The Noise of Time: A Novel (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes (Epub)

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One of the Best Books of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle1936: 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. An extraordinary portrait of a relentlessly fascinating man, The Noise of Time is a stunning meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Brilliant. . . . As elegantly constructed as a concerto.” —NPR “A condensed masterpiece that traces the lifelong battle of one man’s conscience, one man’s art, with the insupportable exigencies of totalitarianism.” —The Guardian (London)“Brilliant. . . . Leads us to places only a handful of novelists have the skill and the courage to go.” —The Boston Globe “Barnes’s storytelling is phenomenal; Shostakovich, as tragic and anxious as he is, is utterly fascinating. “ —The Christian Science Monitor“A powerful portrait . . . Barnes does wonderful work on the key scenes. . . . The whole Kafka madhouse brought to life.” —The New York Times Book Review “Exquisite.” —O, The Oprah Magazine “Beautifully written. There is a wonderful rhythm to the prose—long passages are broken up by staccato bursts of single sentences—and Mr. Barnes writes with a crystalline clarity.” —The Wall Street Journal “A tense and elegant study of terror, shame and cowardice, of a celebrated artist capitulating to power, yet on his own terms. . . . Barnes interweaves the painful and the sublime to achieve an epic orchestral effect.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “Affecting. . . . In his impressionistic portrait of Shostakovich, the man and the artist, Barnes balances sympathy with a tough-minded clarity. . . . In its examination of the totalitarian state through the life of a single victim, The Noise of Time stands in an honored literary tradition.” —The Miami Herald “Undoubtedly one of Barnes’s best novels.” —The Sunday Times (London) “Powerfully imagined and chillingly lucid. . . . Moving . . . Barnes takes us inside the composer’s mind, observing how he reacts to the ceaseless demands of power.” —The Millions “Excellent. . . . The author’s achievement here: to not only capture the mood of fear under which Shostakovich worked but also create a tribute to the struggle of all artists.” —The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “Moving. . . . Renders Shostakovich’s wrenching personal and political conflicts in a way that makes them impossible to forget or ignore. . . . Barnes’s writing is elegant, his curiosity boundless, and his intellect formidable.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “Magnificent. . . . Novels about artistic achievement rarely do justice to their subjects. The Noise of Time is that rarity. It is a novel of tremendous grace and power, giving voice to the complex and troubled man whose music outlasted the state that sought to silence him.” —Anthony Marra, Publishers Weekly About the Author Julian Barnes is the author of twenty previous books. He has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in France, the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina; and in Austria, the State Prize for European Literature. In 2004 he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in London. www.julianbarnes.com Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. And so, it had all begun, very precisely, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, in Arkhangelsk. He had been invited to perform his first piano concerto with the local orchestra under Viktor Kubatsky; the two of them had also played his new cello sonata. It had gone well. The next morning he went to the railway station to buy a copy of Pravda. He had looked at the front page briefly, then turned to the next two. It was, as he would later put it, the most memorable day of his life. And a date he chose to mark each year until his death.Except that—as his mind obstinately argued back—nothing ever begins as precisely as that. It began in different places, and in different minds. The true starting point might have been his own fame. Or his opera. Or it might have been Stalin, who, being infallible, was therefore responsible for everything. Or it could have been caused by something as simple as the layout of an orchestra. Indeed, that might finally be the best way of looking at it: a composer first denounced and humiliated, later arrested and shot, all because of the layout of an orchestra.If it all began elsewhere, and in the minds of others, then perhaps he could blame Shakespeare, for having written Macbeth. Or Leskov for Russifying it into Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. No, none of that. It was, self-evidently, his own fault for having written the piece that offended. It was his opera’s fault for being such a success—at home and abroad—it had aroused the curiosity of the Kremlin. It was Stalin’s fault because he would have inspired and approved the Pravda editorial—perhaps even written it himself: there were enough grammatical errors to suggest the pen of one whose mistakes could never be corrected. It was also Stalin’s fault for imagining himself a patron and connoisseur of the arts in the first place. He was known never to miss a performance of Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi. He was almost as keen on Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko. Why should Stalin not want to hear this acclaimed new opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk?And so, the composer was instructed to attend a performance of his own work on the 26th of January 1936. Comrade Stalin would be there; also Comrades Molotov, Mikoyan and Zhdanov. They took their places in the government box. Which had the misfortune to be situated immediately above the percussion and the brass. Sections which in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk were not scored to behave in a modest and self-effacing fashion.He remembered looking across from the director’s box, where he was seated, to the government box. Stalin was hidden behind a small curtain, an absent presence to whom the other distinguished comrades would sycophantically turn, knowing that they were themselves observed. Given the occasion, both conductor and orchestra were understandably nervous. In the entr’acte before Katerina’s wedding, the woodwind and brass suddenly took it upon themselves to play more loudly than he had scored. And then it was like a virus spreading through each section. If the conductor noticed, he was powerless. Louder and louder the orchestra became; and every time the percussion and brass roared fortissimo beneath them—loud enough to knock out windowpanes—Comrades Mikoyan and Zhdanov would shudder theatrically, turn to the figure behind the curtain and make some mocking remark. When the audience looked up to the government box at the start of the fourth act, they saw that it had been vacated. After the performance, he had collected his briefcase and gone straight to the Northern Station to catch the train for Arkhangelsk. He remembered thinking that the government box had been specially reinforced with steel plates, to protect its occupants against assassination. But that there was no such cladding to the director’s box. He was not yet thirty, and his wife was five months pregnant at the time. 1936: he had always been superstitious about leap years. Like many people, he believed that they brought bad luck. # Those who did not know him, and who followed music only from a distance, probably imagined that this had been his first setback. That the brilliant nineteen-year-old whose First Symphony was quickly taken up by Bruno Walter, then by Toscanini and Klemperer, had known nothing but a clear, clean decade of success since that premiere in 1926. And such people, perhaps aware that fame often leads to vanity and self-importance, might open their Pravda and agree that composers could easily stray from writing the kind of music people wanted to hear. And further, since all composers were employed by the state, that it was the state’s duty, if they offended, to intervene and draw them back into greater harmony with their audience. This sounded entirely reasonable, didn’t it?Except that they had practised sharpening their claws on his soul from the beginning: while he was still at the Conservatoire a group of Leftist fellow students had tried to have him dismissed and his stipend removed. Except that the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians and similar cultural organisations had campaigned from their inception against what he stood for; or rather, what they thought he stood for. They were determined to break the bourgeois stranglehold on the arts. So workers must be trained to become composers, and all music must be instantly comprehensible and pleasing to the masses. Tchaikovsky was decadent, and the slightest experimentation condemned as “formalism.”Except that as early as 1929 he had been officially denounced, told that his music was “straying from the main road of Soviet art,” and sacked from his post at the Choreographic Technical College. Except that in the same year Misha Kvadri, the dedicatee of his First Symphony, became the first of his friends and associates to be arrested and shot. Except that in 1932, when the Party dissolved the independent organisations and took charge of all cultural matters, this had resulted not in a taming of arrogance, bigotry and ignorance, rather in a systematic concentration of them. And if the plan to take a worker from the coal face and turn him into a composer of symphonies did not exactly come to pass, something of the reverse happened. A composer was expected to increase his output just as a coal miner was, and his music was expected to warm hearts just as a miner’s coal warmed bodies. Bureaucrats assessed musical output as they did other categories of output; there were established norms, and deviations from those norms. # At Arkhangelsk railway station, opening Pravda with chilled fingers, he had found on page three a headline identifying and condemning deviance: muddle instead of music. He determined at once to return home via Moscow, where he would seek advice. On the train, as the frozen landscape passed, he reread the article for the fifth and sixth times. Initially, he had been shocked as much for his opera as for himself: after such a denunciation, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk could not possibly continue at the Bolshoi. For the last two years, it had been applauded everywhere—from New York to Cleveland, from Sweden to Argentina. In Moscow and Leningrad, it had pleased not just the public and the critics, but also the political commissars. At the time of the 17th Party Congress its performances had been listed as part of the Moscow district’s official output, which aimed to compete with the production quotas of the Donbass coal miners.All this meant nothing now: his opera was to be put down like a yapping dog which had suddenly displeased its master. He tried to analyse the different elements of the attack as clearheadedly as possible. First, his opera’s very success, especially abroad, was turned against it. Only a few months before, Pravda had patriotically reported the work’s American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Now the same paper knew that Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had only succeeded outside the Soviet Union because it was “non-political and confusing,” and because it “tickled the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music.”Next, and linked to this, was what he thought of as government-box criticism, an articulation of those smirks and yawns and sycophantic turnings towards the hidden Stalin. So he read how his music “quacks and grunts and growls”; how its “nervous, convulsive and spasmodic” nature derived from jazz; how it replaced singing with “shrieking.” The opera had clearly been scribbled down in order to please the “effete,” who had lost all “wholesome taste” for music, preferring “a confused stream of sound.” As for the libretto, it deliberately concentrated on the most sordid parts of Leskov’s tale: the result was “coarse, primitive and vulgar.”But his sins were political as well. So the anonymous analysis by someone who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges was decorated with those familiar, vinegar-soaked labels. Petit-bourgeois, formalist, Meyerholdist, Leftist. The composer had written not an opera but an anti-opera, with music deliberately turned inside out. He had drunk from the same poisoned source which produced “Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science.” In case it needed spelling out—and it always did—Leftism was contrasted with “real art, real science and real literature.” “Those that have ears will hear,” he always liked to say. But even the stone deaf couldn’t fail to hear what “Muddle Instead of Music” was saying, and guess its likely consequences. There were three phrases which aimed not just at his theoretical misguidedness but at his very person. “The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music.” That was enough to take away his membership in the Union of Composers. “The dan­ger of this trend to Soviet music is clear.” That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: “It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.” That was enough to take away his life. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Somewhere, I now forget where, I stumbled across the following quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize-winning author of, among others, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago:“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more—we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”It’s worth keeping that quote, that sentiment, in mind when reading Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time. Barnes’ novel about Dmitri Shostakovich opens with the composer standing by the elevator in his apartment building all night long, with a small overnight bag at his feet, smoking endless cigarettes as he waits for Stalin’s security officers to come take him away. Those who were unlucky enough to drift into Stalin’s vast (seven million or more dead) and frequently merely peripheral web of disfavor were invariably taken away during the night, and Shostakovich’s standing by the elevator is his personal act of courage, his desperate effort to save his wife and children.I am not knowledgeable or sophisticated enough to appreciate this novel from a musical perspective, but it doesn’t matter because what it really is about is courage, not the great, courageous stroke of the hero, but the small and varying courage it takes to live—to endure—for decades in fear. You cooperate here, resist a little bit there when you dare, bow low and weigh your words carefully this morning, then try to recoup a tiny fraction of self-respect by taking a small stand this afternoon. The subtle stands of resistance—a musical masterpiece like the Fifth Symphony—are offset by the capitulations that breed self-loathing and regret for the opera not written. Courage, under Stalin, had to be used by the teaspoon. Shostakovich recounts the experience of a friend, a violinist who expected to be arrested. Instead, the secret police came, night after night, and each time they arrested someone else in the violinist’s apartment building, gradually working their way up, night by night, apartment by apartment, floor by floor, until at last the entire building was vacant except for the violinist. And that gradual, casual murdering of everyone else, of totally innocent people whose only crime was to have lived in the wrong building, made the violinist completely, utterly compliant. Fear is a powerful weapon, more powerful than death, because after all the dead are immune; nothing more can be done to them.Barnes has an odd writing style, a detached, cerebral style that in the only other book of his that I’ve read, Flaubert’s Parrot, I disliked. It’s as if he uses his own writing to keep all emotion at arm’s length. (In Flaubert’s Parrot, the narrator is so cold and emotionally detached that the result is there is no one in the novel for the reader to identify and empathize with. I found myself thinking of Herman Melville’s comment in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, discussing the relative value of emotion versus intellect in art: “I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head!”) Yet here, in The Noise of Time, that same distancing of emotion works, in part because the only way a man can find the courage to stand, night after night, by an elevator, waiting to be arrested, is by distancing himself from emotion. And by showing us a man who will sacrifice himself to save his wife and children, you have automatically presented someone the reader can empathize with, not a hero, not even a consistently brave man, but one who, like most of us, screws his courage to the sticking place when he can, and hates himself when he can’t.Readers with more musicality than I may get more out of this book, but its universality lies in its harrowing portrayal of what it’s like to live in fear, not for a day or a week or a year, but for decade after decade, and then, at the end, to look back and to think of what one might have done, might have accomplished if only one hadn’t been afraid. If only. If…if.It’s a lesson to be kept in mind.

⭐As a native Russian speaker, I am blown away by this book. Julian Barnes clearly has a way with the English language. His writing is beautiful. But the truly magical thing is how he manages to capture a highly nuanced language like Russian. Combined with the narration of Daniel Philpott – I know I’m listening to English but inside my head I hear the Russian equivalent, not a literal translation but the feel of what is being said.In terms of the story, it’s pure heartbreak from start to finish. In doing other reading about Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, I can honestly say I can’t say where the real story ends and Barnes’ fictional version takes over. Even those familiar with Shostakovich’s life story, it’s as if I’m finding it for the first time and my hear breaks all over again.

⭐In the novel “The Noise of Time,” British writer Julian Barnes tells the story of one musician and composer who often found himself on the razor’s edge of existence in the Soviet Union. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was the outstanding composer of the Soviet era in Russia; he also collaborated, however reluctantly, with the regime.Barnes uses three events in Shostakovich’s life, in 1936, 1948, and 1960.In 1936, while still a young man, Shostakovich finds himself increasingly the target of the regime, ostensibly because of an allegedly anti-Soviet opera based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The campaign against him has gone so far that he has been described in print as “an enemy of the people.” For a considerable period of time, he spends the night by the elevator of his apartment house, a suitcase by his side, waiting for the secret police to arrest him.In 1948, Shostakovich is allowed to travel to New York to participate in a Soviet-arranged propaganda event and give a pre-approved (and pre-written) speech. In 1960, the composer is being driven by a state chauffeur, summoned to meet with “The Corncob,” a nickname for Kruschchev.Barnes uses each event to tell the story of Shostakovich’s life under the Soviet regime, his marriages, his work, but most of all his grappling with survival as an artist during a time and with a regime that will not tolerate any deviance from the official line. Even as that line is constantly changing. It is easy to criticize, Shostakovich muses, but then those who do weren’t there. If they had been, they wouldn’t be here now.In the hands of Barnes, that is what Shostakovich’s life becomes – a struggle between the art, the music, he is creating and survival in the face of a murderous regime that will grind down artistic integrity, originality, creativity, and innovation. It is a difficult time in which to survive physically, but the composer will come to realize that the most dangerous time is not when your life and freedom are constantly threatened but when they are not.Barnes, born in 1946, is a novelist, essayist, short story writer, and translator. His novel “The Sense of an Ending” won the Man Booker Prize in 2011.“The Noise of Time” is a remarkable novel, relatively short, but packed with realities that stop the reader and constantly make him reflect and consider. It may be easy to shrug off Shostakovich as a Soviet collaborator, despite his artistic achievements, but then, we weren’t there.

⭐Men who sell their souls to the devil often pretend that they had not, for an admission of such a vile deed immediately corrupts and destroys their achievements fully and entirely, so they pretend that they had always been pure so that they can continue to bask in all the glory that falls on them through that sale. But it is conceivable that some might be so wreaked by their conscience that they become permanently miserable till the day they give up their own ghost.What was Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovic? Had he sold himself to Stalin and the Communists Party? Or was he lucky that although branded by the Party to be a reactionary, dabbling in the music of formalism, he, unlike other composers, was protected? The day after Stalin watched his opera, ‘Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’ the official newspaper Pravda denounced Shostakovich’s opera as ‘Muddle instead of music’. That was 37 January 1936. A year later, he was brought for gentle interrogation under suspicion of conspiring with Marshal Tukhachevsky. Some months later, the Marshal was executed.No one knows what happened in the investigation – except the interviewer Zakrevsky, and Shostakovich. We are told in almost all biographical accounts of Shostakovich’s life, that Zakrevsky himself disappeared the weekend after interviewing Shostakovich. The truth may never be known. From the biographical portraits, some see Shostakovich as a patriot. Some see him as a dissident.Julian Barnes presents a third version of Shostakovich; a humane and sympathetic one. Barnes is fully aware that the truth may never be known, and although he does not rush to judgment, nor does he think Shostakovich was a secretly heroic dissident. Barnes takes us through the major events in the life of Shostakovic and shows us the torment and humiliations Shostakovich had suffered, and challenges us to condemn DD Shostakovich if we believe that he sold out to the communists – if we are able to say that we would have acted differently were we in his shoes.

⭐This is one of the descriptions of art given in this novella about the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, a person about whom the only thing I vaguely remembered was that he wrote “A Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism” following denunciation by the authorities. That appears in this tale, but – in an indication of the Kafkaesque world in which he was forced to live – it turns out that was a journalist’s description of his Fifth Symphony with which the composer was obliged to agree.Beset by the oppressive regime, he tries to maintain personal integrity and a distinctive musical voice, but – according to Barnes’s representation of Shostakovich’s inner voice – is unsuccessful in these strivings. This is reinforced by the three episodes in the composer’s life on which the story focusses: firstly, awaiting interrogation following Pravda’s description of his opera as “Muddle instead of music”; then being forced into a humiliating denunciation of Stravinsky (a composer he admired) during a Soviet propaganda trip to New York and finally being compelled to join the Party and serve as chairman of the Composers’ Union. Even after the terror of Stalin has given way to the slightly less repressive era of Khrushchev, he finds that any attempt at accomodation, or request to be left alone, is doomed, because “however much you gave, they wanted more” [p107].This is a moving, disturbing account of one man’s struggle with dictators, his conscience and his art. It’s not a pleasant read, but it’s certainly a worthwhile one. Recommended.

⭐I usually like Julian Barnes, but found this book heavy going. In some ways it was more like a biography, and I was wanting to read a novel. There was also an awful lot of philosophising that seemed to go nowhere! I don’t know much about Russian composers and felt I needed to be more aware of their work in order to appreciate some of the relationships.

⭐I wouldn’t say I enjoyed reading this but I am really pleased I did read it. I’ve learnt so much about the Russian composers and understanding the socio-political environment in which they were working really helps in understanding and appreciating their music. I knew so little about Stalin’s Russia and this was a great catalyst to go off and do other reading. It seems (worryingly) very relevant reading in today’s world of Donald Trump, and made me think carefully over that phrase that has been going around ‘when you were in history lessons and thought “well why didn’t those people just stand up to the powers?” – well are you doing that now’… it’s a lot harder in real life isn’t it?

⭐This engagingly immediate novella by one of our intellectual giants has (of course) writing that pings with bell-like clarity. Barnes justifies fictionalising Shostakovich’s life in part because he fictionalised it himself through multi-layered response and non-response to the intrusions of Power. For example, while the soubriquet ‘A Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism’ was actually written by a journalist after the Fifth was premiered, Dmitri never challenged assumptions that he had written it onto the manuscript. At a time of unprecedented suspicion of expertise and increasing constraints on the independence of academics and professionals, the book offers considerable food for thought.

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