Books Do furnish A Room by Anthony Powell is the fabulous tenth volume of the chef d’oeuvre A Dance To The Music, which is included on some (actually, it must be all) of the most relevant lists: The Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, it is ranked 342nd on The Greatest Books of All Time, and more importantly for this corner, it is one of my Top 50 Favorites – you find thousands of reviews of magnum opera from the aforementioned and other lists on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel, where you can check my macaws

 

Books Do furnish A Room by Anthony Powell is the fabulous tenth volume of the chef d’oeuvre A Dance To The Music, which is included on some (actually, it must be all) of the most relevant lists: The Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, it is ranked 342nd on The Greatest Books of All Time, and more importantly for this corner, it is one of my Top 50 Favorites – you find thousands of reviews of magnum opera from the aforementioned and other lists on my blog  https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel, where you can check my macaws

 

10 out of 10


 

I have been exhilarated by A Dance To The Music of Time https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-military-philosophers-by-anthony.html so Books Do Furnish A Room should not have been a surprise, and yet, it was fantastic beyond belief, you have everything inside

 

Widmerpool is, as usual, up to no good, though in this narrative he does get some well derived punishment – spoiler alert, I will speak of some things that happen towards the end here – when his wife, Pamela, runs away with X Trapnel, nevertheless, her ‘escapism’ had been known, so what was unexpected was the man involved this time

As mentioned, this book is full of delights: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, naturalism are analyzed, one of the heroes of Fyodor Dostoevsky is ‘exposed, Prince Myshkin aka The Idiot https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-idiot-by-fyodor-dostoyevsky.html is said to have been impotent

 

Kenneth Widmerpool tried to have sex with his spouse a couple of times, and then gave up, Trapnel tells us – I mean, the readers get this through Nick Jenkins, the main character and narrator – that Pamela Widmerpool wants to have sex all the time, but then when that happens, she turns rigid, her demeanor is altogether peculiar

Her comportment is awkward even at the funeral, where the presence of that bizarre group is quite burlesque – humor is a central element here, and throughout the whole outstanding A Dance to The Music of Time, even the interment and the elopement of Pamela are wrapped in mirth, Trapnel is amusing…

 

Albeit he is also tragic, the writer is based on Julian Maclaren Ross https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/04/of-love-and-hunger-by-julian-maclaren.html his magnum opus Of Love and Hunger is ‘an absolute favorite of mine’ I do not know what the discovery of his ‘real persona’ will do to me

The plan is to read the masterpieces that mesmerized me a second, third time, Insha’ Allah, so will I be sensitive to the shenanigans of Trapnel aka Maclaren Ross, presented in A Dance…actually, he was quite endearing, if also outré – and to think of what happens to him and his manuscript, never mind Love and Hunger…

 

Paul Johnson has written a fantastic book in which he looks at Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Henrik Ibsen, Jean Jacques Rousseau and others https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/01/intellectuals-by-paul-johnson.html if great minds, they could be terrible human beings, Rousseau has abandoned his children (nine of them I wonder) at the door of the orphanage

 

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