Category: proust

A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME by Anthony Powell


Now this is a book I really wanted to like. Sometimes you come across a book in a perfect kind of way, and with the weird symmetry that life can sometimes have, it becomes the perfect book for you right then. I found this book randomly in a Goodwill in LA. I had just had my mind boggled by what books cost in a real bookshop (a place I never go): US$16! So the price was right: US$1.99. Also, it was the only thing worth reading in the whole place. I was giving up, because all the rest was sad 80s chick lit, or self help (Dream Yourself Thin, etc), when suddenly I found “the major achievement in post-war English fiction” (Guardian); “one of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War” (New Yorker) and “more realistic than A La Recherche du Temps Perdu” (Evelyn Waugh). And I’d never heard of it! The Waugh really sold me. As we know, I love me some Proust in a serious, and seriously embarrasing, way. I love big fat novels that you can live in for months, and I love dry old English lit.

And it certainly is dry. Very dry. It’s told in the first person, by one Nick Jenkins, beginning in his last few years at public school, sometime in the 1930s. The work is made up of 12 novels, and the three I have in this volume are A QUESTION OF UPBRINGING, A BUYER’S MARKET, and THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD. The first covers his school years, the next his first years out of school, and I can’t tell you about the third one because I have given up on it.

I really want to like it, but I just can’t. There are some interesting elements. It’s quite involving to see how the First World War affected those just slightly too young to fight in it, and to see what daily life was like in that period. Occasionally, the author makes observations about human life and behaviour that are insightful and compelling. And yet, somehow, I just can’t go on. For one thing, we know virtually nothing about the inner life of the first person narrator. I’ve never come across anything like that, and it’s just bizarre. It gives the whole novel a kind of empty, unengaging feel. What we mostly learn about are his acquaintances (not even really his best friends) who he runs into an improbable number of times in his life. We learn a lot about people he doesn’t have much strong feeling for and doesn’t care about. Apparently, this is a major theme of the book: how people and issues recur across a lifetime, making patterns, and over the course of the remaining nine books, which will take us to the 1970s and his old age, it will all become clear, and presumably engaging. Sorry Mr Powell, I just can’t make it.

Also, isn’t the cover dire?

Book: WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED Contd

So yes, basically, I find it encouraging that David Sedaris wasted that much of his life and still seems to have got somewhere. Not that I’m some big druggie, but I’ve certainly wasted my fair share of time here and there.

I find Sedaris’ use of language strangely brilliant. I’ll laugh out loud at a sentence, and then spend ages trying to understand what about that turn of phrase made it so funny. It’s less about the comedy of incident,and more about the comedy of language, which is SO DIFFICULT. So well done that man.

He does on occasion try, especially at the ends of his stories, to give us a kind of literary thrill, or a sense that he’s been talking about something larger than we at first thought. This is only sometimes successful.

Disclaimer: Okay, I skipped some stories this time round. I really didn’t feel I could handle the death ones. Maybe when I know you better I’ll tell you why.

Book: WHEN YOU ARE IN ENGULFED IN FLAMES by David Sedaris


Now, this is another kind of unusual book for me, because:

a)it was left at my house randomly, I didn’t choose it
b)for some reason, it is in large print. Which is odd, as the person who left it at my house has normal eyesight
c)this is a re-reading. And I almost never re-read

I re-read it because I hadn’t got to the Library and I was feeling a bit blah and I happened to see it and it looked cheering. It looks more sort of mangled, now, as it fell into the bath several times during this reading. Oh dear.

WHEN YOU ARE IN ENGULFED IN FLAMES is a series of comic short stories. The longest one is very long, and is about his attempt to give up smoking by moving to Tokoyo. David Sedaris actually really reminds me of Proust. Now, don’t be hating, and thinking I’m pretentious. I totally get to say that because a) it’s true and b) I’ve actually read IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, which, let’s face it all you Tolstoy loving bunch of bitches, is probably the best novel ever written. And I’m just saying ‘probably’ so as not to appear too dogmatic.

But please, let’s not even deny it’s the best novel of the twentieth century, because that’s just blatantly true, whether you like it or not (all you James Joyce loving bitches out there).

What I find similar in them is the kind of unassuming honesty they possess. It’s a book that makes you feel like you are less alone in the world; that other people are experiencing the day-to-day as you are. JANE EYRE is a fabulous novel, but it doesn’t deal at all with 95% percent of our lives – the pedestrian part.

The character that is David Sedaris in these stories is sort of sweetly imperfect. It’s interesting also that he seems to have blown large sections of his life on being kind of drugged up. I sometimes feel that . . . oh no, go to go. More on this tomorrow.