Powers’ first novel,
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, takes its title from a photograph by August Sander. On the most superficial level, the novel “recreates” the stories of the three young men, both before and after the moment captured in the photograph. Under normal historical circumstances, such a narrative would connect their family backgrounds and formative experiences with the adult choices that would shape not only their lives but those of their wives and offspring and, perhaps by extension, their later descendants. But, because the photograph is dated immediately before the outbreak of the First World War, the lives of these characters are truncated or radically transformed by the unprecedented, industrialized violence of that conflict. As George Kearns notes in the
1968 words
Citation: Kich, Martin. "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 April 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=21626, accessed 21 November 2024.]
