Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

Rating:
Summary: Powers' second-best novel
Review: 'The Gold Bug Variations' is his best. This one, so entirely different, is almost as good. I tell people about it all the time, since it isn't very well known. Try it.

Rating:
Summary: Powers looks at a photograph and tells a story about it.
Review: A famous photograph, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, elicits what must have started, for Richard Powers, as a virtuoso story improvisation that takes on a life of its own. The characters come alive on the page

Rating:
Summary: A sublime masterpiece.
Review: Although Powers requires his readers to "bring something" to their reading of his works, I find the effort well worth it. This is probably his third best book--closely behind Galatea 2.2 and well behind his best one--The Gold Bug Variations. I only wish he were more prolific

Rating:
Summary: Occasionally interesting, but not entirely worthwhile
Review: At least two people whose tastes I place a lot of stock in reccomended Richard Powers to me, but with no specific book singled out in their raves, I decided to start with this, his first novel. On the basis of "Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance," I won't exactly be rushing out to buy his others. Not only did I find this novel to be a chore to read, I didn't really come away from it feeling that I'd gained anything from my efforts. Powers' writing is complex and informed, but to what effect? I didn't really find any of these characters particularly interesting or worth caring about as I followed them through the many series of connections that links them all together through time. In fact, the only character who I felt *any* sympathy or fascination for is the very minor character of an old man who hangs around in a restaurant every night just to be with a young waitress who resembles his dead wife. I did understand what Powers' was saying about obsession (all the characters who are featured in the modern day setting seem to be fixated on one thing or another) and how memories are preserved through time (my favorite line in the entire book comments on how memories "are remembering to change things next time") but in the end I felt that a lot more could have been said with a lot less.

Rating:
Summary: A Most Interesting Meta-Fiction
Review: I agree with the other customer reviewers of this novel when they state that it is a "difficult" work. In many ways, reading Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance is not even like reading a novel. The book uses its main stories as a clothesline to hang an astonishing number of meditations on history, culture, technology, and memory.

While the other customer reviews to a wonderful job of touching on most of the topics described above, the one area I would add is that the novel serves as an excellent explanation of the principles underlying the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: that it is impossible to study anything or anyone without bringing the researcher's bias into the study. In this novel, the reader is treated to discussions on the subjectivity of history, as well as of the seemingly concrete art of photography, that will cause the reader not to be able to view either discipline in the same way after completing the book.

Hopefully, readers will not find all of the discussion of the more challenging aspects of the novel as a reason to find the book too intimidating to read, as it is a work that surely rewards the efforts necessary to read it.

Rating:
Summary: A Most Interesting Meta-Fiction
Review: I agree with the other customer reviewers of this novel when they state that it is a "difficult" work. In many ways, reading Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance is not even like reading a novel. The book uses its main stories as a clothesline to hang an astonishing number of meditations on history, culture, technology, and memory.

While the other customer reviews to a wonderful job of touching on most of the topics described above, the one area I would add is that the novel serves as an excellent explanation of the principles underlying the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: that it is impossible to study anything or anyone without bringing the researcher's bias into the study. In this novel, the reader is treated to discussions on the subjectivity of history, as well as of the seemingly concrete art of photography, that will cause the reader not to be able to view either discipline in the same way after completing the book.

Hopefully, readers will not find all of the discussion of the more challenging aspects of the novel as a reason to find the book too intimidating to read, as it is a work that surely rewards the efforts necessary to read it.

Rating:
Summary: More educational than engrossing
Review: I like Richard Powers, in fact, I'd rate his "Galatea 2.2" as one of my top ten novels of all time.

But "Three Farmers" (which I read _after_ "Galatea" and "The Goldbug Variations" and "Gain") was a bit of a let down. Sure, it had all the intellectual stimulation that I expected. And yes, it had some great quotes (both from Powers and from others that he cites ... such as "The world has changed less since the death of Jesus than it has in the past 30 years").

What went wrong? Maybe I was just not in the mood. Maybe it was the lack of a compelling love interest (so powerful in his other novels). Maybe it was that his historical lectures (on Ford, WW I, Sarah Berndhart, and photography) were a bit too pedantic.

But what really bothered me was the gimmicky ending: in the final two pages, one of the protagonists (who is on the verge of continuing a relationship with a female character) abruptly stops and asks (the reader? the author?) "So does he [I] get the girl?" ... and he walks out of her life forever. Huh?

Okay, so Powers has just finished a lecture on how (in photography, at least) there is a fascinating relationship between photographer, subject, and viewer. They fulfill each other, they create each other, they cannot exist without each other. I get it: this same relationship exists between author, characters, and reader. But to take a 350 page narrative and have it end on this cheesy metaphysical note .. a bit of a let down. I'm not even sure what is happening: is the character stepping out of the novel and into the readers reality? If this is so important to Powers, why not at least develop it for a few pages rather than tack it on in the last page?

This device reminds me of Pirandello's "Seven Characters in Search of an Author" ... but in that case it was a successful device because it was clear what was happening, and gave the audience something to chew on.

Try one of Power's other books.

Rating:
Summary: Synchronicity
Review: I'm almost done re-reading Three Farmers on the Way To A Danceand am really blown away by the quality, and depth of this work. Thefirst time I read it I don't think I really got it. It left me cold and I was dissapointed because I didn't like it as much as The Goldbug Variations. This time, I am enjoying it much more. Upon first starting this novel you are struck by two things. Firstly, it is very difficult, and therefore, not for everybody. Secondly, the reader may ask, "Is this even a novel?" The book is repleat with "historical" research, which it is unclear how much of this is factual, and a great deal of philosophy about the role of machines in the 20th century, which is how I started getting really into this book. The book demonstrates an overwhelming sense of loss in the face of technological advances in the twentieth century. Also interesting to me is the idea of synchonicity, or coincidence, a theme that I have been stumbling onto with greater and greater frequency (a sort of synchronicity in and of itself). I can't really explain why this theme is so facinating to me, but it is. Also, the Powers/Pynchon comparison seems to work much better for me with this novel, partly because Powers touches on ideas of paranoia and conspiracy. END

Rating:
Summary: An Intelligent, Complex Novel of Ideas
Review: In 1910, Richard Powers relates in "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance," the German photographer August Sander came upon the idea of an epic photographic collection to be called "Man of the Twentieth Century." Sander went on, during the next several decades, to take thousands of photographs of everyday life, "a massive, comprehensive catalog of people written in the universal language-photography."

One of Sander's photographs, taken in May, 1914, depicts three German farmers standing in a muddy road, their heads turned to the camera. The three farmers are dressed in their best suits, white shirts, ties, hats, and walking sticks. They are on their way to a dance. As Powers' first person narrator writes, "the date sufficed to show that they were not going to their expected dance. I was not going to my expected dance. We would all be taken blindfolded into a field somewhere in this tortured century and made to dance until we'd had enough. Dance until we dropped."

From this intriguing beginning, Richard Powers tells three stories, each of them connected through the photograph and through time. The first is that of the narrator, who stumbles upon Sander's photograph at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He becomes obsessed with the haunting aura of the photograph and spends the next several months trying to find out more about the photographer and the three men in the photograph. The second is that of the three farmers themselves-Hubert, Peter and Adolphe-and what happens to each of them when the Great War breaks out in Europe. The third story is that of Peter Mays, a writer for a computer trade magazine in 1980s Boston, who also becomes obsessed-not with the photograph, but with a beautiful red haired woman dressed in early twentieth century period costume that he sees on the street following a Veterans' Day Parade-and ultimately finds out that he has a connection to one of the men in the picture and to the events of the Great War.

To say that "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance" tells three stories is misleading, however, insofar as the novel is dominated not by plot, but, rather, by a range of discursive narratives on how the world has changed between the Great War, when Sander's photograph was taken, and the present day. Plot does not drive the action of Powers' densely intellectual novel; rather, it provides a touchstone for the narrator to explore certain events and fundamental ideas of the Twentieth Century. For example, when the office cleaning woman shows the narrator artifacts from the Great War, it strikes an intellectual cord that leads to a long discourse on Charles Peguy, the French thinker who, in 1913, made the subsequently oft-quoted remark that "the world had changed less since the death of Jesus than it had in the last thirty years," and the ideas "hidden" in Peguy's formulation. Similarly, the narrator's obsessive study of the 1914 photograph leads to an historical investigation of Sander's life and works. It also leads to speculations on the nature of photography and on how photography changed conceptions of art that derive closely from Walter Benjamin's classic essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

Ideas and intellectual referents are ubiquitous in this novel; simply read the epigraphs to each chapter to get a feel for the intellectual gyroscope that orients "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance". It is a remarkable work that demands a great deal from the reader. It is also a work that will disappoint anyone who is looking for a straightforward plot or a mere "page turner."

If you're interested in ideas, in novels with intellectual density, in narratives that force you to think deeply and reflectively about the world, "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance" is the perfect novel. Read it, enjoy it, and move on to the rest of Richard Powers' remarkable list of fictions.

Rating:
Summary: An audacious novel
Review: Mr Powers begins his novel by following a narrator travelling by train from Chicago to Boston. He has to change trains in Detroit and since he has several hours at his leisure, he decides to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts. There, he is puzzled by a photograph taken by Augustus Sander in 1914 showing three farmers on their way to a dance. The reader follows the narrator's progress as he tries to find answers to the questions that preoccupy him about the photograph: who took it, why was it taken, who are the three farmers appearing in the picture.
On another level, Mr Powers gives a fictional account - or it may also be the result of the narrator's research, it is not explicit in the text - of the action taking place at the time the photograph was taken and also what happens subsequently. And so the reader gets to know the three farmers Hubert, Peter and Adolphe.
Yet on another level, the author introduces various contemporary characters working in the Powell Building for a magazine called "Micro Monthly News": Mays, Moseley, Delaney. After having at first the impression that the events at this level are unrelated to the two other levels, the reader soon realises that there is a connection indeed.
What makes Mr Powers's novel interesting are his many reflections on various topics. These range from the situation of a small Belgian village called Petit Roi during the First World War, the part that Henry Ford played in that war, various personalities like Darwin, Freud, Gödel, Planck or Sarah Bernhardt, to the Industrial Revolution and the changes that mechanisation brought to our civilisation. And because the main protagonist so to speak of the novel is a photograph, Mr Powers also deals in detail in the history of photography.
A very instructive novel, plenty of interesting points of view that show Mr Powers's broad knowledge.