My summer’s reading included the twelve parts of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which takes its narrator from his school days in the 1920s, through his college years, marriage and early career, through his service in WWII, and to his literary success in the postwar years up to the late 60s. Powell is not much of a stylist (Even James Hall, who recognized how important an author Powell was going to be when only half of A Dance had been published, admits, “When I first read Powell, I thought a successful novel could not be written in sentences like these.”), but his novel claims interest because of his huge cast of characters, the way they keep entering and leaving the immediate life of the narrator (this is the dance of the title), and the way they all contribute to his ever-evolving view of the world.
When I retired, I found myself able—and eager—to devote the time to some longer works that they deserved. During the first year I spent several enjoyable months with Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, an experience I wrote about in the Harvard Review (“A Retiree Reads Proust and Montaigne,” No 23, 2008). There’s nothing quite like the experience of living with an author over the course of a long novel, and it has the advantage of putting off that question about what to read next, which I will talk about in a future entry.
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