RSS

Tag Archives: Dance to the Music of Time

Theme Thursday: Face

19 Jul

Theme Thursdays is a fun weekly event that will be open from one Thursday to the next. Anyone can participate in it. The rules are simple:

  • A theme will be posted each week (on Thursday’s)
  • Select a conversation/snippet/sentence from the current book you are reading
  • Mention the author and the title of the book along with your post
  • It is important that the theme is conveyed in the sentence (you don’t necessarily need to have the word)
    Ex: If the theme is KISS; your sentence can have “They kissed so gently” or “Their lips touched each other” or “The smooch was so passionate”

This will give us a wonderful opportunity to explore and understand different writing styles and descriptive approaches adopted by authors.

The theme for this week is:

FACE , Features

Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time

My THURSDAY THEME for FACE is here:

Moreland’s face in repose, in spite of this cherubic humorous character, was not without melancholy too; his flush suggesting none of its riotously healthy physique enjoyed by Bronzino’s — and, I suppose everyone else’s — Folly.

from Anthony Powell’s Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, p. 16 part of A Dance to the Music of Time

Related articles
 
1 Comment

Posted by on July 19, 2012 in British Lit, classic, fiction

 

Tags: , , ,

Teaser Tuesday

19 Jul

Rather late, but I’m in the mood to do this today.

Grab your current read.
Open to a random page.
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other Tuesday Teaser participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

From Octavia Butler‘s Kindred:

Carrie and Nigel named their thin, wrinkled, brown son, Jude. Nigel did a lot of strutting and happy babbling until Weylin told him to shut up and get back to work on the covered passageway he was supposed to be building to connect the house and the cookhouse.

From Anthony Powell‘s At Lady Molly’s (Dance to the Music of Time):

Since we have been undergraduates together my friendship with Quiggin, moving up and down at different seasons, could have been plotted like a temperature chart. Sometimes we seemed on fairly good terms, sometimes on fairly bad terms; never with any very concrete reason for these improvements and deteriorations.

Related articles
 
3 Comments

Posted by on July 19, 2012 in African American Lit, British Lit, classic

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

A Dance to the Music of Time: The First Movement (66% of It)

29 Jan

Garrison Keillor‘s Writer’s Almanac mentioned Anthony Powell‘s A Dance to the Music of Time in December and I was intrigued. How could I pass up a book Evelyn Waugh compared to Proust‘s In Search of Lost Time? Waugh says Powell’s 12 volume masterpiece is “dry, cool, humorous, elablorately and accurately constructed and quintessentially English. It is more realistic than A Recherche du Temps Perdu, [trans. In Search of Lost Time], to which it is often compared and much funnier.”

So far I’ve read the first two novels, A Question of Upbringing and A Buyer’s Market. Set in the 1920s, A Question of Upbringing introduces readers to Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator. He’s attending boarding school with the churlish, bothersome Kenneth Widmerpool, and the “cooler kids” Stringman and Templer, with whom he hangs out conniving pranks, and sharing a jaded view of their teachers and peers. After graduation, Jenkins is sent to France for six weeks to polish his language skills and whom should he run into but Widmerpool. Finally, the novel concludes with Jenkins at university attending a tea at a unctuous social climbing professor’s rooms. Here he meets Mark Members, JG Quiggin, Bill Truscott, who’re sure to factor into the rest of the story. I was surprised at how little time university would play in a 12 volume work.

Here’s a sample insight:

Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.” (A Question of Upbringing, p. 229)

In A Buyer’s Market, Jenkins has finished his education and is living in London. Though work is the topic of many conversations and status is determined by one’s employment to a degree, the emphasis is on debutante balls, loves and faux loves, and friendships that are ill-advised, dead, or comatose.

The strength of these novels isn’t what happens, but how Jenkins thinks about events, relationships, and perceptions. That’s where the power and the humor come into play. The descriptions are trenchant and witty. As I read them, I envy Powell’s talent and skill. Ah, to write so well.

The book does center on the upper crust of England and that’s not everyone’s cup of Earl Grey, but if you like Downton Abbey, I think you’ll like this.

Related articles
 
1 Comment

Posted by on January 29, 2012 in British Lit, classic, contemporary

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,