Messengers of Day: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell

More charming apercus from Powell. This is a better read than the first volume simply because the people are more interesting, and you get the sense that life is really happening to him now (he publishes his first novels in this volume, for instance). Again, totally meaningless if you don't care that Powell wrote ADTTMOT, but absolutely charming if you do. The interesting thing about the memoirs so far, for me at least, is that you get the same 'empty eyeball' feeling from the narrator as in ADTTMOT. Just as in that novel the narrator's falling in love and getting married warrants about half a paragraph of "by the way, I got married about five years ago," so here, even though Powell is ostensibly discussing his own love life and show more occasionally mentions how he went to certain pubs because that's where the girls were, it's pretty clear that what's interesting to Powell is the pubs and other people's love lives.

Also, how he remembers all his friends' one liners from the remote past of his own youth is beyond me. I can't even remember them from two nights ago.

PS: Powell's discussion of it here has convinced me to read The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. I hold that against this volume, because I'm starting to think OGP will ruin Waugh for me. show less