<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: The worst thing about it is that it came to an end
Review: C. S. Lewis once wrote that one of the greatest services that literature offers is the opportunity to experience worlds and lives not our own. This is rarely more true than with Powell's magnificent series. I had come to feel that Nicholas Jenkins's friends were my friends, and by the end I felt almost as if I had experienced another life. If one is willing to make the commitment of time, I wholeheartedly recommend this superb series. In a hundred years time, it might be the single work that I would recommend to anyone wanting to know what life in the 20th century was like.
Rating: 
Summary: A BAD END to a DELIGHTFUL SERIES
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed reading the Dance series for a graduate level course over the summer of 2003....until I got to the last volume. In my opinion the books peaked with the sixth, "The Kindly Ones" and finshed delightfully at book nine "The Military Philosophers". Most major character lines were completed and the story had reached a logical and chronological end. For this reason Volume Four reads like a long and arduous addendum. The new characters are unappealing and the loss of the most interesting personalities from the prior three volumes is immense. Further, a personal irritation of mine is the continued use of archaic verse lifted from often bad and lugubrious poetry. Powell is indiscrimant in adding pages from irrelevant works while not advancing the story line. Did he write these last three novels to augment his income as he approached his later years? Regardless they alloy this otherwise delightful series. DO YOURSELF A FAVOR, END AT BOOK 9, DON'T BOTHER WITH THIS VOLUME.
Rating:
Summary: A BAD END to a DELIGHTFUL SERIES
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed reading the Dance series for a graduate level course over the summer of 2003....until I got to the last volume. In my opinion the books peaked with the sixth, "The Kindly Ones" and finshed delightfully at book nine "The Military Philosophers". Most major character lines were completed and the story had reached a logical and chronological end. For this reason Volume Four reads like a long and arduous addendum. The new characters are unappealing and the loss of the most interesting personalities from the prior three volumes is immense. Further, a personal irritation of mine is the continued use of archaic verse lifted from often bad and lugubrious poetry. Powell is indiscrimant in adding pages from irrelevant works while not advancing the story line. Did he write these last three novels to augment his income as he approached his later years? Regardless they alloy this otherwise delightful series. DO YOURSELF A FAVOR, END AT BOOK 9, DON'T BOTHER WITH THIS VOLUME.
Rating:
Summary: culmination of one the novels of the century
Review: While I would recommend starting at an earlier stage of Powell's intimate epic (a contradiction in terms? maybe not), this is essential reading.
Rating:
Summary: Last segments of the finest English novel of the 20th C.
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 final volume of the University of Chicago's beautiful Trade Paperback edition includes the last three books. _Books Do Furnish a Room_ is set shortly after World War II, when Nick Jenkins is moving in London literary circles, dealing with such characters as the doomed, eccentric, novelist X. Trapnel, his mistress Pamela Flitton Widmerpool, and of course Kenneth Widmerpool himself, clumsily but successfully trying to maximize his political influence with the help of a literary magazine. _Temporary Kings_ features Jenkins at a conference in Venice, then back in London, and introduces a couple of curious Americans, Louis Glober and Russell Gwinnett. It also features the final destructive acts of the terrible Pamela Flitton's life. _Hearing Secret Harmonies_ concludes the sequence, as Jenkins rather bitterly views the radicalism of the '60s, and especially Widmerpool's usual attempts at ingratiating himself with the latest fads in power. The novel closes with a remarkable vision of Widmerpool's end, oddly, bitterly echoing his first appearance. A great, great, series of novels. Incomparable.
Rating:
Summary: Last segments of the finest English novel of the 20th C.
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 final volume of the University of Chicago's beautiful Trade Paperback edition includes the last three books. _Books Do Furnish a Room_ is set shortly after World War II, when Nick Jenkins is moving in London literary circles, dealing with such characters as the doomed, eccentric, novelist X. Trapnel, his mistress Pamela Flitton Widmerpool, and of course Kenneth Widmerpool himself, clumsily but successfully trying to maximize his political influence with the help of a literary magazine. _Temporary Kings_ features Jenkins at a conference in Venice, then back in London, and introduces a couple of curious Americans, Louis Glober and Russell Gwinnett. It also features the final destructive acts of the terrible Pamela Flitton's life. _Hearing Secret Harmonies_ concludes the sequence, as Jenkins rather bitterly views the radicalism of the '60s, and especially Widmerpool's usual attempts at ingratiating himself with the latest fads in power. The novel closes with a remarkable vision of Widmerpool's end, oddly, bitterly echoing his first appearance. A great, great, series of novels. Incomparable.
<< 1 >>
| 
