A Buyer's Market

2. -- A BUYER'S MARKETAnd so the Dance continues in its beginnings. The second period interval is still part of the dawn of times. The main contribution with this term is that the dancers begin to acquire shape. They also become much more numerous, and I now begin to fear a multitude, given how poor my memory for names is, when the do not have a face. Luckily I am accompanying my read with an audio version, which appropriately adds the musicality of the human voice to the dance. The brilliant re [...]

This is the second novel in the Dance to the Music of Time series, following on from A Question of Upbringing. It is set in 1928, when our narrator, Nick Jenkins, is twenty one or two. However, it begins with a flashback to Paris just after WWI, when Nick has a chance meeting with an artist, Mr Deacon, an acquaintance of his parents. This introduction serves the reader to understand the various relationships in Nick’s life, as he meets up with Mr Deacon again after a dinner party at the Walpol [...]

The second part of the twelve-step dance around time and memory from Anthony Powell picks up the story of his alter-ego, Nicholas Jenkins, a few years after he finishes school and moves to London, probably around 1925. I am grateful to the group read of the Dance for motivating me to keep to the schedule of one book per month, thus keeping things fresh in my mind and offering bonus material in the discussion pages. Being familiar with the style of presentation and with some of the characters hel [...]

"It is no good being a beauty alone on a desert island." -- Anthony Powell, A Buyer's Market "For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we, ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity."-- Anthony Powell, A Buyer's [...]

"A Buyer's Market" is the second book in Anthony Powell's twelve novel sequence "A Dance To The Music of Time" and it picks up the narrative in 1928, via a flashback to Paris where narrator Nick Jenkins introduces us to an artist called Mr Deacon. Nick is now in his early twenties and whilst more grown up, still uncertain of his place in the world. I assume this explains the book's title. Nick and his contemporaries are searching for money, jobs, sex, social status etc. and their search takes th [...]

"A Buyer's Market" takes the narrator, Nick Jenkins, to London in the late 1920s. Much of the novel is set at either upscale parties, or with a group of bohemians that revolve around the artist Mr Deacon.The title of the book suggests that the parties are a kind of marketplace. People attend the parties to meet marriage prospects and sexual partners. The parties are also an opportunity to make business contacts, the 1920s version of networking. It was important to climb the social ladder by ming [...]

From Wiki:A Buyer's Market is the second novel in Anthony Powell's twelve-novel series, A Dance to the Music of Time. Published in 1952, it continues the story of narrator Nick Jenkins with his introduction into society after boarding school and university.The book presents new characters, notably the painter Mr. Deacon and his dubious female acquaintance Gypsy Jones, as well as reappearances by Jenkins' school friends Peter Templer, Charles Stringham and Kenneth Widmerpool. The action takes pla [...]

I am quite mesmerised by Anthony Powell's style now that I have got used to it. The long rolling sentences remind me in a way of the themes in Rachmaninov's symphonies, which roll on and on and sweep the listener with them. The following description of one of the characters gives a flavour of Powell's style:"She dressed usually in tones of brown and green, colours that gave her for some reason, possibly because her hats almost always conveyed the impression of being peaked, an air of belonging t [...]

In book 2, Nick and his school friends are in their 20's, and have entered the real world of work and pleasure. The excellent writing continues, with intimations of complications ahead.

In this, the second novel in Powell’s twelve-volume series, A Dance to the Music of Time (and the books absolutely must be read sequentially!), new personages are introduced: Mr. Deacon, Barnby, Barbara Goring, the Walpole-Wilsons; and Widmerpool reappears. The events in the book occur four or five years following those in the previous book, A Question of Upbringing, during which interval Nick has not seen Charles Stringham. In chapter after chapter, indeed in novel after novel, characters and [...]

It's interesting to see Nick Jenkins and the other young men from A Question of Upbringing in their 20s in the 20s. Some fascinating new characters emerge. Lots of art and social commentary. But mostly the deliciously wonderful writing that just rolls over the reader in a salty surf of words. :)

A BUYER'S MARKET, the second volume of Anthony Powell's 12-volume sequence "A Dance to the Music of Times" is a considerably more ambitious work than the first. While A QUESTION OF UPBRINGING was an enjoyable if something lightweight look back at narrator Nicholas Jenkins' days at school and university, now we see him entering the ballrooms of high society while also discovering the London demimonde of the late 1920s. The novel is impressive in form also. Nearly the entire first half of the nove [...]

Nothing in the first novel of ADMT really prepares you for this. There you get short introductions to characters, traditional plot movements, transparent prose and above all variety. With A Buyer's Market we're suddenly in the realm of Proust volume three, which is pretty much a party described over hundreds of pages. Say what you will about Powell. This is shorter than Le Côté de Guermantes. I wonder if Marias, anglophile that he is, took as much from Powell as from Proust to write Your Face [...]

I found this more difficult than Book 1 and it's taken me several weeks to finish. I think I've had, at least, two problems. First, I've had great difficulty caring about Powell's characters. I don't need to like them. After all, sometimes the most compelling characters are unlikeable. But so far, I feel quite indifferent to them. (And there are dozens!) Their dialogue is opaque, their motivations murky and their stories meaningless to me. And perhaps that's because what I'm experiencing is cult [...]

Each of the novels of ADTTMOT makes a claim - with varying degrees of conviction - to stand alone, with characters and plots resolved within a single volume. The intricate, lopsided, A Buyer's Market follows two such strands. First, the life of Edgar Deacon, a bad painter and family friend of narrator Nick Jenkins' whose reappearance helps put in motion his escape from the world of balls and debutantes the book opens in. Second, Nick's troubles with women, an overlapping series of largely passiv [...]

Avec une acuité, un sens de la précision et de la nuance presque obsessif, qui s'appuie sur moult appositions et circonstants, et qui exige du lecteur une attention de tous les instants, M. Powell, dans la foulée du premier volet de cette longue suite romanesque, propose une forme expressive dont la complexité n'a peut-être d'autre but que d'épouser la complexité des relations humaines dans un milieu fermé comme celui qu'il décrit. Complexité sur l'axe synchronique, mais surtout, aussi [...]

A logical continuation on from the first book, that sees Jenkins and friends flirt with society life and become rather self reflective because of it. While I'm not quite invested in the characters yet (the story needs come conflict) they are growing on me, but I think the plot needs to expand somewhat before their lives have some context.It is a better book that the first though: Powell's prose remains a key attraction and I found London society life more interesting that the school days of the [...]

It is considered an axiom that a writer should have an exciting beginning to a novel to draw readers in and encourage them to continue. Anthony Powell starts with a discourse about a minor, unfashionable artist Nick's parents knew and he met a few times before mentioning Barbara Goring, Nick's first and possibly only serious love. We also know, quite early in the book, that Nick and Barbara's romance does not prosper to a happy conclusion because later he is no longer invited to dine with her un [...]

Second time round - still wonderful. Nick, Widmerpool, Stringham, Mr Deacon and the gang go round the merry go round of time again in a buyers market: for love, power and art. But don’t blink - the door is open for a moment and then shuts again - with some players off the Field and the stakes higher. Powell has been called the British Proust - and the subject is the passing of time and the life lived within. And Powell is so hilarious and entertaining - with set pieces of four parties in the 1 [...]

Bohemians and freeloaders, socialites and beautiful people are all in a hurry to partake in the agitated stirrings at the bottom of high society…“Although these relatively exotic embellishments to the scene occurred within a framework on the whole commonplace enough, the shifting groups of the party created, as a spectacle, illusion of moving within the actual confines of a picture or tapestry, into the depths of which the personality of each new arrival had to be automatically amalgamated.� [...]

Still waiting for the plot to form, but that prose! How can someone weave such deliciously intricate sentences is beyond me.

Fascinating, extraordinary, sublime, lyrical and, well, more of the same.I recently discovered and (somewhat skeptically) embarked upon Powell's epic series, A Dance to the Music of Time, and - frankly, not really knowing what I was getting into - was quite taken with the first installment. For better or worse, the second installment - this "book" - was entirely consistent a seamless progression through the narrator/protagonist's life (and maturation? discovery? finding his way? discerning his [...]

Reading #57. Perhaps any other comment is superfluous.

Book two of Antony Powell's cycle of twelve novels sees Nicholas Jenkins move into early adulthood. Early friendships wither while once unexpected ones develop. Characters disappear and then return later to the dance of time. The once easily-dismissed, Widmerpool sees his star start to rise through sheer tenacity and determination to 'get on' rather than any great talent and despite a far from appealing personality. The mysterious industrialist and politician, Sir Magnus Donners also appears sur [...]

This is a strange book: very readable, and yet very little seems to happen. It's almost as it's setting up a plot that is barely begun when the book rather abruptly ends. It's a while since I read the first book in the series, which was a bit of a disadvantage, as you keep having to try and refer back to the first book, where possible, to figure out who so and so is; plainly it's someone we should remember from the first episode. Anyway, those two minor criticisms aside, it's an intriguing narra [...]

This for me was rather slow going - I got quickly tired of the parties, of Sillery, of some of the hyperboles, and the main character's apparent detachment from most that is going on around him: he is the narrator who does not seem to add much to an omniscient narrator's voice. I am glad I got this as part of the "movement" set of three volumes, as I might have otherwise let the series go.

Binge ReadingI didn't know how I was going to read this series. Would I read another book in between each instalment? Perhaps read two in a row, then something else? Three? Halfway through A Question of Upbringing the 'every second book' option was in front -- my attention wavered a little during the French scenes. But by the end of that volume, I knew I had to pick up the next one straight away. And halfway through A Buyer's Market I knew I'd read the whole series as though it was one huge nove [...]

The second volume of Anthony Powell's great roman fleuve is a densely wrought mesh of intense human relationships largely played out at a sequence of parties in the fashionable London society of the late twenties. Characters from the first book pass through the pages of the second and a vast range of new ones make their first appearance; it can be tricky trying to keep up with who is who and how they are related to each other. Powell's writing is extraordinary: highly sophisticated, intense and [...]

The second novel in Dance to the Music of Time is an entry into the world. Marriages are made , careers pursued friendships revived or forgotten. Nick is gradually becoming himself. There's something of Christopher Isherwood here as well as the obvious Proust influence.

I liked this one considerably more than volume 1.