Venusberg — Anthony Powell

An English journalist encounters dangerous hijinks on the Baltic Sea in this satirical novel by the author of A Dance to the Music of Time.

Written from a vantage point both high and deliberately narrow, the early novels of Anthony Powell nevertheless deal in the universal themes that would define his oeuvre: pride, greed, and the strange drivers of human behavior. Scathingly funny and insightful character studies, Powell's early works reveal the stirrings of the unequaled style, ear for dialogue, and eye for irony that would reach their caustic peak in his epic, A Dance to the Music of Time.

Powell's sophomore novel, Venusberg, follows an English journalist named Lushington as he travels by boat to an unnamed Baltic state. Navigating an elegant and politically precarious social scene, Lushington becomes infatuated with his very own, very foreign Venus. An action-packed literary precursor to Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, Venusberg is replete with assassins and Nazis, loose countesses and misunderstandings, fatal accidents and social comedy.