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A Question of Upbringing / A Buyer's Market / The Acceptance World (A Dance to the Music of Time, Bks 1-3)
A Question of Upbringing / A Buyer's Market / The Acceptance World - A Dance to the Music of Time, Bks 1-3 Author:Anthony Powell This wry and sparkling portrait of English society which Time hailed as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times" has received extraordinary critical acclaim as well as a unique popularity - in fact, addiction - on both sides of the Atlantic. — A Question of Upbringing takes place just afte... more »r the First World War and tells of the emergence from adolescence of four boys who first meet at Eton. There is Jenkins, the narrator; Widmerpool who early distinguishes himself by wearing the wrong kind of overcoat; Stringham, already prepared to live a life of recklessness; and Templer whose "unfortunate incident" sets ajar a mysterious door and hints at a more complex life to come. After a brief interlude in France the scene shifts to Oxford and the great world of London. 230 pages
A Buyer's Market is a portrait of Jenkin's widening circle of eccentric friends and acquaintances growing up in the mid-Twenties. Widmerpool still flounders toward the tape in races never won and continues to rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of his own humiliations. A party in London, a busy country weekend, a funeral and a wedding are rendered with satiric wit, while the oft-remembered incident of Widmerpool's inundation with sugar forms a hilarious cornerstone for the book. 274 pages
The Acceptance World provides an even larger gallery of absorbing, slightly seedy, and never quite admirable characters ont the fringes - or in the middle - of every madness of a world approaching the great Depression. By perception as well as irony, Anthony Powell insinuates the reader into their love affairs, house parties, literary rivalries and "Old Boy" dinners. 214 pages
Throughout, Anthony Powell illuminates in a superbly comic light that lost London: the gay, sometimes melancholy-streaked world spanning the years between two wars. The reader who begins this fascinating and immensely entertaining excursion into English society and its bohemia will find himself captivated by the rhythmic beat of A Dance to the Music of Time.« less