lizemanuel's review against another edition
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
charlottesometimes's review against another edition
funny
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
mgeake's review against another edition
emotional
funny
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
wynter's review against another edition
3.0
Still waiting for the plot to form, but that prose! How can someone weave such deliciously intricate sentences is beyond me.
honeypielovesbooksnthebeatles's review
funny
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
phileasfogg's review against another edition
4.0
Binge Reading
I didn't know how I was going to read this series. Would I read another book in between each instalment? Perhaps read two in a row, then something else? Three? Halfway through A Question of Upbringing the 'every second book' option was in front -- my attention wavered a little during the French scenes. But by the end of that volume, I knew I had to pick up the next one straight away. And halfway through A Buyer's Market I knew I'd read the whole series as though it was one huge novel. At time of writing, I'm enjoying Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (book 5).
Infinitely Improbable
The first half of A Buyer's Market describes one busy evening, beginning with a society dinner party, where naturally Nicholas meets Widmerpool, moving on to a debutante ball, and then a coffee stand at Hyde Park Corner where various characters from Nicholas's past unexpectedly show up, and from there to a party. Nicholas staggers home in the dawn, to find yet another figure from his past mysteriously lurking across the road from his apartment.
While I read this series, I sometimes can't help thinking of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- but then sometimes I just can't help thinking of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In particular, the moment after Zaphod first uses the improbability drive, and finds that his ship has, extremely improbably, picked up two hitch-hikers, one of whom happens to be his semi-cousin Ford (who shares three of the same mothers as him), while the other is Arthur, whom he met once at the same party where he met his girlfriend... and so on. And over the course of the series the characters, especially Arthur, repeatedly encounter far greater coincidences.
Obviously our narrator Nick Jenkins has also unwittingly been exposed to an improbability field. At some time (was it in this book or the first?) he rationalises his experiences by theorising that there is a kind of 'gravity' that repeatedly brings the same people together. The coincidental reunion is a minor and perfectly acceptable contrivance, already in book 2 almost a running gag, that enables the story of A Dance to the Music of Time, which is all the stories of the lives of Nicholas and his friends and acquaintances over the decades, to be told through a minimal number of scenes described in immersive detail.
Multi-dimensional Storytelling
Frequently those scenes do not contain any events that further a 'plot'. They operate at two scales: they're fascinating in themselves, for their close observation of an hour or two of English social life; and they also allow Nicholas to get the latest update of the doings of his friends and acquaintances, either from themselves or from a mutual acquaintance. This is, I think, a precise emulation of the way we follow the lives of the people we know but with whom we don't spend very much time. Or it was before social media exposed you to what everyone you ever met and a lot of other people were having for breakfast every day. In the old days our knowledge of others was 'curated' by their understanding, and our mutual friends' understanding, of what about their lives was actually worth hearing about.
There is an almost anthropological interest in, for example, the society dinner party; it's a scene we've seen many times in other books and movies and TV shows, but which seems real for the first time when recorded in such extraordinary detail as in this book.
As a fan of PG Wodehouse I'm especially fascinated to see in this series the types of places and people Wodehouse wrote about. For Wodehouse they were stock characters and settings, with comparatively little basis in his own experience. But Powell really did hobnob with the aristocracy and the rich and visit them in their country houses.
Miscellaneous Observations
A recurring motif in Nicholas's conversations is that some of his interlocutors sneer because he doesn't yet know about the latest events in their private lives. On the one hand, this makes the other man an idiot, for failing to construct an accurate mental model of Nicholas's knowledge; on the other hand it makes him arrogant, for assuming that other people must be talking about him, which would be the only way Nicholas could already know his latest news.
Nicholas often reports conversations in which we hear what the other person said, but not what Nicholas said. Often the other person will ask a question, and Nicholas's reply, if any, will not be recorded. Sometimes a conversation is written as an unbroken series of questions, where the reader doesn't quite know if Nicholas is answering or not. Occasionally the other party shows signs of knowing something Nicholas must have just told them in an unrecorded response to a question. Thus, subtly, the author reveals that yes Nicholas probably is answering all those questions; he just isn't writing down his answers in this book.
Thus he pushes himself further into the background, and illustrates his sometimes repeated notion that he is very interested in other people, while others of his acquaintance (like Widmerpool) do not have the slightest interest in anyone but themselves.
The title is arguably a play on words. It refers most obviously to the auction house where Nick finds some paintings by his old friend Henry Deacon, a discovery which sparks many of the memories recorded in this book. But it may also refer to the marriage market represented by the old debutante ball system. If it refers only to the former, it would seem odd to name the whole book after a minor incident; or perhaps the idea is to reinforce the way a whole long series of disparate memories might be sparked by a chance encounter.
It's remarkable that by the time this novel was written, the world it describes had already fallen thoroughly into the realm of history and social anthropology, although only a few decades had passed. Part of the appeal of these early instalments of the series must always, from the day they were published, have been the window they opened onto a past that was already being forgotten.
Something I noticed while reading Powell's pre-Dance novels is that he's very LGBTI-friendly for a writer of his era. There's at least one gay character in many of his novels.
I laughed out loud at Nick's encounter in Sir Magnus Donners' dungeon. A scene worthy of Douglas Adams.
I didn't know how I was going to read this series. Would I read another book in between each instalment? Perhaps read two in a row, then something else? Three? Halfway through A Question of Upbringing the 'every second book' option was in front -- my attention wavered a little during the French scenes. But by the end of that volume, I knew I had to pick up the next one straight away. And halfway through A Buyer's Market I knew I'd read the whole series as though it was one huge novel. At time of writing, I'm enjoying Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (book 5).
Infinitely Improbable
The first half of A Buyer's Market describes one busy evening, beginning with a society dinner party, where naturally Nicholas meets Widmerpool, moving on to a debutante ball, and then a coffee stand at Hyde Park Corner where various characters from Nicholas's past unexpectedly show up, and from there to a party. Nicholas staggers home in the dawn, to find yet another figure from his past mysteriously lurking across the road from his apartment.
While I read this series, I sometimes can't help thinking of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- but then sometimes I just can't help thinking of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In particular, the moment after Zaphod first uses the improbability drive, and finds that his ship has, extremely improbably, picked up two hitch-hikers, one of whom happens to be his semi-cousin Ford (who shares three of the same mothers as him), while the other is Arthur, whom he met once at the same party where he met his girlfriend... and so on. And over the course of the series the characters, especially Arthur, repeatedly encounter far greater coincidences.
Obviously our narrator Nick Jenkins has also unwittingly been exposed to an improbability field. At some time (was it in this book or the first?) he rationalises his experiences by theorising that there is a kind of 'gravity' that repeatedly brings the same people together. The coincidental reunion is a minor and perfectly acceptable contrivance, already in book 2 almost a running gag, that enables the story of A Dance to the Music of Time, which is all the stories of the lives of Nicholas and his friends and acquaintances over the decades, to be told through a minimal number of scenes described in immersive detail.
Multi-dimensional Storytelling
Frequently those scenes do not contain any events that further a 'plot'. They operate at two scales: they're fascinating in themselves, for their close observation of an hour or two of English social life; and they also allow Nicholas to get the latest update of the doings of his friends and acquaintances, either from themselves or from a mutual acquaintance. This is, I think, a precise emulation of the way we follow the lives of the people we know but with whom we don't spend very much time. Or it was before social media exposed you to what everyone you ever met and a lot of other people were having for breakfast every day. In the old days our knowledge of others was 'curated' by their understanding, and our mutual friends' understanding, of what about their lives was actually worth hearing about.
There is an almost anthropological interest in, for example, the society dinner party; it's a scene we've seen many times in other books and movies and TV shows, but which seems real for the first time when recorded in such extraordinary detail as in this book.
As a fan of PG Wodehouse I'm especially fascinated to see in this series the types of places and people Wodehouse wrote about. For Wodehouse they were stock characters and settings, with comparatively little basis in his own experience. But Powell really did hobnob with the aristocracy and the rich and visit them in their country houses.
Miscellaneous Observations
A recurring motif in Nicholas's conversations is that some of his interlocutors sneer because he doesn't yet know about the latest events in their private lives. On the one hand, this makes the other man an idiot, for failing to construct an accurate mental model of Nicholas's knowledge; on the other hand it makes him arrogant, for assuming that other people must be talking about him, which would be the only way Nicholas could already know his latest news.
Nicholas often reports conversations in which we hear what the other person said, but not what Nicholas said. Often the other person will ask a question, and Nicholas's reply, if any, will not be recorded. Sometimes a conversation is written as an unbroken series of questions, where the reader doesn't quite know if Nicholas is answering or not. Occasionally the other party shows signs of knowing something Nicholas must have just told them in an unrecorded response to a question. Thus, subtly, the author reveals that yes Nicholas probably is answering all those questions; he just isn't writing down his answers in this book.
Thus he pushes himself further into the background, and illustrates his sometimes repeated notion that he is very interested in other people, while others of his acquaintance (like Widmerpool) do not have the slightest interest in anyone but themselves.
The title is arguably a play on words. It refers most obviously to the auction house where Nick finds some paintings by his old friend Henry Deacon, a discovery which sparks many of the memories recorded in this book. But it may also refer to the marriage market represented by the old debutante ball system. If it refers only to the former, it would seem odd to name the whole book after a minor incident; or perhaps the idea is to reinforce the way a whole long series of disparate memories might be sparked by a chance encounter.
It's remarkable that by the time this novel was written, the world it describes had already fallen thoroughly into the realm of history and social anthropology, although only a few decades had passed. Part of the appeal of these early instalments of the series must always, from the day they were published, have been the window they opened onto a past that was already being forgotten.
Something I noticed while reading Powell's pre-Dance novels is that he's very LGBTI-friendly for a writer of his era. There's at least one gay character in many of his novels.
I laughed out loud at Nick's encounter in Sir Magnus Donners' dungeon. A scene worthy of Douglas Adams.
bookpossum's review against another edition
4.0
I am quite mesmerised by Anthony Powell's style now that I have got used to it. The long rolling sentences remind me in a way of the themes in Rachmaninov's symphonies, which roll on and on and sweep the listener with them. The following description of one of the characters gives a flavour of Powell's style:
"She dressed usually in tones of brown and green, colours that gave her for some reason, possibly because her hats almost always conveyed the impression of being peaked, an air of belonging to some dedicated order of female officials, connected possibly with public service in the woods and forests, and bearing a load of responsibility, the extent of which was difficult for a lay person - even impossible if a male - to appreciate, or wholly to understand."
I took a long time reading this book because of other things coming between me and it, not because of a lack of enjoyment. I have now embarked on the third volume.
"She dressed usually in tones of brown and green, colours that gave her for some reason, possibly because her hats almost always conveyed the impression of being peaked, an air of belonging to some dedicated order of female officials, connected possibly with public service in the woods and forests, and bearing a load of responsibility, the extent of which was difficult for a lay person - even impossible if a male - to appreciate, or wholly to understand."
I took a long time reading this book because of other things coming between me and it, not because of a lack of enjoyment. I have now embarked on the third volume.
onceandfuturedm's review against another edition
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
2.5
adamantium's review against another edition
4.0
I'm not saying this is the best part of the book, but here's a brief part near the end that stuck with me:
"She looked so despairing at the idea of Widmerpool possessing, as it were, an operational base in extension to the cottage from which he, and his mother, could already potentially molest Hinton, that I felt it my duty to explain with as little delay as possible that Widmerpool had recently taken a job at Donners-Brebner, and had merely come over that afternoon to see Sir Magnus on a matter of business."
Whether you find this formulation tiresome or clever--I definitely think the latter--is a good indicator of how you'll feel about the series. Slow-moving but always well-written, with plenty of little moments like the above.
"She looked so despairing at the idea of Widmerpool possessing, as it were, an operational base in extension to the cottage from which he, and his mother, could already potentially molest Hinton, that I felt it my duty to explain with as little delay as possible that Widmerpool had recently taken a job at Donners-Brebner, and had merely come over that afternoon to see Sir Magnus on a matter of business."
Whether you find this formulation tiresome or clever--I definitely think the latter--is a good indicator of how you'll feel about the series. Slow-moving but always well-written, with plenty of little moments like the above.
nocto's review against another edition
3.0
Second in the dodecology. It didn't make me rant as much as the first one, but it wasn't as interesting either. Since it was basically three, possibly more, parties, a wedding and a funeral, I was trying to amuse myself by figuring out which character was Hugh Grant. But I haven't come to a conclusion yet, I'm probably going to read the next one soon so it's certainly an angle to bear in mind. There were certainly more roles for Charlotte Coleman here too, which can only be a good thing. In this book women get to throw sugar shakers over men and have hushed abortions which is considerably more animation than they had in the first, though they are still made of cardboard and the abortion is only imagined to be a disaster for the male half of the couple. There might have been a hint of homosexuality, I identified this by two of the characters popping into three dimensions for about a page. I thought the narrator was going to find himself a wife for a minute but not yet. I'd say he's still too vapid for that yet but I don't feel like he's going to find any more substance in the series.
There are good lines here though and I did really like the closing paragraph where the narrator notices that "there are specific occasions when events begin to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last".
There are good lines here though and I did really like the closing paragraph where the narrator notices that "there are specific occasions when events begin to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last".