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The Noise of Time (2016)

by Julian Barnes

Other authors: See the other authors section.

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1,4577712,487 (3.8)140
A compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich--Julian Barnes's first novel since his best-selling, Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending. 1936: Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), he reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, various women and wives, his children all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, for years to come he will be held fast under the thumb of despotism: made to represent Soviet values at a cultural conference in New York City, forced into joining the Party, and compelled, constantly, to weigh appeasing those in power against the integrity of his music. Barnes elegantly guides us through the trajectory of Shostakovich's career, at the same time illuminating the tumultuous evolution of the Soviet Union. The result is both a stunning portrait of a relentlessly fascinating man and a brilliant meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society.… (more)
  1. 00
    The Siege by Helen Dunmore (charl08)
    charl08: Linked by the experience of 'the terror'.
  2. 00
    The noise of time and other prose pieces by Osip Mandelstam (aileverte)
    aileverte: Barnes's book (not so secretly) dialogues with Mandelstam.
  3. 00
    Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman (aileverte)
    aileverte: Barnes subtly alludes to Grossman's work on many occasions.
  4. 00
    The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (aileverte)
    aileverte: Miłosz delves into different types of comportments of artists living in a totalitarian regime.
  5. 00
    Sjostakovitsj zijn leven, zijn werk, zijn tijd by Krzysztof Meyer (gust)
  6. 00
    The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (shaunie)
    shaunie: Barnes is a huge fan of Fitzgerald and her influence is clear in The Noise of Time.
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» See also 140 mentions

English (64)  Dutch (4)  Spanish (4)  Italian (2)  Catalan (1)  French (1)  All languages (76)
Showing 1-5 of 64 (next | show all)
This book is really worthy of several reads. One read on the fear and paranoia of life as an artist in Stalin's Soviet Union. A second reading on the irony inherent in musical time, in which real time is a construct, and real music is eternal, and therefore not of any time. A third reading on the noises of reality, that the human mind stutters and stammers human existence. It is fearful and fearfully short of permanence. A fourth reading is about the quieting of the universe toward entropy, and the battle of creation to survive entropy. Perhaps the most painful reading of this book is on the level of betrayal and honour. Shostakovich betrays art and his fellow composers when he joins the Communist Party under pressure from the authorities. His weakness and confessions to the reader are simply sickening. And yet he knows how little value his betrayals are when compared to the artistic achievements of Stravinsky, for example. I am simply amazed by Julian Barnes' skill as a storyteller. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
Biography of Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich. Quite vividly paints the picture of civic life especially that of artist under Stalin's regime. ( )
  harishwriter | Oct 12, 2023 |
"Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing hime to live, they had killed him."

Wow. This book is a masterpiece. So profound. I have never before read a book that more perfectly enscapsulates the anxious mind.

Would recommend having some background knowledge of Shostakovich and Soviet Russia before reading. ( )
  RRabas | Jun 16, 2023 |
This book is a novelised account of Shostakovich's life under the heel of the oppression exerted by Stalin and then by Khrushchev. Barnes captures Shostakovich's brushes with Power at three crucial stages in his life and, in the process, posits questions about who owns music, what is it for, and on the nature of courage versus cowardice in the face of a lifetime of intimidation. ( )
  gjky | Apr 9, 2023 |
“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 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. ( )
  saschenka | Mar 12, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 64 (next | show all)
In 1979, a book purporting to be Shostakovich’s memoir, entitled “Testimony,” appeared in the West, depicting a frustrated composer who despised Communism and hid veiled critiques of the Soviet regime in his music. . . . Barnes, who acknowledges “Testimony” as one of his major sources, gives us a mournfully sarcastic, frustrated Shostakovich, at once mocking of his Soviet patrons and stymied by his inability to break with them fully. In a sort of third-person monologue of impressions, vignettes, and diaristic reflections, he comes off as neither heroic nor craven, though he exhibits both traits on occasion. ...
... [W]ith this drily self-chastising, depressed, and exhausted composer, Barnes is also shielding himself from other Shostakoviches, such as the one who fiercely criticized an avant-garde young composer, whose work he had hitherto supported, when he discovered the deputy culture minister sitting in the audience and became frightened.
added by aileverte | editThe New Yorker, Nikil Saval (May 26, 2016)
 
Music was what Shostakovich "put up against the noise of time." Barnes' stirring novel about what is lost when tyrants try to control artistic expression leaves us wondering what, besides more operas, this tormented, compromised musical prodigy might have composed had he been free.
added by aileverte | editNPR, Heller McAlpin (May 10, 2016)
 
Using this third-person “Shostakovich,” but often switching into an unlocatable voice, like a biographer behind a literary veil, Barnes deftly covers three big episodes in the composer’s life: denunciation in Pravda and subsequent implication in an assassination plot; his trip to America, where he is humiliated as a Soviet stooge; and lastly, being forced to join the Communist Party. This story is truly amazing, as Barnes knows, an arc of human degradation without violence (the threat of violence, of course, everywhere). . . .
. . .
It’s a powerful portrait, and readers will have to decide whether they think this is “really” Shostakovich. I felt that he emerged as a (strangled) hero, but wished that Barnes would explain a little less, and show a bit more.
 
The book is, partly, an exercise in cold war nostalgia. But it’s also, more interestingly, an inquiry into the nature of personal integrity. Shostakovich made his accommodations with “Power”, and survived. For some people that damns him unequivocally. For Barnes, the matter is more complicated, and he weighs it carefully.
added by aileverte | editThe Guardian, James Lasdun (Jan 22, 2016)
 
The composer’s decline into ill health, the withering of his spirit, his hope that “death would liberate his music… from his life” – Barnes presents Shostakovich’s final downward spiral with a kind of ruthless inevitability (and inevitability is, as Susan Snyder says, the signal note of tragedy). Alexei Tolstoy wrote in Pravda of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony: “Here the personality submerges itself in the great epoch that surrounds it, and begins to resonate with the epoch.” Barnes has achieved a similar feat with a period of history, and a place, that despite their remoteness, are rendered in exquisite, intimate detail. He has given us a novel that is powerfully affecting, a condensed masterpiece that traces the lifelong battle of one man’s conscience, one man’s art, with the insupportable exigencies of totalitarianism.
added by aileverte | editThe Guardian, Alex Preston (Jan 17, 2016)
 

» Add other authors (21 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Julian Barnesprimary authorall editionscalculated
Hörmark, MatsTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Krüger, GertraudeTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Philpott, DanielNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Vlek, RonaldTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
One to hear
One to remember
And one to drink.

traditional
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for Pat
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It happened in the middle of wartime, on a station platform as flat and dusty as the endless plain surrounding it.
Quotations
He liked to think that he wasn't afraid of death. It was life he was afraid of, not death. He believed that people should think about death more often, and accustom themselves o the notion of it. Just letting it creep up on you unnoticed was not the best way to live. You should make yourself familiar with it. You should write about it: either in words or, in his case, music. It was his belief that if we thought about death earlier in our lives, we would make fewer mistakes. (p. 156)
Art is the whisper of history heard above the noise of time.
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A compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich--Julian Barnes's first novel since his best-selling, Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending. 1936: Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), he reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, various women and wives, his children all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, for years to come he will be held fast under the thumb of despotism: made to represent Soviet values at a cultural conference in New York City, forced into joining the Party, and compelled, constantly, to weigh appeasing those in power against the integrity of his music. Barnes elegantly guides us through the trajectory of Shostakovich's career, at the same time illuminating the tumultuous evolution of the Soviet Union. The result is both a stunning portrait of a relentlessly fascinating man and a brilliant meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society.

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