University of Chicago Press A Dance to the Music Time: Second Movement

Beautiful cover, robustly bound.

oh I wish it would go on forever.

Describes the intellectual atmosphere in the UK in the 1920s. The upper classes studied art in Oxbridge, socialized talking about art, and if they bothered to work at all, they produced art, they published art books, or they pretended to work as art critics. Did they ever do any real work ? Their tedium vitae led them into dysfunctional sexual relationships or into alcoholism. Those, who actually had to work, because they did not have a family fund, were either tragic failures, leading precarious lives ( Uncle Giles Jenkins ) or mindless, autistic bores like Widmerpool. I have got a horrible suspicion, that this 1920's society is about to return to Western Europe, due to income concentrations like in the 1920's.

Lively evocation of a world gone by. I'm no very convinced Powell-ite but much to admire even so, and to enjoy as an ample comedy of manners -- no broad comedy, or not often, but shrewd in its observations of a world the author knows so verywell. It will be the next novel(s) in the series where he achieves something more.

この巻では、主人公の恋愛の話が中心である。その書き方はとても美しく、しかしコミカルだ。そして、優雅である。著者とイートン校で同級生だったイーヴリン・ウォーの作品と似ている。ウォーも昔原書でよく読んだが、とても優雅でコミカルである。やはり文学書は原書で読まねば駄目である。