Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
A Buyer's Market
A Buyer's Market: Book 2 of A Dance to the Music of Time | Anthony Powell
4 posts | 7 read | 2 to read
Anthony Powells universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally publishedas twelve individual novelsbut with a twenty-first-century twist: theyre available only as e-books. The second volume, A Buyers Market (1952),finds young Nick Jenkins struggling to establish himself in London. Amid the fever of the 1920s, he attends formal dinners and wild parties; makes his first tentative forays into the worlds of art, culture, and bohemian life; and suffers his first disappointments in love. Old friends come and go, but the paths they once shared are rapidly diverging: Stringham is settling into a life of debauchery and drink, Templer is plunging into the world of business, and Widmerpool, though still a figure of out-of-place grotesquerie, remains unbowed, confident in his own importance and eventual success. A Buyers Market is a striking portrait of the pleasures and anxieties of early adulthood, set against a backdrop of London life and culture at one of its most effervescent moments. "Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--Chicago Tribune "A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times "One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven, New Yorker The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.--Kingsley Amis
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
Pick icon
100%
review
Minervasbutler
post image
Pickpick

Second in his Dance to the Music of Time sequence and narrator Nick is out of university and drifting a bit, professionally and romantically. This one sees the introduction of characters such as Mr Deacon, Gypsy Jones (to whom our hero loses his virginity in a "blink and you miss it" episode) and Barmby but Widmerpool remains the fish-faced star.

quote
Minervasbutler
post image

Currently reading this for the fourth time and always finding something new

65 likes1 stack add
review
Booksnchill
post image
Pickpick

Volume 2 of 12 Dance to the Music of Time taking our characters out into the “real world”. The end sentence sums it up “life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncountrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity”. Volume 3 awaits for March “The Acceptance World” and the completion of the 1st Movement.

review
twohectobooks
Mehso-so

...But this was kind of boring. I will have to find a different enormously long series to devote my reading time to.