Author of the Day: Anthony Powell

English author Anthony Powell (pronounced like "toll" not "towel") was born in 1905. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford where he met several other young writers, including Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Prior to World War II he worked in publishing and as a film-script writer, before becoming a full-time novelist and literary critic.

Powell is best known for his twelve-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, most commonly available in a four-volume set with three novels in each. Dance is at the top of my "Top 10" favorite books list and what always name as my "desert island" book, although that may be cheating, since it is really 12 books.

Powell wrote a number of other novels and a biography of the seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey. He was also a prolific literary critic and book reviewer for a number of periodicals including the Daily Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement, Punch and the Spectator. He published four volumes of memoirs, three volumes of diaries, and two volumes of his selected literary criticism.

Powell was married to the author Lady Violet Pakenham. He died in 2000 at his home in Somerset.

His books are listed below in order of publication. Those I have read, including all of Dance, are in red. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue. I hope to read them all some day, although several are hard to find.

Afternoon Men

Venusberg (reviewed here)

From a View to a Death

Agents and Patients
What's Become of Waring

John Aubrey and His Friends

A Question of Upbringing (Dance to the Music of Time, Vol. 1)

A Buyer's Market (Dance, Vol. 2)

The Acceptance World (Dance, Vol. 3)

At Lady Molly's (Dance, Vol. 4)

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (Dance, Vol. 5)

The Kindly Ones (Dance, Vol. 6)

John Aubrey and His Friends a New and Revised Edition

The Valley of Bones (Dance, Vol. 7)

The Soldier's Art (Dance, Vol. 8)

The Military Philosophers (Dance, Vol. 9)

Books Do Furnish a Room (Dance, Vol. 10)

Two Plays By Anthony Powell: The Garden God & The Rest I'll Whistle

Temporary Kings (Dance, Vol. 11)

Hearing Secret Harmonies (Dance, Vol. 12)

To Keep the Ball Rolling: Infants of the Spring (Memoirs, Vol. 1)

To Keep the Ball Rolling: Messengers of Day (Memoirs, Vol. 2)

To Keep the Ball Rolling: Faces In My Time (Memoirs, Vol. 3)

To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Strangers All Are Gone (Memoirs, Vol. 4)

O, How the Wheel Becomes It!

The Fisher King

Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers

Under Review: Further Writings on Writers, 1946-1990

Journals, 1982-1986

Journals, 1987-1989

Journals 1990-1992

Writer's Notebook

OTHERS READING POWELL'S BOOKS

Books Do Furnish a Room (where you will find many Powell posts)

(If you would like your Powell-related blog posts listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

NOTES

Last updated December 29, 2018.

Review of the Day: The Fixer

Based on a true story, The Fixer is the story of a Russian Jew who, in the early 1900s, is unjustly accused of murdering a Christian boy. Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Yakov Bok has a hard luck life as a handyman, or fixer, in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Although political reforms following the 1905 revolution gave Jews new freedoms and political clout, life in the Pale had not improved. After his childless wife abandons him for a goy, Yakov leaves the shtetl for Kiev, where he ends up working in, and living above, a Christian-owned brick factory. With an assumed name, no papers to allow him to live in that part of the city, and anti-Jewish sentiments on the rise, Yakov is headed for trouble.

When the mutilated body of a neighborhood boy is found stuffed in a cave, the evidence – circumstantial and fabricated – mounts against Yakov. He is arrested and left to rot in prison while the sham investigation drags on for years as anti-Semitic authorities try to build a case of ritual murder. With no indictment, no lawyer, and no idea of what is to come, Yakov’s situation is a downward spiral of gloom. Yakov is motivated by his dwindling hope of exoneration, only meagerly spurred on by a few rare contacts with the outside and tidbits of news about his case. Although claiming to be non-religious and non-political, Yakov worries that his case will spark violent retribution or even a new pogrom against the Jews.

Malamud incorporates Yakov’s tragedy into the larger picture by having characters discuss Russia’s anti-Semitic history and Tsarist politics. It is this contextual detail that raises Yakov’s story above that of one individual’s tribulations and makes it a morality tale about freedom and responsibility in the face of evil and suffering. One of the characters explains Malmud’s thesis:

I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. Once often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempts to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small thing to offer – he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.

Or, as Yakov put it more succinctly as he was finally being taken to his trial, “[T]here’s no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew.”

Malamud is an incredible writer. Even though this story is horribly grim, he grabs the reader and does not let go. The Fixer is a book that everyone should read and, once read, ponder.

NOTES

This book was my "double dipper" choice for the Battle of the Prizes Challenge. i

OTHER REVIEWS

Hotch Pot Cafe
Book Psmith

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Opening Sentence of the Day: Forbidden Bread

. "'Let's go to the top.'" -- Forbidden Bread by Erica Johnson Debeljak. I just finished reading Malamud's The Fixer this morning, so if there was ever a day to take my own advice and read something funny, today would be the day to start. But I am still nagged by guilt over my stack of LibraryThing Early Reviewer books, so I am going with "a touching and intelligent memoir" about a New York woman who marries a Slovenian poet and follows him back to his homeland. Something tells me that this is not going to be the Balkan version of A Year in Provence, so I am not expecting much humor. But it definitely looks interesting. And if post-communist Yugoslav wars of succession get to be too much, I can always take a break and slip in a P.G. Wodehouse or a Nick Hornby book. .

BTT: Recent Funny

The Booking Through Thursday theme this week is "Recent Funny," which asks the question, "What’s the funniest book you’ve read recently?" This is a no-brainer for me, since I just laughed my way through High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. For an idea of why I found the book so funny, please read my review. But it is a good question because I realize that I usually turn to "serious" books. I should remember to seek out funny books more often.

List: National Book Award

The National Book Foundation awards annual prizes to American authors in the following categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature.

I am working on the Fiction winners. Those I have finished are in red; those sitting on my TBR shelf are in blue. I will get to them all eventually.

2018 The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

2017 Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

2016 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

2015 Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson

2014 Redeployment by Phil Klay

2013 The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

2012 The Round House by Louise Erdrich

2011 Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

2010 Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (reviewed here)

2009 Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (reviewed here)

2008 Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

2007 Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

2006 The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

2005 Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

2004 The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck

2003 The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

2002 Three Junes by Julia Glass

2001 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

2000 In America by Susan Sontag

1999 Waiting by Ha Jin

1998 Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

1997 Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (reviewed here)

1996 Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett

1995 Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth

1994 A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis

1993 The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx

1992 All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (reviewed here)

1991 Mating by Norman Rush

1990 Middle Passage by Charles Johnson (reviewed here)

1989 Spartina by John Casey

1988 Paris Trout by Pete Dexter

1987 Paco's Story by Larry Heinemann

1986 World's Fair by E.L. Doctorow

1985 White Noise by Don Delillo

1984 Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist

1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker

1982 Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

1981 Plains Song by Wright Morris

1980 Sophie's Choice by William Styron (reviewed here)

1979 Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien

1978 Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle

1977 The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner (reviewed here)

1976 JR by William Gaddis

1975 The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams (reviewed here)

1975 Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

1974 Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

1974 A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer

1973 Augustus by John Williams

1973 Chimera by John Barth

1972 The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

1971 Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow (reviewed here)

1970 Them by Joyce Carol Oates

1969 Steps by Jerzy Kosinski

1968 The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder

1967 The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (reviewed here)

1966 The Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter

1965 Herzog by Saul Bellow

1964 The Centaur by John Updike (reviewed here)

1963 Morte d'Urban by J.F. Powers

1962 The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

1961 The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter

1960 Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth (reviewed here)

1959 The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud

1958 Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

1957 The Field of Vision by Wright Morris

1956 Ten North Frederick by John O'Hara

1955 A Fable by William Faulkner

1954 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (reviewed here)

1953 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

1952 From Here to Eternity by James Jones

1951 The Collected Stories by William Faulkner

1950 The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren (reviewed here)

NOTE

Last updated on March 27, 2019.

OTHERS READING THESE BOOKS

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