A Glastonbury Romance to be reissued

[rich]

i read it a long time ago as well

remember liking it but can't remember much of it sad to say

rich

On 2/11/07, Nick Halliwell <nick.halliwell at btclick.com> wrote:
>
> I read it many, many years ago. It's one of a quartet of novels usually
> grouped together under the "Wessex" banner (the other three being "Wolf
> Solent", "Weymouth Sands" - I think that had a different title in the US -
> and "Maiden Castle"). I keep meaning to reread Powys but I read so much of
> him in my early twenties that... well, sometimes you're a little worried
> about going back in case it's not as good as you remember, aren't you? I
> don't think I'd start with "Romance", though. As far as I remember my copy
> upstairs runs to around 1500 pages. I suppose the Dostoevsky etc.
> comparisons are obvious, not only in terms of scale but in terms of
> dealing
> with themes of good and evil. I know that Duckworth have been gradually
> reissuing the books in the US because we've been getting them over here,
> and
> the ones on sale in British shops are obviously US copies because all the
> spelling is Americanised. I have most of them in UK Picador editions from
> the early eighties, plus there were a number, such as "Porius", which came
> out published by a small imprint the name of which slips my mind.
>
> Anyway, Powys is neglected again nowadays, he's one of those writers who
> seems to slip in and out of vogue. But there was a piece in "The Guardian"
> only a few weeks or months ago all about the upcoming reissue of "AGR".
>
> So, to sum up, "A Glastonbury Romance" is one of those books so large that
> it's difficult to judge them by normal criteria. People who read Tolstoy
> are
> much more likely to have read "Anna Karenina" (itself not exactly a
> novella)
> than "War and Peace" or with Dostoevsky "Crime And Punishment" rather than
> "The Brothers Karamazov". I swear by all that's holy that I DID read all
> of
> "AGR" back in the days when life seemed so much longer.
>
> Anyway, Powys is a neglected writer, whether this is his masterpiece is
> open
> to debate... It may be but then again... He wrote an awful lot of books
> and
> lived into his nineties.
>
> Sorry, I'm rather tired so I apologise if this isn't terribly lucid.
>
> Nick
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf
> Of Ya Sam
> Sent: 11 February 2007 19:01
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: A Glastonbury Romance to be reissued
>
> Has anyone read it? Is it really a neglected masterpiece?
>
>
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/Glastonbury-Romance-John-Cowper-Powys/dp/0715636480/
> sr=1-4/qid=1171218347/ref=sr_1_4/026-4357268-0446006?ie=UTF8&s=books
>
>
> Synopsis
> This is the first modern paperback edition of "the only novel produced by
> an
>
> English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy
> and
> Dostoyevski." - George Steiner, "The New Yorker". John Cowper Powys has
> been
>
> acclaimed by some of the greatest minds of this century, from Henry Miller
> ("my first living idol") to George Steiner ("supreme in English fiction
> after Hardy") to Robertson Davies ("a great writer"). "A Glastonbury
> Romance", first published in 1932, is his masterwork, an epic novel of
> terrific cumulative force and lyrical intensity. In it, he probes the
> mystical and spiritual ethos of the small English village of Glastonbury,
> and the effect upon its inhabitants of a mythical tradition from the
> remotest past of human history - the legend of the Grail. Powys's rich
> iconography interweaves the ancient with the modern, the historical with
> the
>
> legendary, and the imaginative within man with the natural world outside
> him
>
> to create a book of astonishing scope and beauty.
>
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