Quote:
Originally Posted by poohbear_nc
Last year I had reported finally making it through all 12 volumes of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, and how much I had enjoyed the experience, mingling with the fantastically original cast of recurring characters, whilst awaiting with eager dread the return appearance of the dreadful Widmerpool in each volume.
Well, I've begun a slow re-read, accompanied by Hilary Spurling's magisterial, yet entertaining, Invitation to the Dance -- a handbook par excellence to the series. I'm simply wallowing in Powell's vocabulary and sentence structure, e.g. "The passages seemed catacombs of a hell assigned to the subdued regret of those who had lacked in life the income to which they felt themselves entitled..." -- a brilliant, atmospheric description of a second class private hotel in London for gentry who had fallen on hard times.
Powell constructed sentences whose length rivals Henry James at his most florid, whose intricate structures are descriptive of both the inner and outer landscapes. Sentences and paragraphs are to be savored slowly, allowing them to reveal their concealed nuances of meaning and insinuation.
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The Chapel Hill library has these, so I might tackle them soon. I've never read them, and you make them sound very inviting.
Since my last update here, I have completed: