The Noise of Time

This brilliant fictional biography of the great 20th century composer, Shostakovich, focuses on just three key events in his life, with the rest of the details told briefly in flashbacks. First, in the 1930's, during the Great Terror, when so many prominent people were killed, he is waiting for a lift, expecting, any moment, to be carted to the authorities and executed for displeasing Stalin by the direction of his music. The second stage is after World War II, when Stalin himself rings him up, convincing him to go to the States on a special tour, where he is forced to denounce composers like Stravinsky that he actually considers a musical hero, and generally he is forced to be the puppet of communist Power. The final section, when show more communism has apparently thawed and dangers aren't so clear, is when he suffers arguably his greatest set of humiliations at the hands of Russian communism when, in his old age, he is forced to join the Communist party and take on a bureaucratic leading position within it. In this way rather bad propaganda is written in his name - words he completely disagrees with and his friends start deserting him for what he signs his name to out of a sense of exhaustion.

The Noise of Time first and foremost captures, brilliantly, the character of one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, if not all of history. It also, though, shows how he is shaped by an extreme culture, and the extreme dilemmas that throws up. Is it better to maintain both personal and artistic integrity, if that means you will simply be imprisoned or even killed for your actions, thus not being able to create any art to speak of? How do you respond to such dishonesty, such threats, and such oppression, while still being able to be true to your art?

All these and many more raised by this slim, yet ever so powerful novel, are complex, with no easy answers. But Barnes deftly explores them, and shows how debilitating and destructive a society that has lost touch with honesty actually is. A fantastic, very readable, absorbing, deep novel, about a landmark figure in 20th century music. show less

I love what Julian Barnes can do with the facts.
When the Russian composer Shostakovich was denounced in 1936, at the beginning of Stalin’s Great Terror period, he knew he was likely to be “purged”. Everyone dreaded the nocturnal sound of pounding on the door - it had only one meaning. “They always came for you in the middle of the night. And so, rather than be dragged from the apartment in his pyjamas, or forced to dress in front of some contemptuously impassive NKVD man, he would go to bed fully clothed, lying on top of the blankets” For a period of time, to spare his family, he waited every night outside his apartment, beside the lift, fully dressed and with a small suitcase of essentials. And while he waited:
“The show more cacophony of sounds in his head. His father’s voice, the waltzes and polkas he had played while courting Nita, four blasts of a factory siren in F sharp, dogs outbarking an insecure bassoonist, a riot of percussion and brass beneath a steel-lined government box.
These noises were interrupted by one from the real world: the sudden whirr and growl of the lift’s machinery. Now it was his foot that skittered, knocking over the little case that rested against his calf.
He waited, suddenly empty of memory, filled only with fear. “

How did Shostakovich live through this, and survive until 1975, producing so many great works? ”Well, life is not a walk across a field, as the saying goes. A soul could be destroyed in one of three ways: by what others did to you; by what others made you do to yourself; and by what you voluntarily chose to do to yourself.”

He was constantly torn between an experimental style and a conservative melodious style that was pleasing to the ears of Stalin and the bureaucrats. The navigation was fraught with unseen pitfalls. He was denounced several times. At times he was forced to repudiate his own work, in addition to that of others such as Prokofiev and Stravinsky. “Being a hero was much easier than being a coward. To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment””

Wikipedia outlines the salient features, the skeleton, of Shostakovich’s life. Julian Barnes has added the flesh, the heart and the soul.

“What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves – the music of our being – which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.
This was what he held to.”

show less

“Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it.” – Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

In this fictional presentation of episodes from the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, Barnes explores how tyranny reduces artistic creativity in a society. The story is told in three vignettes: one set in 1936 at Shostakovich’s apartment during Stalin’s reign of terror, one in 1949 during his trip to the US to represent the Soviet Union at the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace, and a third years later during Khrushchev’s tenure. It shows the composer being subjected to official disapproval of his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk, and his show more corresponding fear of being arrested and killed at Stalin’s whim.

As one of the most noted Soviet composers of the time, Shostakovich endured immense political pressure by the state, and this book provides sympathetic portrait of how those pressures impacted his creative output. It challenges Lenin’s declaration that “art belongs to the people.” It is hard enough to create music without having to worry how it will be perceived by the state, and what might happen if it doesn’t please the despot in charge.

Barnes’ prose elicits a sense of Shostakovich’s inner turmoil. He wants to act courageously but feels like a coward. He wants to maintain his integrity but worries about his and his family’s safety. These complexities are teased out as the story unfolds. I was impressed by Barnes’ ability to relate numerous personal insights into Shostakovich’s character in a succinct way (just over 200 pages). One can only wonder what musical works Shostakovich may have produced in a more open and accepting environment.

This is the second of Barnes’ novels I have read this year. I also enjoyed The Sense of An Ending (My Review). I will definitely be reading more of his works in the future. show less

“One to hear, one to remember, and one to drink” lays out the structure of the novel, inspired by the creative life of Dmitri Shostakovich under a randomly repressive regime. The refrain ‘he lies like an eyewitness’ is threaded throughout the novel, illustrating the failure of memory. How an artist survives and how he dies a hundred deaths is examined by imagining the composer’s inner monologue at three main events in his life. Art may be immortal but artists are not — they bleed like the rest, and that blood can be spilt by friends & family. POV restricted to this character and the brief dialogs serve as catechisms and summaries. Barnes does a good job of depicting neither a victim nor a supplicant and doesn’t try to show more write a biography or a commentary on the nature of music: Shostakovich is a tool used to ponder the role of the artist in a political arena and the residue of politics on our personal choices.

Shostakovich is a perfect choice: less is known about him than many other composers and music is harder to pin down than literature. Barnes incorporates information not just for filler but to show how the composer tried to walk a thin, ever changing line: the postcard of Titian’s ‘The Tribute Money’ kept by his bedside re rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s as a survival tool. There are elements of both The Porcupine (what is our responsibility under authoritarianism, when should the individual be preferenced over the society) and Arthur & George (nature of fame, personal honour). Content 3 stars, gave it 4 stars because of the approach and structure; not many other writers could pull this off as elegantly. The book is fairly short, enjoyable to immediately re-read to really appreciate some of the structuring. show less

Although it's framed as a biographical fiction about Shostakovich, that's almost a pretext: what Barnes is really interested in here is clearly the relationship between the creative artist and power. The artist may be a genius in his field, but he's still a human being, and not necessarily an exceptionally brave or reckless one. What does it do to him if he's confronted by threats and demands he doesn't have it in him to resist?

Shostakovich got a major ponck from Stalin after the opening of The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District: after that he slowly worked his way out of official disfavour by compromising left, right and centre (or by ironically pretending to compromise: no-one quite knows, although plenty of people are still show more arguing about it), until he found himself being drawn uncomfortably close to power in the Khrushchev era.

Barnes tries to imagine what it might have been like to be inside Shostakovich's mind at those points. He doesn't really have any more evidence for that than we do, however, and he ends up with a character who is endearingly human and is undergoing the same kinds of fears and doubts that we might, but who somehow doesn't seem to have whatever it is about him that makes Shostakovich Shostakovich. We never get a real sense of him as someone whose life is built around music. In fact there's very little music in the book: most of the time, all that we hear is how other people have reacted to Shostakovich's music.

Interesting, but the effort Barnes must have put into researching this somehow seems disproportionate to the result. show less

This is a fiction based on facts. Events in the life of Julian Barnes's Shostakovich happened to the actual Shostakovich. Barnes imagines what Dmitri Dmitrievich's inner monologue in reaction to those events might have been. In doing so, Barnes provides an allegory for private life lived in relation to public authority. As well as a satire about the Soviet system under Stalin, with its arbitrary rules and changeable persecutions, the book is a reflection on how any of us subdue our true selves in the workplace or under whatever political system governs our country. We all make compromises to fit in with the system. Some of us, like Barnes's Shostakovich, use irony to take away the bitterness of not being true to ourselves, others show more convince themselves that they truly believe the nonsense we are made to labour under, and a few are naïve about the world they inhabit.
The book is a thoughtful and thought provoking one. It considers the matter of historical fact and whether we can ever trust it to be true. Shostakovich reads articles he hasn't written to discover what he is supposed to think. He knows it isn't true, but the articles become the historical record by which he is judged. He considers death, and realises that death would mean he is no longer able to tell his own story, even if only to himself. His story would be completely in the hands of the Soviet régime. As a historian, and as an archivist whose job it is to preserve and protect the historical record, I find ideas about what is fact and what is perception reported as fact interesting. It tips over into literature like this book and Hillary Mantel's Cromwell novels, where such a convincing fictional portrait of an actual person is constructed by the author that the novel comes to be treated as biography. Facts are often dull. I see facts contained within the archive I manage embroidered and embellished by our press team to make an interesting story. Those amplified facts then become received wisdom, distorting the actual history. It reminds me of when I was at school, studying the First World War. We were given an essay topic about the Christmas truce and one of my classmates described the video to Paul McCartney's Pipes of Peace.
The other thing I liked about this book is its dryness. Barnes writes wryly as Shostakovich, and I found that I had to slow my reading to properly absorb what he was getting at. It's not an entertaining romp through the life of Shostakovich, it's a story about principles, compromise and survival. Anyone who chooses to have a career rather than simply work for a living will recognise themselves, and the sacrifices and compromises they've had to make, as they climb their chosen ladder. I certainly did. show less

Dopo un inizio faticoso, Barnes mi ha totalmente catturata. Il rumore del tempo è un romanzo storico e come tale l'ho letto, con il gruppo di lettura dell'ornitorinco. Ci viene raccontata la vita di Shostakovich, un musicista che ha lottato con il regime totalitario di Stalin per quasi tutta la vita.
Letot in un momento storico adatto, tante cose sono diverse eppure uguali.
Struggente, ironico, irritante: un uomo che per paura e per inseguire il suo essere artista passa sopra a tanto. E' in balia del suo tempo (e del rumore del tempo), a volte schiacciato, a volte usato come strumento di propaganda. Mi ha molto colpito il suo viaggio negli USA e il suo dialogo con Nabokov, uno che può permettersi di parlare e di attaccare in un certo show more modo perché con Stalin non ci deve più convivere.
Una lettura piena di spunti interessanti su tanti aspetti, a partire dal rapporto tra arte e potere e tra artista e potere. Consigliatissimo. show less