SOURCE: "Photo-finish," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4432, March 11-17, 1988, p. 276.

In the following review, Clute offers a mixed assessment of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.

Three young farmers are walking along a mud track in the Rhineland in the spring of 1914, on their way to a dance in the nearby village. A passing photographer named August Sander shoots them, as part of his great project to assemble a photographic catalogue, Man of the Twentieth Century. The three farmers stare at us from before the watershed of the First World War with a naive, comical, solemn gaze. So much, more or less, is history.

It can be assumed that Sander's three young Rhinelanders thought they were en route to no more than a springtime festival. For Richard Powers, whose Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance generates a most elaborate fiction from the photograph...