![]() 'I think they've done it as well as this medium possibly can.'" Across the board, the actors are almost uniformly pleasing. ![]() 'It seems quite alright to me,' he told me with faltering voice, on the telephone. Nicholas Coleridge reports: "Powell, himself, says that 'Somewhat to my surprise' he is happy with the adaptation. ![]() In response to criticisms of the abridgment, we should note that Powell, as a former screenwriter, was not upset at the reshaping of his work for TV. We may have a good time getting there, but I wind up wondering why we made the trip. They learn, age, crack-up and die, but the whole thing just kind of trails off and rumbles to a stop rather than ends. We meet characters of greater or lesser interest, they do the things that people do (and sometimes don't do, and occasionally never have done in the history of the world). At least as presented here, no such unifying ideas are discernible in Powell. It was a meditation on the nature of memory, and underlying all the gossip and melodrama is an awareness that there is a coherent thesis and philosophy tying the whole journey together. In addition to writing earlier, Proust had the structural advantage of writing the beginning and end of his novel first, spending the rest of his life filling in the middle. Both works chronicle the human cycles of birth, education, coupling, re-coupling, decay and death. Major characters are rarely single portraits, but are usually drawn from composites of two or three prototypes. Both genteel epics run more than 3000 pages. Lower class types pop in from time to time, but they never take center stage for long. Both "Dance" and "In Search of Lost Time" are panoramic multi-generational quasi-autobiographical narratives of the gentry they knew. Powell's first volume appeared thirty years after Proust's death, and a greater valentine can't be imagined. No, I haven't read the books, but I have read Proust, and you can bet Mr.
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