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Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant: Book 5 of A Dance to the Music of Time | Anthony Powell
4 posts | 4 read | 1 to read
Anthony Powell’s 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 published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books. Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960), the fifth book, finds Nick marrying Isobel Tolland and launching happily into family life—including his new role as brother-in-law to Isobel’s many idiosyncratic siblings. But even as Nick’s life is settling down, those of his friends are full of drama and heartache: his best friend, Hugh Moreland, is risking his marriage on a hopeless affair, while Charles Stringham has nearly destroyed himself with drink. Full of Powell’s typically sharp observations about life and love, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant offers all the rewards and frustrations, pleasures and regrets of one’s thirties. "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
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Minervasbutler
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Volume 5 of his 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time opens in the late 1920s with Nick recalling his first meeting with composer Hugh Moreland before jumping forward a few years to 1936 when both he and Moreland are navigating the shoals of matrimony. As well as Moreland we are reintroduced to old friends, most memorably Stringham, and Widmerpool continues his inexorable rise.

DivineDiana Twelve Volumes! Fascinating! I was not aware of him. 2y
Minervasbutler @DivineDiana this is my fourth time reading it. I read it every couple of decades and enjoy it more each time. But that's just me lol. Won't be to all tastes. 2y
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nocto
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Starting in on volume 5 of A Dance to the Music of Time. I still can‘t decide if I actually like this series but it‘s definitely interesting historically.

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nocto
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I'm all ready for 🥞💞February's #bookspin! Emojis almost certainly bear absolutely no resemblance to the content of 📚books that I haven't 📖read 😄. The tagged book is a series I really want to get back to before I forget who everyone is again. Looking forward to what @TheAromaOfBooks picks out at random this month!

nocto And now I've learnt that I can't spell 'Casanova'! 🙄 3y
TheAromaofBooks Woohoo!!! 3y
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Booksnchill
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Just finished book 5 in Powell‘s Dance to the Music of Time- almost 1/2 way through my one a month reading project to finish these 12 volumes this year. Casanova‘s Chinese Restaurant follows the gang- less Widmerpool and more Moreland/Lovell/erridge and Quiggin through marriages begun and ended, what feels like the end of frivolity and the drumbeats of the approaching war. This volume was originally published in 1960 and set in London 1933-37.