Hearing Secret Harmonies Book 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time edition by Anthony Powell Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : Hearing Secret Harmonies Book 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time edition by Anthony Powell Literature Fiction eBooks 
Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist they’re available only as e-books.
In the final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, Nick and his contemporaries have begun to settle into the quieter stages of later life—even as the rise of the counterculture signals that a new generation is pushing its way to the front. The darkly fascinating young Scorpio Murtlock unexpectedly draws Widmerpool into his orbit, calling to mind occult and cultish doings from earlier decades; close friends leave the stage, never to be replaced in this life; and, drawing all the long, tangled strands together, Anthony Powell sounds an unforgettable requiem for an age.
"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--Chicago Tribune
"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times
"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven, New Yorker
“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”--Kingsley Amis
Hearing Secret Harmonies Book 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time edition by Anthony Powell Literature Fiction eBooks
Nick’s many acquaintances are dying and retiring. Their grandchildren are getting married. It’s the late 20th century and this dance is coming to an end.My interpretation is that Powell is comparing the 1960s and 1970s to the Edwardian era. Both eras found some of the most promising young Britons looking for new Messiahs in occult or radical movements. These occult leaders have all the titanic strengths of politicians and business tycoons, but with greater spiritual and social gifts. The check against such scary power is that it’s very hard to keep modern Westerners in a cult. This book provides examples of young people in the late 20th century being less comfortable in cults than the Edwardians. Could it be the decline in self-discipline?
2.7 stars
Series review
I don’t understand why twelve volumes and hundreds of characters were necessary. Furthermore, there’s hardly any plot worth remembering in most of the volumes. And because he seems to want to jam in as much as possible, Powell often resorts to gossip to move things along. A much better version of this series could be squeezed into four strong volumes, focusing on a dozen characters.
I don’t know. Maybe the twelve volumes, meandering events and hundreds of characters were necessary to convey the sense of a large intertwined social network making their way through slow-moving time.
But I won’t deny that I enjoyed every volume, some more than others. For example, THE KINDLY ONES is a classic that stands on its own. That’s the one to read if you read only one volume in the series. If you like that one and would like to try another, try TEMPORARY KINGS. It’s the most explosive book in the series.
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Hearing Secret Harmonies Book 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time edition by Anthony Powell Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
I'm very happy to have discovered this series, it is wonderful. I enjoyed it to the very end. It recounts the memories of a man who lived during the twentieth century and fought in WWII. But it is really about his large circle of acquaintances and the travails of their lives as he sees them. The books are slowly paced with very long, intricate sentences, a treat for the patient reader.
Seems an improbable ending to a 12 book series
this is the final book of the series. no car crashes or gun fights. such a relief to spend a little time considering real life and how we get through it. a lovely experience rereading this.
It took me two years to read all 12 volumes... and it was worth it. Masterful piece of literature in the style of Proust.
I read the first eleven of Anthony Powell's twelve-volume sequence of novels 'A Dance to the Music of Time', and was engrossed. Deeply, hugely impressed and engrossed. And then found I'd lost my copy of the twelfth one, 'Hearing Secret Harmonies'. I ordered a copy on , from the UK to South Africa, and it duly arrived some three weeks later. Good clean second-hand copy (looks like new).
'Hearing Secret Harmonies' is a wonderful conclusion to this English mixture of Balzac and Proust. With a thematic focus on Jacobean drama and occultism, ageing, friendships and betrayals, death, the youth and sexual liberation, the early 1970s (the series begins in circa 1920). I felt after finishing it that I was forlorn, lost, bewildered, forced reluctantly to return to my diurnal world.
I have now ordered Hilary Spurling's companion to Powell's sequence.
As a new novelist myself ('Zebra Crossings, tales from the Shaman's Record' and 'The Zombie and the Moon, more tales from the Shaman's Record' - Jacana Media, Johannesburg and Cape Town, 2008, 2011) I felt that reading Powell taught me a lot about the reflective aspects of writing. Measured prose, slow incremental accumulation of an entire world, informed but unpretentious drawing on a whole wide range of allusions to music, fine art, and literature - and a haunting sense of time passing, memory, change, through two world wars and after. Powell's use A Question of Upbringing Book 1 of A Dance to the Music of Timeof an anecdotal first-person narrator's voice is marvellously done.
This lesser known (today) 12 book saga will appeal to fans of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. There are hundreds of characters who are interrelated in some manner to the others and who appear and reappear throughout, so be sure to buy the companion guide Hillary Spurling's Invitation to the Dance which has an index to them all. It is a great social profile of upper middle class life in Great Britain from the twenties to the early seventies with focus on the music, art and literature scene. If it is any way near to reality the mores of this strata of society during that era are an eye opener. Students of the book agree that most characters are based on real persons and that Powell himself is the model for the narrator Nicholas Jenkins. The other main characer who appears in all twelve books is Kenneth Winderpool, a masterful creation of a very odd pompous, self-centerd, ambitious ass who rises from obscurity to the House of Lords despite the fact that everyone who knows or has any contact with him loathes him. I read it twice.
I read all 12 books, and agree with reviewers who praised the series as a window into upper-middle class lives in England during the first half of the 20th century. The writing is enjoyable, but there is not much overt action. Powell’s music of time is a slow waltz, during which lots is happening, but you have to look carefully to see it in his low-key, polite manner of playing. The action is all in the stories he tells about other men he meets in the course of his life; you don’t get much about the narrator himself. The women appear only as they affect the male characters who are the subjects of the book. It’s a leisurely read about a man’s world.
Nick’s many acquaintances are dying and retiring. Their grandchildren are getting married. It’s the late 20th century and this dance is coming to an end.
My interpretation is that Powell is comparing the 1960s and 1970s to the Edwardian era. Both eras found some of the most promising young Britons looking for new Messiahs in occult or radical movements. These occult leaders have all the titanic strengths of politicians and business tycoons, but with greater spiritual and social gifts. The check against such scary power is that it’s very hard to keep modern Westerners in a cult. This book provides examples of young people in the late 20th century being less comfortable in cults than the Edwardians. Could it be the decline in self-discipline?
2.7 stars
Series review
I don’t understand why twelve volumes and hundreds of characters were necessary. Furthermore, there’s hardly any plot worth remembering in most of the volumes. And because he seems to want to jam in as much as possible, Powell often resorts to gossip to move things along. A much better version of this series could be squeezed into four strong volumes, focusing on a dozen characters.
I don’t know. Maybe the twelve volumes, meandering events and hundreds of characters were necessary to convey the sense of a large intertwined social network making their way through slow-moving time.
But I won’t deny that I enjoyed every volume, some more than others. For example, THE KINDLY ONES is a classic that stands on its own. That’s the one to read if you read only one volume in the series. If you like that one and would like to try another, try TEMPORARY KINGS. It’s the most explosive book in the series.
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