tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6959297.post4169428972785676054..comments2024-03-21T07:37:30.475-04:00Comments on Light reading: Caviar, champagne, beardsJenny Davidsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02295436498255927522noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6959297.post-67918178811804704102010-12-12T08:07:07.304-05:002010-12-12T08:07:07.304-05:00What's funny here is that you've identifie...What's funny here is that you've identified one of the very qualities that makes Powell my favorite author. I love the reticent, diffident, circumspect quality of his narration. I appreciate that Powell's narrator is perpetually trying to refine his observations, like he's ever-honing his perceptions.<br /><br />I think of it as being sort of like the approach of an extroverted Henry James: the preference not to make straightforward, declarative pronouncements here is rooted, not in uncertainty about the self and its many layers but in uncertainty about how that self relates to the world; not in the realization that there are endless shades of emotion that can be described, but that there are nearly endless minute variations in social relationships that are worth attending to.<br /><br />It results in a finicky, self-conscious narration at times, and I can certainly understand why that's not to every taste, but oh, I find it completely appealing, as if this narrator is playing completely straight with me, never trying to pretend that he knows more than he actually does. In a lot of ways, it's that tone more than anything else that keeps me coming back to <i>Dance</i>, and that makes me feel at home the moment I open a volume.<br /><br />{As for the more technical problem of the temporal location of the voice: I think it's reasonably safe to always think of it as a voice from later, working through the thoughts and feelings remembered from that time. In the case of the Uncle Giles passage you quoted, to me the disjunction between the thoughts of a child and adult perspective is intentional, designed for humor--and, to my mind, it works: I read that and laugh even as I do recognize some qualities of thought remembered from childhood.)<br /><br />I hope you are able to keep going with it--the first book, because it's simultaneously introducing Powell's style and all these relationships that, by the later books, will be layered with memory and meaning, is definitely the toughest to immediately sink into.Levi Stahlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11094919454842047688noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6959297.post-41589123414492923352010-12-12T05:33:05.449-05:002010-12-12T05:33:05.449-05:00Most thoughts are banal and commonplace until expr...Most thoughts are banal and commonplace <i>until</i> expressed in a unique idiom. At least to me, that's the whole <i>raison d'ĂȘtre</i> of writing.Leehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13770069472552779217noreply@blogger.com