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    O, How the Wheel Becomes It!: A Novel
    Unavailable
    O, How the Wheel Becomes It!: A Novel
    Unavailable
    O, How the Wheel Becomes It!: A Novel
    Ebook138 pages2 hours

    O, How the Wheel Becomes It!: A Novel

    By Anthony Powell

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The first novel Anthony Powell published following the completion of his epic A Dance to the Music of Time, O, How the Wheel Becomes It! fulfills perhaps every author’s fantasy as it skewers a conceited, lazy, and dishonest critic. A writer who avoids serving in World War II and veers in and out of marriage, G. F. H. Shadbold ultimately falls victim to the title’s spinning—and righteous—emblem of chance. Sophisticated and a bit cruel, Wheel’s tale of posthumous vengeance is, nonetheless, irresistible.

    Written at the peak of the late British master’s extraordinary literary career, this novel offers profound insight into the mind of a great artist whose unequaled style, ear for dialogue, and eye for irony will delight devotees and new readers alike.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateOct 30, 2015
    ISBN9780226132822
    Unavailable
    O, How the Wheel Becomes It!: A Novel

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    Reviews for O, How the Wheel Becomes It!

    3/5

    22 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      There's a pretty big difference between this and Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time.' DMT is enormous, and this is short; DMT is fantastic, and this is okay. On the other hand, they both deal with the strange break between the early to mid twentieth century and the last decades of it, so it's in some ways not so different. If you liked the last volume of DMT, I would definitely recommend this; and this would be a reasonable place to start, to see if you want to make the investment in the series. As a stand alone book, it's okay; the start is incredibly confusing, but after the first few chapters it settles into nice prose. A quick, funny read.
    • 1/5
      Anthony Powell is a man I would probably like, though there are so many reasons why I think I wouldn't. Firstly, he demands that his name be pronounced like 'pole' with a long 'o', and not so it rhymes with 'bowel.' That I can understand.His work is generally well-regarded, and I can see why - it possesses a literary flair that would attract many, but just like marmite it will put off a fair number too, and I fall into the latter group.This work deals with the discovery of a minor writer/editor that the woman he most fancied as a young man slept with somebody for whom he had very little literary respect; he is then charged with editing this same man's memoirs for publication, and decides to attempt a cover-up.Despite its prodigious shortness - 188 well-spaced pages - one rather feels that Powell, with a tighter reign on his flowery prose, could have made it even shorter, almost to the extent that his novel shifted through novella to become a short story and nothing more.
    • 3/5
      I have been a huge admirer of Anthony Powell’s wonderful novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. Indeed, for many years I intended to write a series work about it, and may still do so. After all, I have read the whole sequence more than twenty times.I have, however, been a bit ambivalent about Powell’s other novels. He wrote five novels before the Second World War and I suspect, without the wonderful Dance to the Music of Time sequence. They might well have been largely overlooked nowadays. There are some fine moments, but not enough, in my view, to render them especially memorable.He wrote a further two novels after completing the sequence: this one, and The Fisher king. As with the first five books, I fear they struggle to match the glory of his greater work. This novel followed the tribulations of a critic who finds that an old novel by a former friend, or at least acquaintance, has been ‘rediscovered’ and may be given a new lease of life. There are some very amusing scenes and lines, but, even though it is a very short book, weighing in at a mere 150 pages of fairly large print, it was rather turgid overall.