The extremely unusual pleasures of reading Dance to the Music of Time

Reading the 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell, is like no other reading experience - if I were to outline the plot for you, which I am completely unable to do, it would sound as if this novel or series of short novels, is impossible to read and comprehend - so many complex relationships among the characters, ever changing from volume to volume, that there is no way I can keep all the characters straight in my mind, much less recall who's married to who's sister and who may have run off with some ne'er to well count or jazz singer, and so forth. Can't even keep them straight from volume to volume. And it's not as if there are all that many characters - part of the fun and the humor is you know that characters from past volumes will continue to pop up in the oddest places - creating the illusion that London society through the early and mid 20th century was made up of about 30 people - in volume 8, which I'm just reading, the narrator, Nick, is having dinner in one of the mess halls on his military base when he notices a waiter - and of course we know the waiter will turn out to be one of his friends from boarding school (Stingham, I think his name is) recalled from the first volume; they meet later on the base and Stringham declines to have dinner with Nick - the difference in their ranks is too great - and recalls his gradual recovery from alcoholism and his assertion that his only goal in life, or in the service, is to be a waiter - and they rather sadly part ways. Later in the volume, a whole bunch of people from Stringer's life converge as a posh London restaurant, and there are varying degrees of discomfort as they become dimly aware of the cross-threads that connect their lives - everyone's dated, lived with, or been married to the relative of at least one of the other characters around the table, or so it seems. But as you read, the point is not to try to keep all these nuances clear or straight - it's, rather, to allow the characters to flow past you, as you dimly recall their histories and to a degree piece together the elements of this complex social web - it's life a river of life flowing past, or, to use the metaphor Powell adopted, like a dance going on around you, the reader, a stasis point in the midst of the movement. There really are only 3 main characters - the insufferable Widmerpool, the sorrowful and unlucky composer and musician Moreland (narrator's best friend), and narrator Nick Jenkins who is extremely opaque - and it's amazing how little we know about key people in his life, notably wife and child. No, it's like no other novel - not even Search for Lost Time, with which it is often compared - and the pleasures of reading it are unusual, maybe unique.