A Dance to the Music of Time
» Reading
It is a long deferred pleasure. I’m rereading Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time: ten novels following the lives of a group of Brits from the early 20th century to the 1970s.
Nicholas Jenkins, the Narrator, is a detached appraiser of himself and the lives of those whose lives intersect his own over the decades.
In rereading the Dance I have the same feelings as I did on my first pass through a couple of decades ago.
This most disinterested of works feels deeply personal. Jenkins cool but not unsympathetic responses are in harmony with my own inner life. Variously engaged as an amused, bemused, sometimes annoyed spectator.
Not that Powell and I had anything in common. But it with a continuous frisson of surprise that I find myself feeling so much empathy with a disinterested witness of others’ lives.