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    The Noise of Time: A novel
    The Noise of Time: A novel
    The Noise of Time: A novel
    Ebook207 pages3 hours

    The Noise of Time: A novel

    By Julian Barnes

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    About this ebook

    From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes an extraordinary fictional portrait of the relentlessly fascinating Russian musician and composer Dmitri Shostakovich and a stunning meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society. • “Brilliant…. As elegantly constructed as a concerto.” —NPR

    1936: Dmitri Shostakovich, just thirty years old, reckons with the first of three conversations with power that will irrevocably shape his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has suddenly denounced the young composer’s latest opera. Certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, his daughter—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, he will twice more be swept up by the forces of despotism: coerced into praising the Soviet state at a cultural conference in New York in 1948, and finally bullied into joining the Party in 1960. All the while, he is compelled to constantly weigh the specter of power against the integrity of his music.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateMay 10, 2016
    ISBN9781101947258
    The Noise of Time: A novel
    Author

    Julian Barnes

    Julian Barnes (Leicester, 1946) se educó en Londres y Oxford. Está considerado como una de las mayores revelaciones de la narrativa inglesa de las últimas décadas. Entre muchos otros galardones, ha recibio el premio E.M. Forster de la American Academy of Arts and Letters, el William Shakespeare de la Fundación FvS de Hamburgo y es Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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    Reviews for The Noise of Time

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    • 5/5
      Barnes wrote The Noise of Time in the style of an orchestral composition. Leitmotifs abound in the third-person narrative, including the worry about getting arrested, the fixation with adhering to the party line, and the anxiety about getting banned from Soviet music halls. Shostakovich faced all of these fears, and they were not the product of paranoia. A string of unfortunate events molded his life... Upon hearing his "Prelude and Fugue no. 4," all the hardships that Shostakovich endured and all the suspicious actions that Barnes painstakingly describes in his book became apparent to me.
    • 4/5
      A novelistic biography of sorts of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich - a very capable companion piece to Martin Amis's Koba the Dread. It's interesting how much I've read about 20th Century Russia lately.
    • 4/5
      “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.
    • 4/5
      I took longer to read this latest novel by Julian Barnes than I usually take to read his novels - he is one of my favorite authors.

      This was possibly because I know little I know of classical music, but also how I knew little of Shostakovitch and his life in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

      I found the book to be pessimistic, even bitter at times. Yet I classify it is a good novel, and I recommend it. Partly because it was so well written, and how brilliantly it evoked a man in relation to his art. And partly because I was a child at the time of Stalin's rule over the Soviet Union, and could never work out what was really going on there.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 1/5
      Wholly uninterested in made-up bullshit. 'This book has been stolen from D. B. Shostakovich' sounds like a Book of the Month Club owner's book plate and the next page's "'You must be the man in the family now.' They had freighted him with an expectation and a sense of duty he was ill equipped to bear" sounding more like sappy middle America than Soviet Russia. Done with early on.
    • 5/5
      Excellent book; Barnes draws you into the soul of Shostakovich, a composer trying to make a living in Stalinist Russia. The encounters with the tyrant and the horrific system are believable, and Shostakovich comes across as an all too human character. The writing is wonderful; this is an enchanting little book I found hard to put down. Kudos to Mr. Barnes.
    • 3/5
      So that's Shostakovich then. But too much Stalin for my taste. Soviet Russia was not much fun is one of the key takeaways here. I have tended to find Julian Barnes just a little hard to enjoy apart from Arthur & George. This was a little hard to enjoy.
    • 4/5
      Sibelius had apparently been full of dissatisfaction and self-contempt. It was said that the day he burnt all his surviving manuscripts he felt a weight lifted from his shoulders. That made sense. As did the connection between self-contempt and alcohol, the one inciting the other.

      3.5 Stars. Julian Barnes crafted a patient portrait of Shostakovich. It lacks the splendor and kinesis of Bill Vollmann's searing images in Europe Central. Barnes reflects on loss and the shame of indecision. Hamlet looms large. I have been on holiday and this book is a fitting summation. Much of my time recently has involved reflecting on Nixon and Islam. This keeps me away from over-exposure to futbol and ale. My time with both have been extensive but manageable with these other pursuits.

      There's also been music. I find my self staring in silence towards the idea of music these days. It is but a field of certain composers which ultimately reign in my mind. Sibelius, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams and, well, Shostakovich. There's always a time for Count Basie or Blood on the Tracks. Yet somehow I sense a change. Barnes relates this gradual shift in priority with a deft hand. This tectonic activity remains subtle and submerged.

      I should add a coda on politics and art, a soft linking of the two is explored in this novella: one which is addressed with asides and the anecdote. I would only muddle my effort.
    • 5/5
      A magnificent reimagining of three pivotal moments in the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, focusing on three occasions when the direction of his life was determined by conversations with the Soviet authorities, or as Barnes describes it, Power.

      The first part covers the events of 1936, when the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was condemned after Stalin saw it and disapproved, resulting in the famous Pravda editorial "Muddle instead of Music". In this case the conversation is a first interview with the local secret police chief in the Leningrad Big House, after which he is reprieved because his accuser has himself been purged.

      The second part moves on to 1948 and a trip to America as part of a Soviet delegation purporting to be peace envoys - this time the conversation is with Stalin himself.

      The final part covers his declining years, and the conversation is the 1960 one which led to him joining the party and becoming head of the Composers' Union.

      Barnes has obviously been influenced by Solomon Volkov's book Testimony, which claimed to be Shostakovich's own memoirs; while acknowledging in the postscript that its veracity has been questioned and explaining that the truth of anything that happened in Soviet Russia is rather slippery: "All this is frustrating to any biographer, but most welcome to any novelist".

      Barnes is very sparing in describing the music, possibly wisely focusing more on the compromises required for survival in Stalin's Russia, the very different pressures and compromises in the time of Khrushchev ("Nikita the Corncob") and the nature of bravery and cowardice. The book is very wise on the dubious benefits of age and experience to a creative artist, and this must be at least partly about Barnes himself.

      Whether or not you are interested in Shostakovich's music (I am very fond of his string quartets) this is a fascinating book and probably the best of Barnes's later novels.

      I'll finish with a few quotes, as much of this book seems very quotable:

      "The system of retribution had been greatly improved, and was so much more inclusive than it used to be"

      "Who engineers the engineers?"

      "Art is the whisper of history heard above the noise of time"

      "It is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised"

      "Integrity is like virginity: once lost, never recoverable"

      "Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul"

      "Well, few lives ended fortissimo and in the major"
    • 4/5
      The Noise of Time delivers a gradually unfolding tale of the life of Shostakovich beneath the pervasive and seemingly inevitable threat and fears of violence, torture, arrest, death,
      and harm to his family and friends. How he responds to denunciation, false acceptance, and collusion while continuing to write great music is a testimonial to the pure power of creativity.

      The writing remains sparse, clear, and moving.
      (Less of "the Corncob" would be welcome.)

      What was the threat that finally made him join The Party?
    • 5/5
      Another beautiful contemplation from a writer at the peak of his power.
    • 4/5
      Nicely written and a pleasure to read this book provides a story of the life of the Russian composer Shostakovich in the Soviet Union. It didn't capture me in the same way that A Sense of Ending did but it was an enjoyable read nonetheless.
    • 3/5
      Life under tyranny is precarious. For the artist its risks are as much to the art as to the person. What is art deformed by tyranny? Is it even art any longer? And how can you walk the tightrope of conforming just enough to allow your art to surface without becoming so noticeable that the tyrant is forced to take note of it? Such was the challenge of life and art for Dmitri Shostakovich in communist Russia.

      Julian Barnes presents, in fiction, the whole of Shostakovich’s life. The evidence of his research into the biographies of Shostakovich and his peers is rife. And so the fiction reads, to an extent, like biography. It is somewhat distant, diffident, daunted perhaps by the two large elephants in the room. On the one hand there is the Soviet version of tyranny, a monstrosity so enormous that any account of it comes across as banal: it was bad…very bad. On the other hand there is Shostakovich’s music, a sizeable oeuvre over a long life, but in the absence of being a serious student of music, what can one say about it? Some of it was very good. Some of it was very bad. But which and for what reasons? Barnes largely foregoes the challenge of assessing Shostakovich’s music. Instead he concentrates on Shostakovich as an exemplar of life under tyranny. But it isn’t clear whether Barnes gets beyond the observation that it was bad…very bad.

      Despite Barnes’ workmanlike account of Shostakovich’s life here, we would be hard-pressed to claim that we gain any insights into him, at least beyond what a competent biographer might have provided. Which leads one to wonder what more Barnes was hoping to achieve in writing this fictional account of Shostakovich’s life. And is the object of Barnes’ quest perhaps too subtle for the broad brush of fictional biography that he brings to it? Certainly there is something about Shostakovich’s life that gives us pause. The problem is that without an adequate presentation of his musical gifts, there is nothing for the reader to use to distinguish Shostakovich from, say, Khrennikov.

      Not a bad book. But not one that will bring the reader to a new understanding, I think, of either Shostakovich or Soviet tyranny.
    • 5/5
      This is an interesting and well-written novel based on the life of Shostakovich, who was a composer living during the USSR years in Russia.
    • 3/5
      A history I knew nothing about, but told in a way that was interesting and provoking. The composer Shostakovich reflects on his life and the ups and downs he had as the political climate of Russia changed with government's whims. Not a long book, not scintillating, but interesting nonetheless.
    • 5/5
      Has only given me one nightmare so far.
    • 4/5
      I am a fan of julian barnes! the story of a artist living in the old soviet union trying to be a artist and staying alive, how fate both good and bad interacts with our life
    • 5/5
      Brilliantly written by a brilliant author -- but I didn't care for the story. It's about the life of the Russian composer Shostakovich. I know nothing about this composer and maybe that's best. He comes alive on these pages in all his brooding inferiority feelings, despite seeming to be not only good at what he does but ahead of his time. The nuanced revelations of his character and his life and fears are exquisite. And he has reason to fear for his life, living under a brutal regime.

      I heartily encourage reading this author, as I intend to read more of his books, however I wouldn't begin with this one unless you know quite a bit about music or perhaps about Russia or the history of the country. I suspect people who have lived in Russia might enjoy the book. The writing, as always, is beyond fault.
    • 2/5
      I note that there are 33 reviews of this novel - what can I add except my personal reaction.

      In the Author's Note, Julian Barnes writes: ' Elizabeth Wilson is paramount among those who have helped me with this novel. She supplied me with material I would never have come across, corrected many misapprehensions, and read the typescript. But this is my book, not hers; and if you haven't liked mine read hers." I may in fact do that, as I struggled with this.

      I wanted to like it but I kept on thinking it wasn't a novel that it was biography. Why didn't he write a biography I kept wondering? Maybe it really is a fictional biography...

      The main character is Dmitri Shostakovich and it is a novel of his living torture under Stalin and later on Khrushchev. Having been to St Petersburg helped me to fill in parts for myself. However it was a puzzling book.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed every single page of this book - it is so well written, with deep insight about the impact of politics on the profoundly gifted compsoser. His journey from over-protected son, to the young embracer of free love, to the recognised composer, to the shunned then rehabilitated public figure. Underpinning it all is the humiliation he lives with in perceives to be his cowardice, rather than self-survival - and the juxtoposition of his acceptance of what he needs to do to survive against his desire for death. Sad but illuminating 'those that understood the complexities of life under tyranny'. Also enjoyed gaining another perspective on the impact of stalinist communism on artists as well as the disdain Shostakovich felt for the sympathetic westerners who applauded the principles of communisim whilst living in freedom.

      Finally, Julian Barnes is just such an intelligient writer - in just a few sentences he can share a great deal of understanding - but perhaps the two standouts for me was Shostakoviches observation that in Shakespeare's tragedies, the villians always had some form of doubt - in Soviet Russia, there appeared no doubt. And then, the Power (the seat of Russian authority) squashed what it most feared - that is, the Power had fear (if not doubt).
    • 5/5
      Shostakovich and his struggles to maintain his artistic integrity in the face of the sometimes urgent, sometimes insinuating pressures of "Power" are brought to life beautifully in this short novel. As he gets older, Julian Barnes seems to need fewer and fewer words to get across what he needs to, and this novel is short but intense, and primarily about Fear.

      In this telling, Shostakovich is primarily driven by fear and the seeming inevitability of being crushed by Stalin's apparatus of repression - always referred to as "Power". The lasting image from the book is of the scared composer, standing every night outside his apartment by lift, with a small suitcase, waiting for the secret police to arrive (so that they don't disturb his wife). And yet, they don't come for him, whereas they do come for many of his peers. The paranoia of being one who remains, seems almost worse than being arrested (but of course, not actually worse).

      Shostakovich is not portrayed as a hero, not even as a courageous man, although he does his best to stand up to Stalin in a telephone call where the Man himself smoothly persuades (but what choice does he really have?) the composer to join a cultural delegation to London. Its both a brave, pathetic and utterly futile resistance. Is he compromised - undoubtedly yes, both personally and artistically. In my opinion Barnes lets him off a little easily here but his point is to show the gradual assimilation of the composer and is ultimate submission to "Power"

      Does it help to know something of the composer and his contemporaries to understand the book? Probably yes, but its not mandatory. Its an excellent book
    • 3/5
      I was disappointed in this little book which was mercifully short. Julian Barnes' beautiful writing is there , but the story of the musician Shostakovich and his life in Stalinist Russia as he struggles to maintain his artistic integrity in the face of edicts from the leaders to compose the sort of music they require as propaganda for their regime. He did not come across as a very interesting character and nothing of his "person" or his relationships was revealed to me.
    • 5/5
      What a delight this elegant little gem from Julian Barnes is.

      It's not easy to breathe new life into a subject that's been written about so often. But in a compact package, this novel about composer Dmitri Shostakovich provides a fresh glimpse into life in the Soviet Union at the height of Stalin's purges. With wit and humanity, Barnes has captured something essential about the terror, paranoia, and absurdities of that time: "a vast catalogue of little farces adding up to an immense tragedy."

      It's a story about art and creativity struggling to survive under impossible conditions, but it's also the story of a man literally trying just to survive.

      What a terrific and lasting central image: Shostakovich dressed and with a suitcase out on the landing of his apartment every night, waiting to get picked up by the secret police, because he hopes that will keep the police from bothering his family inside (and he doesn't want to keep his wife up all night with his own terror-induced insomnia). But night after night, the police don't come. And so he waits, and ponders his fate. "This was one of the questions in his head: was it brave to be standing there waiting for them, or was it cowardly? Or was it neither -- merely sensible? He did not expect to discover the answer." Should he smoke, or save his cigarettes for after his arrest? But what if he saves the cigarettes, and they then get confiscated? Or what if he's quickly executed before he gets a chance to smoke them? And so it goes. . . .

      Barnes has given us a thoughtful meditation on art and the life of the artist. In the end, are music and its historical context inextricably woven together? Can music ever escape the noise of time?

      "What he hoped was that death would liberate his music: liberate it from his life. Time would pass, and though musicologists would continue their debates, his work would begin to stand for itself. History, as well as biography, would fade: perhaps one day Fascism and Communism would be merely words in textbooks. And then, if it still had value -- if there were still ears to hear -- his music would be . . . just music."

      It's a graceful and understated book, full of compassion. But there is also dark humor at every turn:

      "In the old days, a child might pay for the sins of its father, or indeed mother. Nowadays, in the most advanced society on earth, the parents might pay for the sins of the child, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and even the man who unthinkingly smiled at you as he came out of the lift at three in the morning. The system of retribution had been greatly improved, and was so much more inclusive than it used to be."

      I've read a fair amount of Barnes's fiction over the years, but this is my new favorite among his books. I'm very fond of it.

      So here I sit, listening to Shostakovich's string quartets as I type this review. It seems only fitting.
    • 5/5
      Dating back to graduate school, I have admired Julian Barnes for his quirky novels. In most of his works, he does not use anything resembling the conventional structure of the novel. However, as a Booker Prize winner, he has the sort of position which allows him to be as unconventional as he wishes. His latest novel, The Noise of Time, is certainly no exception.

      This interesting historical account of the career of Dmitri Shostakovich has some flavor of historical fiction, but at the end of the novel, he has profusely thanked Elizabeth Wilson, who “supplied [him] with material I would never have come across, corrected many misapprehensions, and read the typescript” (201). He continues this adulation with, “this is my book not hers; and if you haven’t liked mine, then read hers” (201). Thanks for the offer Dmitri Dmitrievich, but I liked your book a lot.

      I have been fascinated by Russian history for decades, and I also have a fondness for Russian music – particularly Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich. When I learned of the relationship between Dmitri and Josef Stalin, I was perplexed. I always thought music was a bridge over any troubled waters on the planet. The composers refusal to join the Communist Party caused him much trouble. At one point in his life, he so feared the Russian secret police, he slept in his clothes with a small handbag on the floor. He did not want to be dragged away in his pajamas.

      Eventually, Stalin died, and Nikita Khrushchev became the First Secretary of the Party. While Stalin abhorred Dmitri’s talent, and the official party line was that Dimitri’s music was “Muddle and Muck.” Most of his work was banned for years. When Nikita took over, he was rehabilitated after joining the party. He refused as best he could, but the pressure was intense. Many of his fellow composers and musicians turned their backs on him for giving it to Khrushchev

      Barnes spent a lot of time on Dmitri’s introspection. In 1949 when the pressure under Stalin was at its greatest, Shostakovich mused, “If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something. // 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” (135). Wow. This requires some serious thought to digest this – especially for a non musician.

      Towards the end of his life, Shostakovich feared his memories. Barnes writes, “he could not stop hearing; and worst of all, he could not stop remembering. He so wished that the memory could be disengaged at will, like putting a car into neutral. That was what chauffeurs used to do, either at the top of a hill, or when they had reached maximum speed; they would coast to save petrol” (182-183).

      What troubled me the most was the politicization of music. Music should join people together not drive them apart. Music should soothe, refresh, invigorate, and raise ones sensibilities. It should not be a political tool manipulated for the accumulation of power. Music has power of its own, and that should be the end. Julian Barnes’ 21st book, The Noise of Time is an absorbing and thought-provoking exploration of the clash between art and power. Whether you are a composer, a musician, or merely a listener like me, this novel should move you to a better place. 5 stars

      --Jim, 10/26/16
    • 3/5
      A short book, with a great beginning, excellent structure and excellent writing, but for some reason it started to drag. It felt repetitive, perhaps: rather than going farther or deeper into the story, it seemed stuck in the same groove. Perhaps because the subject lived so recently, and this is based on actual biography, Barnes felt less free to elaborate and invent, and thus had to live with certain ellipses in Shostakovich's life as it is known to us.

      Not a bad book by any means, however -- just perhaps not enough meat there to sustain an entire novel. It will still be of particular interest to those who enjoy Russian history. And Barnes is an amazing writer, with a felicitous style that sometimes made me stop reading in pure admiration.
    • 4/5
      The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes is a stunning novel of the life of Shostakovich the composer in the context of Stalinist Russia. Artists including composer were not allowed the freedom to express themselves freely in this Communist society. Barnes shares with the reader the frequent close calls between Shostakovich and the Communist party. The composer refuses for many years to avoid joining the Party until he could no longer escape it. He reluctantly joined. The novel was relevant for me because the censorship in Russia was so reminiscent of the censorship of creeping political correctness in America today. It is frightening.This book like much of Barnes is worth a detour.
    • 4/5
      Although I have enjoyed Julian Barnes's books in the past (his Flaubert's Parrot remains a masterpiece, surpassing some of his later production; but I did not dislike The Sense of an Ending, for instance), I approached this volume with some skepticism: what insight, I thought, could a Western writer, who has not experienced fear under a totalitarian regime, have into a tortured Russian soul? Some book reviews also gave me the impression that the book was written as a first-person narrative, which alone seemed to doom it to failure. So it was without high hopes that I picked the book off the recent-arrivals shelf at the local public library. Not only was the book not bad, I found it rather engaging and, if not exactly revelatory, well-researched and insightful. It is clearly informed by readings of Solzhenitsyn, whose One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is mentioned at one point and whose work as a whole contains the best analysis to date of the oppressive individual and collective paranoia generated by an interminable reign of terror.

      Julian Barnes composed his book in short fragments, giving it a rather "airy" appearance. The second-person narration helps put a bit of distance between the speaking voice and the subject whose thoughts and recollections it ventriloquizes, and the paragraph spacing allows the story to move seamlessly between the present, concentrated in distinct moments of awkwardness (waiting on a fifth-floor landing for an ill-fated lift; a return flight from NY; a chauffeured car ride to the composer's dacha) and the past. As a result, the simple past of storytelling is heavily studded with past perfect, which generates the dizzying effect of spiraling into the workings of another's conscience.

      The novel made me think of Czesław Miłosz's Captive Mind which traces four different positions vis-à-vis totalitarian authority and subtly shows how, in a mind captive to latent idealism of the regime, lines between freedom and slavery, courage and cowardice, right and wrong, become blurred and unrecognizable. Julian Barnes's dissection of Shostakovich's half-captive psyche comes quite close to Miłosz's.
    • 5/5
      "Turgenev was not to his literary taste: too civilised, not fantastical enough. He preferred Pushkin and Chekhov, and Gogol best of all. But even Turgenev, for all his faults, had a true Russian pessimism. Indeed, he understood that to be Russian was to be pessimistic. He had also written that, however much you scrubbed a Russian, he would always remain a Russian. That was what Karlo-Marlo and their descendants had never understood. They wanted to be engineers of human souls; but Russians, for all their faults, were not machines. So it was not really engineering they were up to, but scrubbing. Scrub, scrub, scrub, let's wash away all this old Russianess and paint a shiny new Sovietness on top. But it never worked - the paint began to flake off almost as soon as it was applied."

      It's truly amazing what Julian Barnes was able to say with so few words. This fictional biography is stunning. It's polished very near to perfection, and in less than 200 pages, the complicated life and sophisticated music of a composer is laid bare before us. And yet it doesn't feel short. Or succinct. It feels agonizingly long - I cannot imagine being in Dmitri Shostakovich's place; it must have been unbearable, and yet he did bear it.

      "Yes, he loved Shakespeare; before the war, he had written the music for a stage production of Hamlet. Who could doubt that Shakespeare had a profound understanding of the human soul and the human condition? Was there a greater portrayal of the shattering of human illusions than King Lear? No, that was not quite right: not shattering, because that implied a single great crisis. Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away. It was a long and wearisome process, like a toothache reaching far into the soul. But you can pull out a tooth and it will be gone. Illusions, however, even when dead, continue to rot and stink within us. We cannot escape their taste and smell. We carry them around with us all the time. He did. "

      What happens when you live your life the best that you can and it still is not good enough? Shostakovich knew this feeling well. He was eventually forced to join the Party, sign articles that he did not write, make speeches that he did not agree with and prostitute his music. He wanted to be stronger, but he was afraid. The writing here is so palpable that you feel that fear and that disgust and that disappointment in every page. He only wanted to be a composer; he could be a brilliant composer but he did not know how to fight a political system that was so corrupt that you never knew from day to day who would still be standing.

      "Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised."

      If you have not read anything about Shostakovich, I would not recommend starting here. Start with a biography or with Symphony for the City of the Dead, in fact, I highly recommend starting with the second one. It tells his story in a simple and straightforward manner with lots of background information on all the major players and lots of photographs. And it tells the story of just how amazing the writing and performing of his seventh symphony, the one written for Leningrad while it was under siege during WWII really was. It's not that you can't appreciate The Noise of Time without any prior knowledge of Shostakovich, it's just that you will get so much more from Barnes' writing if you do your homework first.
    • 4/5
      The book is historical fiction about the Shostakovich, the Russian composer and deals with the compromises of art in Soviet Russia. More particularly it deals with courage and cowardliness, ideals and compromise all against the process of aging. Contains some great quotes.

    Book preview

    The Noise of Time - Julian Barnes

    Book cover image

    ALSO BY JULIAN BARNES

    FICTION

    Metroland

    Before She Met Me

    Flaubert’s Parrot

    Staring at the Sun

    A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

    Talking It Over

    The Porcupine

    Cross Channel

    England, England

    Love, Etc.

    The Lemon Table

    Arthur & George

    Pulse

    The Sense of an Ending

    NONFICTION

    Letters from London, 1990–1995

    Something to Declare

    The Pedant in the Kitchen

    Nothing to Be Frightened Of

    Levels of Life

    Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

    TRANSLATION

    In the Land of Pain by Alphonse Daudet

    The Noise of Time Julian Barnes alfred a. knopf new york 2016

    THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

    Copyright © 2016 by Julian Barnes

    All rights reserved.

    Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London.

    www.aaknopf.com

    Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

    Grateful acknowledgment is made to Marion Boyars Publishers for permission to reprint an excerpt of A Career from Early Poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by George Reavey. Reprinted by permission of Marion Boyars Publishers.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Barnes, Julian, author.

    Title: The noise of time / Julian Barnes.

    Description: First American edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2015043444 (print) | LCCN 2015048211 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101947241 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101971185 (softcover) | ISBN 9781101947258 (ebook)

    Subjects: LCSH: Shostakovich, Dmitriæi Dmitrievich, 1906–1975—Fiction. | Composers—Soviet Union—Fiction. | Nationalism and communism—Fiction. | Communism and society—History—20th century—Fiction. | Soviet Union—Politics and government—20th century—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Biographical. | FICTION / Historical. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.

    Classification: LCC PR6052.A6657 N65 2016 (print) | LCC PR6052.A6657 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

    LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/​2015043444

    Ebook ISBN 9781101947258

    Cover design by Megan Wilson

    Cover image: Dmitry Shostakovich by Pyotr Vladimirovich Willyams © Glinka Museum of Music Culture, Moscow, Russia/Bridgeman Images

    ep_rh_4.1_148356982_c0_r4

    Contents

    Cover

    Also by Julian Barnes

    Title Page

    Copyright

    Dedication

    Epigraph

    [It happened in...]

    [ One ]: On the Landing

    [ Two ]: On the Plane

    [ Three ]: In the Car

    Author’s Note

    A Note About the Author

    Reading Group Guide

    _148356982_

    for Pat

    One to hear

    One to remember

    And one to drink.

    —traditional

    It happened in the middle of wartime, on a station platform as flat and dusty as the endless plain surrounding it. The idling train was two days out from Moscow, heading east; another two or three to go, depending on coal and troop movements. It was shortly after dawn, but the man—in reality, only half a man—was already propelling himself towards the soft carriages on a low trolley with wooden wheels. There was no way of steering it except to wrench at the contraption’s front edge; and to stop himself from overbalancing, a rope that passed underneath the trolley was looped through the top of his trousers. The man’s hands were bound with blackened strips of cloth, and his skin hardened from begging on streets and stations.

    His father had been a survivor of the previous war. Blessed by the village priest, he had set off to fight for his homeland and the Tsar. By the time he returned, priest and Tsar were gone, and his homeland was not the same. His wife had screamed when she saw what war had done to her husband. Now there was another war, and the same invader was back, except that the names had changed: names on both sides. But nothing else had changed: young men were still blown to bits by guns, then roughly sliced by surgeons. His own legs had been removed in a field hospital among broken trees. It was all in a great cause, as it had been the time before. He did not give a fuck. Let others argue about that; his only concern was to get to the end of each day. He had become a technique for survival. Below a certain point, that was what all men became: techniques for survival.

    A few passengers had descended to take the dusty air; others had their faces at the carriage windows. As the beggar approached, he would start roaring out a filthy barrack-room song. Some passengers might toss him a kopeck or two for the entertainment; others pay him to move on. Some deliberately threw coins to land on their edge and roll away, and would laugh as he chased after them, his fists working against the concrete platform. This might make others, out of pity or shame, hand over money more directly. He saw only fingers, coins and coat sleeves, and was impervious to insult. This was the one who drank.

    The two men travelling in soft class were at a window, trying to guess where they were and how long they might be stopping for: minutes, hours, perhaps the whole day. No information was given out, and they knew not to ask. Enquiring about the movement of trains—even if you were a passenger on one—could mark you as a saboteur. The men were in their thirties, well old enough to have learnt such lessons. The one who heard was a thin, nervous fellow with spectacles; around his neck and wrists he wore amulets of garlic. His travelling companion’s name is lost to history, even though he was the one who remembered.

    The trolley with the half-man aboard now rattled towards them. Cheerful lines about some village rape were bellowed up at them. The singer paused and made the eating sign. In reply, the man with spectacles held up a bottle of vodka. It was a needless gesture of politeness. When had a beggar ever turned down vodka? A minute later, the two passengers joined him on the platform.

    And so there were three of them, the traditional vodka-drinking number. The one with spectacles still had the bottle, his companion three glasses. These were filled approximately, and the two travellers bent from the waist and uttered the routine toast to health. As they clinked glasses, the nervous fellow put his head on one side—the early-morning sun flashing briefly on his spectacles—and murmured a remark; his friend laughed. Then they threw the vodka down in one go. The beggar held up his glass for more. They gave him another shot, took the glass from him, and climbed back on the train. Thankful for the burst of alcohol coursing through his truncated body, the beggar wheeled himself towards the next group of passengers. By the time the two men were in their seats again, the one who heard had almost forgotten what he had said. But the one who remembered was only at the start of his remembering.

    [ ONE ]

    On the Landing

    All he knew was that this was the worst time.

    —

    He had been standing by the lift for three hours. He was on his fifth cigarette, and his mind was skittering.

    —

    Faces, names, memories. Cut peat weighing down his hand. Swedish water birds flickering above his head. Fields of sunflowers. The smell of carnation oil. The warm, sweet smell of Nita coming off the tennis court. Sweat oozing from a widow’s peak. Faces, names.

    —

    The faces and names of the dead, too.

    —

    He could have brought a chair from the apartment. But his nerves would in any case have kept him upright. And it would look decidedly eccentric, sitting down to wait for the lift.

    —

    His situation had come out of the blue, and yet it was perfectly logical. Like the rest of life. Like sexual desire, for instance. That came out of the blue, and yet it was perfectly logical.

    —

    He tried to keep his mind on Nita, but his mind disobeyed. It was like a bluebottle, noisy and promiscuous. It landed on Tanya, of course. But then off it buzzed to that girl, that Rozaliya. Did he blush to remember her, or was he secretly proud of that perverse incident?

    —

    The Marshal’s patronage—that had also come out of the blue, and yet it was perfectly logical. Could the same be said of the Marshal’s fate?

    —

    Jurgensen’s affable, bearded face; and with it, the memory of his mother’s fierce, angry fingers around his wrist. And his father, his sweet-natured, lovable, impractical father, standing by the piano and singing The Chrysanthemums in the Garden Have Long Since Faded.

    —

    The 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. Then the lift stopped at a lower floor, and his faculties reengaged. He picked up his case and felt the contents softly shift. Which made his mind jump to the story of Prokofiev’s pyjamas.

    —

    No, not like a bluebottle. More like one of those mosquitoes in Anapa. Landing anywhere, drawing blood.

    —

    He had thought, standing here, that he would be in charge of his mind. But at night, alone, it seemed that his mind was in charge of him. Well, there is no escaping one’s destiny, as the poet assured us. And no escaping one’s mind.

    —

    He remembered the pain that night before they took his appendix out. Throwing up twenty-two times, swearing all the swear words he knew at a nurse, then begging a friend to fetch the militiaman to shoot him and end the pain. Get him to come in and shoot me to end the pain, he had pleaded. But the friend had refused to help.

    —

    He didn’t need a friend and a militiaman now. There were enough volunteers already.

    —

    It had all begun, very precisely, he told his mind, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, at Arkhangelsk railway station. No, his mind responded, nothing begins just like that, on a certain date at a certain place. It all began in many places, and at many times, some even before you were born, in foreign countries, and in the minds of others.

    —

    And afterwards, whatever might happen next, it would all continue in the same way, in other places, and in the minds of others.

    —

    He thought of cigarettes: packs of Kazbek, Belomor, Herzegovina Flor. Of a man crumbling the tobacco from half a dozen papirosy into his pipe, leaving on the desk a debris of cardboard tubes and paper.

    —

    Could it, even at this late stage, be mended, put back, reversed? He knew the answer: what the doctor said about the restoration of the Nose. Of course it can be put back, but I assure you, you will be the worse for it.

    —

    He thought about Zakrevsky, and the Big House, and who might have replaced Zakrevsky there. Someone would have done. There was never a shortage of Zakrevskys, not in this world, constituted as it was. Perhaps when Paradise was achieved, in almost exactly 200,000,000,000 years’ time, the Zakrevskys would no longer need to exist.

    —

    At moments his mind refused to believe what was happening. It can’t be, because it couldn’t ever be, as the Major said when he saw the giraffe. But it could be, and it was.

    —

    Destiny. It was just a grand term for something you could do nothing about. When life said to you, And so, you nodded, and called it destiny. And so, it had been his destiny to be called Dmitri Dmitrievich. There was nothing to be done about that. Naturally, he didn’t remember his own christening, but had no reason to doubt the truth of the story. The family had all assembled in his father’s study around a portable font. The priest arrived, and asked his parents what name they intended for the newborn. Yaroslav, they had replied. Yaroslav? The priest was not happy with this. He said that it was a most unusual name. He said that children with unusual names were teased and mocked at school: no, no, they couldn’t call the boy Yaroslav. His father and mother were perplexed by such forthright opposition, but didn’t wish to give offence. What name do you suggest then? they asked. Call him something ordinary, said the priest: Dmitri, for instance. His father pointed out that he himself was already called Dmitri, and that Yaroslav Dmitrievich sounded much better than Dmitri Dmitrievich. But the priest did not agree. And so he became Dmitri Dmitrievich.

    —

    What did a name matter? He had been born in St. Petersburg, started growing up in Petrograd, finished growing up in Leningrad. Or St. Leninsburg, as he sometimes liked to call it. What did a name matter?

    —

    He was thirty-one. His wife Nita lay a few yards away with their daughter, Galina, at her side. Galya was a year old. Recently, his life had appeared to acquire stability. He had never found that side of things straightforward. He felt powerful emotions but had never become skilled at expressing them. Even at a football match he rarely yelled and lost control of himself like everyone else; he was content with the quiet annotation of a player’s skill, or lack of it. Some thought this the typical buttoned-up formality of a Leningrader; but on top of that—or underneath it—he knew he was a shy and anxious person. And with women, when he lost his shyness, he veered between absurd enthusiasm and lurching despair. It was as if he was always on the wrong metronome setting.

    Still, even so, his life had finally acquired some regularity, and with it the correct beat. Except that now it had all become unstable again. Unstable: that was more than a euphemism.

    —

    The overnight case resting against his calf reminded him of the time he had tried to run away from home. How old had he been? Seven or eight, perhaps. And did he have a little suitcase with him? Probably not—his mother’s exasperation would have been too immediate. It was one summer at Irinovka, where his father worked as general manager. Jurgensen was the estate’s handyman. Who made things and mended things, who solved problems in the way a child could understand. Who never instructed him to do anything, just let him watch as a piece of wood turned into a dagger or a whistle. Who handed him a piece of fresh-cut peat and allowed him to sniff it.

    He had become very attached to Jurgensen. So when things displeased him, as they frequently did, he would say, Very well then, I’ll go and live with Jurgensen. One morning, still in bed, he had made this threat, or promise, for

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