dry, Powell's writing is never dull. His descriptions put the reader directly in the heart of the various situations, and his characters soon become as liked (or detested) as old friends. This First Movement is a collection of the first three novels in the series.
Recommended by Gary, Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

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.

Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkinsa budding writershares 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

About the Author

Anthony Powell's work includes Miscellaneous Verdicts and Under Review, both available from the University of Chicago Press.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780226677149
Subtitle:
First Movement
Author:
Powell, Anthony
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Location:
Chicago :
Subject:
General
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
England
Subject:
Dance music
Subject:
Autobiographical fiction, English.
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
England Social life and customs.
Edition Description:
1
Series:
Dance to the Music of Time
Series Volume:
1609
Publication Date:
May 1995
Binding:
Paperback
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Yes
Pages:
732
Dimensions:
8.00 x 5.25 in

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