There are few writers about whom opinions diverge so widely as Anthony Powell, whose
Dance to the Music of Time sequence is one of the most ambitious literary constructions in the English language. In
Different Speeds, Same Furies, Perry Anderson measures Powell’s achievement against Marcel Proust’s celebrated
In Search of Lost Time.
The literature on
Dance is a drop in the ocean compared to that on Proust. Yet in construction of plot and depiction of character, Anderson ranks Powell above him. How much do particular advantages of this kind matter, and why is Powell an odd man out in English letters? At once so similar and dissimilar, the intricate retrospectives of the two novelists on bohemia and Society, upbringing and mortality, relationships and personality, invite interrelated judgements.
The closing chapters of
Different Speeds, Same Furies reach beyond their handlings of time to chart the historical novel from
Waverley to
Underworld, and the breakthrough in epistolatory fiction of Montesquieu’s
Persian Letters, held together by what its author described as ‘a secret chain which remains, as it were, invisible’.
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Perry Anderson is the author of, among other books, Spectrum, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Considerations on Western Marxism, English Questions, The Origins of Postmodernity, and The New Old World. He teaches history at UCLA and is on the editorial board of New Left Review.
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