Rating: 
Summary: My first slow dance . . .
Review: was to an REO Speedwagon song in 7th grade, but that is beside the point. This is an entertaining book: not half as good as Proust, which - if you have some time - will repay your investment tenfold. The difference, I think, is that in Proust the quest of the narrator was a unifying force across all the pages, and you felt that he was stumbling his way towards something worthwhile - which, after finishing the first volume, I still don't feel. Despite patches of excellent writing, it has an episodic feel that belongs neither to life nor art: he runs into people, things happen, generalizations are made about human behavior (sometimes the things seem to happen just so the generalization can be made) and the dance continues, but why isn't the music swelling, or at least changing tempo? And why don't I care when someone else gets divorced or married? I'll keep reading, certainly, but only for the little wonderful bits: for example, "Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests. In general, things are apt to turn out unsatisfactorily for at least one of the parties concerned; and in due course only its most determined devotees remain unwilling to admit that an intimate and affectionate relationship is not necessarily a simple one . . . " And it goes on. Nicely said. I'm not a determined devotee, but I'll keep reading.
Rating: 
Summary: The Finest English Novel of the 20th Century
Review: _A Dance to the Music of Time_ is an extremely absorbing and well-crafted novel (composed of 12 smaller novels). Its subject is the decline of the English upper classes from the First World War to about 1970, a decline seen is inevitable and probably necessary, but somehow also regrettable.Such a description might make the novel seem stuffy, but it is not. _A Dance to the Music of Time_ is at times very funny indeed, and always interesting. always involving. It features an enormous cast of characters, and Powell has the remarkable ability to make his characters memorable with the briefest of descriptions. In addition, Powell's prose is addictive: very characteristic, idiosyncratic, and elegant. The long novel follows the life of the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, from his time at Eton just after World War I to retirement in the English countryside in the late '60s. But Jenkins, though the narrator, is in many ways not the most important character. The comic villain Widmerpool, a creature of pure will, and awkward malevolence, is the other fulcrum around which the novel pivots. This first volume of the University of Chicago Press' beautiful four-volume Trade Paperback edition contains the first three books: _A Question of Upbringing_, which follows Nick Jenkins and his friends Charles Stringham and Peter Templer, along with Kenneth Widmerpool, through the last few terms at Eton, and summer spent in France, and then time at Oxford; _A Buyer's Market_, which covers Nick and his friends in their early 20s, attending dances and dinners, having love affairs, and beginning to make careers; and _The Acceptance World_, which shows the young men becoming settled in their careers, and beginning to marry and divorce and have more affairs as their "dance" continues. This is simply outstanding stuff.
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