The Noise of Time: A Novel (Vintage International)

A very slow read with much repetition, but I suppose the story had to be told that way. How else can a novel convey the sensation of spending night-after-night, fully dressed, waiting for the ominous knock on the door? What to pack for being taken away to an endless interrogation? Likewise, Shostakovich is not depicted with much personality; a timid little man whose closest relationships are uxorious. Not a hero who beat the system, but a survivor.

Many of these stories about the life of Shostakovich have been told elsewhere to greater effect. The bitter dissatisfaction of Shostakovich at hearing Toscanini conduct his music is told with more passion in The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power by Norman Lebrecht.

The novel is also disappointing because of what it leaves out. How, for example, did Shostakovich survive the famine during the siege of Leningrad? Curiously, I bought this book because of the reviews, and throughout, I found the reviews to be more interesting. For example, it's quite obvious that his Fifth Symphony was written to be a crowd pleaser at a time when Shostakovich was in greatest jeopardy. It may have saved his career, but the symphony didn't become the most popular of the century (a couple of years ago, I read that every major orchestra in North America had programmed it for that season) until Leonard Bernstein's fulsome interpretation brought out the bombast of the ending. A controversy yet exists as to whether the fustian ending is a celebration of Stalin's triumph or a lampooning of it. No discussion of this interesting topic is found in the novel. (I for one, am thoroughly jaded with the symphony, and I have no wish to hear it, or Ravel's Bolero, ever again.)

Over-and-over there are scenes of barbarous injustice at the hands of the Soviets, and the whole point of the book is to marvel at how Shostakovich overcame such oppression to write music with universal appeal. But it wasn't just Shostakovich. During the Soviet era, many musical artists flourished. The novel contains numerous references to Sergei Prokofiev, whose music continues to be performed frequently, but not Aram Khachaturian, whose Saber Dance became the mandatory music when plate-spinners were shown on televised US variety shows. Likewise, at one time, the music of Dmitry Kabalevsky (mentioned once in the book and a real brown-noser to the Soviets) was more famous and popular in the US than that of Shostakovich. (We played his popular but difficult Colas Breugnon overture in high school, and you'd recognize his suite from The Comedians.) True, some of the titles of the music Shostakovich was ostensibly forced to write are embarrassing — along the lines of Highest Praise for Comrade Stalin! — but I enjoy Soviet propaganda music. I would go so far as to say that I think that Time, Forward! by Georgy Sviridov is a finer piece of music than many of the movements of the symphonies by Shostakovich. (Particularly when, as is typical, he has the orchestra break into a mad galop in the final movement. Comrade Stalin should've threatened Shostakovich for overuse of the xylophone and snare drum.) Who can fail to sigh in admiration at the lovely Ave Maria by Vladimir Vavilov (often misattributed to Caccini)? And you should be familiar with In the Path of Thunder by Gara Garayev, whom Shostakovich himself praised.

The point of my mentioning these other composers is that the novel depicts a bleak and monochromatic picture of an unrelentingly oppressive environment which crushed creativity and artistry. (If the novel were a piece of music instead, it would consist of a D-minor chord repeated over-and-over.) But during the same period, how many great composers did the Land of the Free produce? Of course, in gathering names for such a comparison, we must consider that African-Americans endured far more oppressive circumstances than any Russian, so they should not be included. We then find that America's greatest composers are all Jews — Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Elmer Bernstein, Morton Gould, Stephen Sondheim, Bernard Herrmann, George Gershwin, Artie Shaw, Richard Rodgers, & al. So if life under the yoke of the Soviet system was so hopeless, how is it that they produced the greatest composers of the twentieth century, while the (caucasian) U.S. produced . . .
. . . John Cage? (May we have a moment of silence for the late John Cage?)

That is my complaint. I don't care for novels that are so one sided — as if I were being sold a bill of goods. No, I certainly wouldn't want to have lived in the old Soviet Union, but neither would I want to live in modern-day Russia. This novel might have been more interesting had Barnes introduced a sympathetic Soviet minister or a sinister depiction of Leonard Bernstein, but the only character throughout this novel is the cardboard Shostakovich, and that makes for a drab read.

I have a suggestion for your amusement. While reading the novel, take note of the other composers, particularly those who opposed (or did an Iago on) Shostakovich, and listen to the snippets of their music which can be found at this site. Some of them aren't as bad as one might expect. Tikhon Khrennikov, who, as Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers for life, was the chief tormentor of Shostakovich, wrote moderately sophisticated music which ironically sounds like imitation Shostakovich.

A good read because of its moods and altering voices that use a different pronoun for the subject-shifting from first person to second: I/he . An external as well as internal perspective of a famous man's battle with self in the face of absolute power -an apology as well as a defense for genius in the midst of physical and psychological oppression .

A good read because of its moods and altering voices that use a different pronoun for the subject-shifting from first person to second: I/he . An external as well as internal perspective of a famous man's battle with self in the face of absolute power -an apology as well as a defense for genius in the midst of physical and psychological oppression .

I will start out by saying that I am a huge Julian Barnes fan. I don't think his writing is necessarily for everyone and I've found that when I don't love something he's written if I simply read it a second time, I will fall fast. The Noise of Time isn't a book I had to read twice; I loved it the first time. The book follows the life of Russian composer Shostakovich; someone whose music I was only semi-familiar with. It didn't truly matter seeing as this is a fictionalized account of his life- based on facts and history, but fictionalized nonetheless. However, I had absolutely no background on the composer's life, nor had I ever really considered challenges artists faced in communist countries.

The Noise of Time had me seriously thankful I live where in the world I live in. Where artists have the freedom to do whatever they want. Imagine having to consider the government whenever you composed a song, painted a picture, or write a novel? The other thing this book did was have me researching Shostakovich in my own time; someone I had never really had any interest in before. I'm not a musician and I don't have any special interest in classical music, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book. And that is exactly what a good writer can do. I hope Julian Barnes never stops writing.

This musical history is made the better by the gifted writing of Mr. Barnes. Surely, musicologists world over will find solace in the pain of writing and of life in the times of Shostakovich. A masterpiece of literature and tribute to a great artist.

Shostakovich was a difficult person, but this book does not help. Yes, he obeyed Stalin, but Krushchec pointed that out soon, and the author keeps going on and on as f it were a discovery. A book I will not keep.

insipid.
the fictionalization of Shostakovich's life has already been done, and quite more expertly, by National Book Award winning William T. Vollmann in his Europe Central.
Barnes' is lazy and inept.

Julian Barnes’ “The Noise of Time” is a fictional journey into the personal torments of Dmitri Shostakovich, Russia’s pre-eminent 20th century composer. Chronological, elliptical, this short book is the dissection of an anxiety filled artist, who, during Stalin’s purges, at night, packed his carrying bag to wait nervously, outside his apartment, cigarette in hand, for the arrival of the henchman of the “Power” to drive him away and put a bullet in the back of his head. This was the self-admitted coward who misjudged his capacity for “irony” in his hand signals to friends and admirers by signing pre-drafted denunciations of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, even Chekhov, who learned about “the destruction of the human soul, ” in the Age of Stalin and in the post Stalin time of “Nikolai the Corncob.”

Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff fled, Oistrakh and Rostropovich as well, Prokofiev left and then surprisingly returned in 1936, Shostakovich remained in the Soviet Union. What Barnes puts into words in this short, tantalizing, cubistic styled book; the composer affirms in his cri de coeur in his violin and cello concertos.

This is about a besieged artist’s life in the Soviet Union who knew that music is not composed for the masses, or the Leader, but “music, in the end, belonged to music. That was all you could say, or wish for.”

A man stands by the lift in his apartment block in the middle of the night, waiting for the men from the 'Big House' to come for him. It is 1936 in the Stalinist USSR, and the man is Shostakovich. The state newspaper Pravda has deemed his latest opera to be “Muddle instead of Music” - a piece designed for the bourgeoisie and therefore not acceptable for a Soviet audience. Now Shostakovich is expecting to be hauled away and grilled about his political beliefs, a dangerous thing for an artist under this brutal regime.

This is a barely fictionalised biography of the composer, focussing on three major episodes in his life each 12 years apart. Shostakovich was eventually brought back into favour and even sent off to represent the regime in the US, but he lived always under the fear that one day he would again be ostracised, or worse. It is clearly well-researched, and is well-written, with Barnes using Shostakovich's life as a vehicle to muse on the position of artists under totalitarian regimes.

Barnes looks at questions of bravery and cowardice, compromise and its debilitating effect on artistic freedom, and the blindness of the regime to the subtleties of irony. He shows clearly how an individual knew that any decision he reached might impact severely on his families and friends, and how this made the question of defying the regime more complex than the simple matter of personal bravery it might at first sight seem. One of the more interesting sections discusses the response of people living safely in the West, expecting Soviet artists to be willing martyrs without an understanding of the realities of living in perpetual fear, not just for themselves but for those around them.

I often find Barnes' writing cold, and this short book falls into that category. In fact, I found myself questioning whether it could really be defined as a novel at all. It reads more like a series of connected essays based on carefully selected vignettes from the lives of Shostakovich and other composers of the time. It's interesting enough and certainly readable, but I found it provoked surprisingly little emotional response in me considering the subject matter, nor did it add anything significant to a subject that has been dealt with many times before both fictionally and factually.

I found myself comparing it to the novella Peredelkino in Ken Kalfus' collection Pu-239 And Other Russian Fantasies, which tells essentially the same story about a writer caught under the restrictions of the Soviet regime. Kalfus' story addresses the issues just as insightfully, but is much more clearly a fiction, with all the contrasts of light and shade that I felt Barnes' book lacks.

So, in conclusion, this is an interesting read, but for me it fell between two camps and didn't quite fit well in either: too cold and unemotional, and a little too polemical, to work fully as a piece of fiction; and without enough depth or detail to be fully satisfying as a factual account of Shostakovich's life.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Random House Vintage.

This latest work by Julian Barnes looks at the life of the composer Shostakovich. Rather than give us a straightforward, fictional biography, the author takes three key points in his life. He begins in 1936, when the composer finds himself denounced in Stalinist Russia. As critics trip over themselves to find fault with his work, Shostakovich waits – dressed and with his small suitcase packed – for those in Power to take him to the Big House…

Shostakovich was living in a dangerous time and the author perfectly creates that period of intense fear, speculation and danger. When a visitor from the Party commentates that he likes the composer’s study, but that it lacks a portrait of Stalin, you can almost feel the composer break out in a cold sweat. Throughout this novel, the composer constantly castigates himself for cowardice. However, when he does feel that he will disappear in the 1930’s, his concern is not just for himself but his wife and baby daughter, as well as his friends and family. Will his beloved child, Galya, be trundled off to a State orphanage if her father is discredited? So begins an uneasy truce with Power.

We meet up with Shostakovich again; after a visit to the United States in 1948, where he is ordered to represent his country at the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace and again, in 1960, when he is offered the Chairmanship of the Russian Federation Union of Composers. During this time, he feels humiliation and shame, as he endeavours to continue his work and keep his family safe in this period of political danger.

I expect that many will read this novel and find it fairly slow and quiet; perhaps too slow. However, this is certainly a novel which has stayed with me and I found it profoundly disquieting and extremely atmospheric. It has made me wish to discover more about the central character and I feel that Barnes painted a very realistic portrait of Stalinist Russia. Lastly, I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

Julian Barnes brings a somber meditation on the role of the artist and the role of art in society, set within Soviet Russia. The life of composer Dmitri Shostakovich serves as the stage for Mr. Barnes’s fiction. I emphasize fiction, as some reviewers seem disappointed that this short work failed to meet an expectation for drawing the reader into the music. Tobias Grey, reporting for the Wall Street Journal, quoted Mr. Barnes, “I thought once I get started each morning I’ll listen to one of Shostakovich’s 24 preludes and fugues but it didn’t work at all for me. . . . The effect was to put different sounds and rhythms in my head to the normal sounds and rhythms of prose, so I had to shake the music off before returning to the writing.” I can understand a reader’s sense of loss associated with not being immersed in the richness of Shostakovich’s work. On the other hand, the fullness that Julian Barnes delivers seems reward enough.

The recital unfolds chronologically, opening in the terror of Stalin’s purges in 1936, as Shosakovich, the narrator, recounts spending hours on successive nights waiting next to the elevator in his residence, hoping to spare his wife and child the anguish of his imminent arrest – expected as mid-night theater. His crime – writing music with “formalist” tendencies. He observes, “If it [tyranny] were stupid, it would not survive; just as if it had principles, it would not survive.” An artist who places the truth of his work, like the elegance of physics proof, above all other considerations has no position from which to stand in this world, where “cats” sharpen their claws on his soul.

The second chapter picks up 12 years later as he is sent to the U.S. representing the Soviet State, particularly in denouncing fellow composer and Russian émigré Igor Stravinsky, whose works Shostakovich is said to love above all others. “He wondered if it would be best to fall silent. Instead, to keep his sanity, he decided to write a series of preludes and fugues, after the example of Bach. Naturally, they were at first condemned: he was told that they sinned against ‘surrounding reality.’” In despair, diminished and reduced by the toll taken against his artistic honesty and his personal honesty, he toasts, “Let’s drink to this – that things don’t get any better!”

Finally, in 1960 he is sent again as an emissary and now Party member, reading galling speeches and presiding over the succession of state competitions, exhibitions intended to flaunt the superiority of Soviet music to the West, and to accept endless international awards for his achievement.
• “He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce.”
• “So far, so banal – at least, he hoped it was to American ears. Another necessary confession of sins, even if at an exotic location.”
• “A resigned Korsakov sent a postcard which read: ‘If we’re going, then let’s go, as the parrot said to the cat which was dragging it downstairs by the tail.’ Yes, that was what his life had often felt like. And his head had been bumped on far too many steps.”

This poignant novel might as readily have been framed against facts from the life of Igor Stravinsky, or August Renoir, or any artist who has struggled through a long life to continue to find meaning and make the truth stand forth publicly. The stark backdrop of a society swallowed by terror makes the anxiety of Barnes’s narrator more vivid to a reader who might dream of a celebrated life. But every artist confronts the compromises forced by the market, by the drive for excellence, by the grinding of time. The narrator notes early that he often hinted to his mother and wives of suicide. Barnes carries that motif throughout, “What he hoped was that death would liberate his music: liberate it from his life.”

The reference is to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66, which ends:

Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Two closing remarks. Like Barnes’s non-fiction meditation on mortality, “Nothing to Be Frightened Of,” “The Noise of Time” provides ample opportunities to consider the sweetness of life, the frustration, fear, foolishness, and pathos, whether you regard yourself as an artist or not.

Second, the mention of Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues is not coincidental. They provide an exceptional doorway to the grace and power of his work. I strongly recommend the Decca recordings by pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy and the recording by Tatiana Nikolayeva, the woman to whom he dedicated the work, available on YouTube. Playback over the Internet is not ideal, but the elegance of her performance is charming.

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, a Soviet composer, cannot escape Power in his country. No matter what he does, his life and his music are influenced by the government and he can’t seem to live life as a free man.

The Noise of Time is far from an easy read. If you aren’t familiar with Shostakovich, you might get the feeling of being abandoned in a maze. The novelization of Shostakovich’s life is not written in chronological order. A third-person narrator tells the reader what’s going on, he isn’t showing them and that creates a great distance between the plot and the reader. This, plus the fact that there is very little dialogue, makes reading The Noise of Time a slow process that requires concentration.

When I started the book, I had no idea what it was about. The official blurb doesn’t give away much and so I felt lost until I reached the second half of the novel. This is where I was finally able to sum up what I had read so far. If I had known that The Noise of Time was a fictional account of a composer’s life, things might have been different.

Julian Barnes’ novel has the air of a non-fiction book. Even though he writes about Shostakovich’s emotions, the reader is too distanced to feel them. The composer is long gone and so are his thoughts and his feelings. The Noise of Time might not be for everyone, but if you are interested in Shostakovich’s life and don’t shy Barnes’ narrative technique you should give it a shot.

* A review copy of this book was provided by the publisher.

Julian Barnes produces yet another beautiful work of fiction. The writing is so powerful, the sentences so crisp. So why 3 stars? Well, to my reading, the book sort of ran out of steam about 2/3 of the way through. The plot just kind of repeated itself. Protaganist comes up against the stupidity of power, struggles to hold on to his artistic integrity, etc. Of course the book makes lots of great points about art and Communism and the struggle of the artist to hold onto dignity in a crazy society. But again, by about 2/3 of the way through it didn't seem that Barnes had anything new to add!

Additionally, and this is not the author's fault, but if you are not familiar with many, many artists and composers who worked during the same period in Soviet Russia, you might be missing something, as I might have, not being at all familiar with Shostakovich's contemporaries!

Overall this is powerful fiction and well worth reading. Barnes is a master. But it feel a bit short for this reader...

On the surface, THE NOISE OF TIME is a skilled novelist's account of the life of Dmitri Shostakovich (b. 1906, d. 1975), one of the four greatest Russian composers of the twentieth century. Shostakovich was immensely talented and prolific -- in short, a genius. But as with many geniuses, ordinary life posed some inordinate difficulties. Women constituted one of them. He was a momma's boy, and throughout the book he is trying to screw up his courage to confront either his mother, his first love Tanya, or his first wife Nita (who at times flaunted her extra-marital relationships before him). But Shostakovich's biggest problem was not some peculiar, idiosyncratic one; it was the autocracy of Soviet Russia. Stalin and his apparatchiks pressured and squeezed and terrified Shostakovich (as they did countless others). Ultimately, they led Shostakovich into compromising his music and his personal integrity.

It is the surreal and tyrannical Soviet Union that provides background, depth, and ultimately an extra dimension to the novel. Throughout the book Barnes scatters little anecdotes having nothing to do with Shostakovich, such as the one about the brands of cigarettes smoked by the leaders: Stalin smoked Herzegovina Flor (after breaking off the cardboard tube and crumbling the tobacco into his pipe). No one else would smoke a Herzegovina Flor in his presence ("unless offered one, when they might slyly attempt to keep it unsmoked and afterwards flourish it like a holy relic"). Most of Stalin's underlings, including the NKVD, smoked Belomory. The brand was named after the White Sea Canal, which had been built with convict labor, who, the official story went, were being given the chance to "reforge" themselves. "Well, there had been 100,000 labourers, so it was possible that some of them might have been morally improved; but a quarter of them were said to have died, and those clearly had not been reforged. They were just the chips that had flown while the wood was being chopped. And the NKVD would light up their Belomory and picture in the rising smoke new dreams of wielding the axe."

There are three chapters, each of which is centered around a major event in Shostakovich's struggle with Soviet Power. The first is "On the Landing". Its pivotal image is Shostakovich standing all night, night after night, at the elevator landing on the fifth floor of his apartment building, dressed in a suit with a valise at his side, waiting for the NKVD to arrive and hoping that by being available for them right by the elevator door they would not disturb his wife and infant daughter. What triggered that pessimistic resignation was Stalin's negative reaction to Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtensk", which led to Shostakovich being declared "an enemy of the people", with all the ignominy associated with the label, although not, as things turned out, execution or the gulag. In the second chapter, Shostakovich, as part of his rehabilitation, is sent on a "cultural" mission to the United States, where he gives speeches ghost-written for him in which he parrots the usual Soviet agitprop, including a scathing denunciation of Stravinsky, whom privately Shostakovich idolized. By the third chapter, Stalin is dead and Shostakovich has a comfortable life, including a chauffeur, but still the Party is able to further corrupt his soul, this time by pressuring him into becoming one of them -- i.e., a member of the Party.

The novel is fast-paced and easy-to-read. It proceeds via episodes or vignettes or terse, interjected comments. Some are as short as one or two lines; others as long as three or four pages. The prose is straightforward and distinctive. Acerbity and irony abound. There are many striking quips. Three examples:

* "He had become a technique for survival. Below a certain point, that was what all men became: Techniques for survival."

* "To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic. That was why the words 'Soviet Russia' were a contradiction in terms."

* "Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time."

In a Note at the novel's end, Barnes explains that he drew heavily on a particular biography (Elizabeth Wilson's "Shostakovich: A Life Remembered") as well as an "as-told-to" memoir of Shostakovich. I believe that THE NOISE OF TIME contains little "fiction"; it instead is more in the way of an historically and psychologically sound biography written by a very accomplished novelist. It surely is less fanciful than some purported biographies that I have read.

But please don't let the notion of "biography of Dmitri Shostakovich" put you off, either because you normally don't read biographies or because you don't care one whit about Shostakovich (or classical music). There really is very little about Shostakovich's music and the novel is much more than a biography. Ultimately, it might be thought of as an object lesson in the ways real life ("the noise of time") sullies the purity and integrity of one's art.

The novel I read just before THE NOISE OF TIME was "Requiem for a Lost Empire" by Andrei Makine. Here's an idle fantasy: Shostakovich living another twenty years, long enough to compose the musical version of "Requiem for a Lost Empire".

The Noise of Time is a fictionalized biography of Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich was a prominent composer and pianist that lived in last century's USSR. Rather than being a mere account of facts, Barnes tries to take us inside the inner turmoil that faces Shostakovich. It is built like a short story where Barnes introduces several smaller stories that feature the coward that Barnes considers his hero.

There are several events that deeply influence the life of Shostakovich. First Shostakovich composes the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that receives favorable reviews at first. However, Stalin decides to attend a showing of the opera and dislikes it, believing it too complex. Because of this, Shostakovich is constantly harassed and lives in terror for a period of time. He has constant meetings with representatives of the Power that suggest that he should compose works that are of a more positive note and that fall within party lines. Shostakovich makes the compromise and composes Song of the Counterplan.

Another event has Shostakovich attending the Congress for World Peace in the U.S. at Stalin's direct request as part of the Soviet delegation. Shostakovich is passive, he recites a speech previously prepared by party henchmen and is harassed by russian exiles. Shostakovich is surprised by his notoriety in the West, his music being widely played outside the USSR.

Finally, after Stalin's passing, under Khrushchev's rule, confrontations with representatives of the Power turn to a more amusing note even though these representatives still want to get Shostakovich to compromise. Stalin sent Shostakovich to the Congress for World Peace in the U.S. to show that Shostakovich is not being discriminated against in the USSR and that he agrees with soviet policies. For similar reasons, Khrushchev wants Shostakovich to join the Party and lead the Union of Composers which he does.

This is a rather short novel and Julian Barnes captures small things about Shostakovich. For example, he was never allowed to own a foreign car and he seems affected by the fact that his wife's lover drives a Buick. He deeply loves his kids and has a good relationship with his wife. However, he oscillates between periods of apathy and periods in which he organizes activities for them such as volleyball games.

Finally what I found interesting, in the closing parts of the novel Shostakovich reflects on Shakespeare (he loves his work) and observes that while Shakespeare's tyrants had major moral dilemmas, it seems that modern day tyrants have evolved to remove such a conscience and becoming ruthless. Julian Barnes is a wordsmith and most of his books have deeply resonating phrases. This book is very similar, however I don't think it rises to the level of other Julian Barnes works.

Men who sell their souls to the devil 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.

Dmitri Shostakovich is not a composer whose music I seek out although I sometimes find his string quartets compelling when string players include them in their programs. And furthermore I knew little about his life before I read Julian Barnes’ short novel. Not having read the two main sources that the author lists that he got his inspiration from, Elizabeth Wilson’s SHOSTAKOVICH: A LIFE REMEMBED and TESTIMONY: THE MEMOIRS OF SHOSTAKOVICH, I have to trust that Mr. Barnes captures who this composer was. With little if any superfluous verbiage he appears to get to the essence of the composer while furnishing us with a lot of information about his life: his three marriages, his two children, his feelings about other composers and writers and of course his relationship with both Stalin and later Khrushchev. He ultimately did become a member of the Communist Party.

I suppose it is easy for us to condemn Mr. Shostakovich for some of his actions; but then we never wore his overcoat. We might have done worse given the same set of circumstances. And one has to ask: would it have been better and more honorable for him to have been more vocal and to have refused to join the Party and refuse to sign his name to essays he did not write and did not believe in and to have been killed or to have lived and given the world his music.

Here are some of the thoughts of Shostakovich-- who would become the most famous living composer of the Soviet Union—as written down by Mr. Barnes: “When all else failed, when there seemed to be nothing but nonsense in the world, he held to this: that good music would always be good music, and great music was impregnable. . . 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.” For whatever this composer did or didn’t do in an impossible situation under Soviet dictators, we can be grateful that he did leave the world his music.

Mr. Barnes takes Shostakovich right up to the end of his life. In his old age, he was ill and shamed by some of his decisions. But as he says, quoting the last line from a poem by Pasternak, another artist who had to deal with Soviet Russia: “Life is not a walk across a field.”

Reading this novel certainly makes one appreciative of just how wonderful artistic freedom really is. While there is much to criticize about this country—every other year or so, we learn that some book has been banned somewhere by someone in the U. S. and fundamentalist zealots are up in arms about their religious liberty-- we still can write and compose anything we d—n well please, the last time I checked.

I continue to read anything that Mr. Barnes chooses to write, and his latest offering did was a welcome addition to the list.

On September 25, 1906, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. During his nearly 70 years on the planet, he grew to prominence as one of the top composers and pianists of the 20th century. It would be a serious understatement to claim that his rise to world-wide success was not without turmoil. Renowned author and Man Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes has selected Shostakovich and his unique struggle as the subject of his latest novel, THE NOISE OF TIME.

Barnes does more than pen a biography of Shostakovich --- he parallels his plight side by side with the rise of socialism and eventually communism in Russia. The chief antagonist of the story is the infamous Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. What THE NOISE OF TIME seeks to accomplish is to provide readers with all sides of the controversy surrounding the existence of art within a totalitarian state.

The novel’s action takes off in the year 1936 amidst a world war and Stalin at the height of his power. During this time, Shostakovich was standing out as an immensely talented composer whose work was in demand, especially at a time of global strife. However, art and music were closely regulated by Soviet government, and one of Stalin's men, Zakrevsky, proved to be the antithesis of musical freedom in an age when every aspect of life was seemingly controlled.

Shostakovich realized he was a marked man when his first public piano concerto was covered in the pages of Pravda on January 28, 1936 --- a date he would celebrate for the rest of his life. Since all composers were employed by the state, it must mean that everything he created was their property. This was in direct confluence to his own ideology. Even though writers were in more danger than composers, Shostakovich never felt comfortable reporting to “the Power” that was overseeing all artistic products.

Paranoia took over as Stalin was quick to believe that everyone was plotting against him and that any artist --- be they using music or words --- was suspected of stirring up public sentiment against his leadership. A journey to America and a meeting with Igor Stravinsky proved to light the fire of musical freedom under Shostakovich, and he would return to Mother Russia a changed man.

The basic premise of the decades-long conflict between Shostakovich and the heavy thumb of despotism revolved around the definition of music and art. Art does not exist for art's sake but for the people's sake. In following this mantra, he embodied a form of artistic socialism that drove him through a life-long struggle to create his music for the people in spite of the necessity to represent the new Soviet Union as one of their own musical prodigies.

Barnes elegantly glides through this slim novel, peppering it with concise prose and short paragraphs that all pack a punch. Shostakovich is depicted as a man, a hero, a victim, and eventually a victorious fighter in the battle between art and those who seek to limit it through suppression and fear. THE NOISE OF TIME presents us with the life of a musical genius who overcomes his challenges and leaves his music behind as a gift for all the world to share.

Reviewed by Ray Palen

The Noise of Time is a fictionalized biography of Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich was a prominent composer and pianist that lived in last century's USSR. Rather than being a mere account of facts, Barnes tries to take us inside the inner turmoil that faces Shostakovich. It is built like a short story where Barnes introduces several smaller stories that feature the coward that Barnes considers his hero.

There are several events that deeply influence the life of Shostakovich. First Shostakovich composes the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that receives favorable reviews at first. However, Stalin decides to attend a showing of the opera and dislikes it, believing it too complex. Because of this, Shostakovich is constantly harassed and lives in terror for a period of time. He has constant meetings with representatives of the Power that suggest that he should compose works that are of a more positive note and that fall within party lines. Shostakovich makes the compromise and composes Song of the Counterplan.

Another event has Shostakovich attending the Congress for World Peace in the U.S. at Stalin's direct request as part of the Soviet delegation. Shostakovich is passive, he recites a speech previously prepared by party henchmen and is harassed by russian exiles. Shostakovich is surprised by his notoriety in the West, his music being widely played outside the USSR.

Finally, after Stalin's passing, under Khrushchev's rule, confrontations with representatives of the Power turn to a more amusing note even though these representatives still want to get Shostakovich to compromise. Stalin sent Shostakovich to the Congress for World Peace in the U.S. to show that Shostakovich is not being discriminated against in the USSR and that he agrees with soviet policies. For similar reasons, Khrushchev wants Shostakovich to join the Party and lead the Union of Composers which he does.

This is a rather short novel and Julian Barnes captures small things about Shostakovich. For example, he was never allowed to own a foreign car and he seems affected by the fact that his wife's lover drives a Buick. He deeply loves his kids and has a good relationship with his wife. However, he oscillates between periods of apathy and periods in which he organizes activities for them such as volleyball games.

Finally what I found interesting, in the closing parts of the novel Shostakovich reflects on Shakespeare (he loves his work) and observes that while Shakespeare's tyrants had major moral dilemmas, it seems that modern day tyrants have evolved to remove such a conscience and becoming ruthless. Julian Barnes is a wordsmith and most of his books have deeply resonating phrases. This book is very similar, however I don't think it rises to the level of other Julian Barnes works.

An enjoyable pseudo-biography of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich done in a quasi-journal style. The focus of the novel is more on the composer's long struggle to survive the brutal vagaries of Soviet politics than on the qualities of his music. He lived in a very dangerous time when the whims and wishes of Joseph Stalin were all-determining and where the leader's least displeasure with a musical work, the popularity of another public figure or even unrelated events outside the country, could destroy a reputation, cause social and professional isolation or even lead to a shot in the back of the head.

Somehow, Shostakovich managed to cling to life through the worst years of ideological uncertainties and bloody purges. He would be able to enjoy an evolving fame and outlive his principal threat (and protector), Stalin. Author Julian Barnes argues, through this fiction based on primary sources, that the times made Shostakovich, who was already a deeply introspective person, intensely neurotic--always waiting for the arrival of the KGB on his doorstep. The frequent ideologically-based attacks on his music were the most unbearable elements in his fraught life and left him mentally and spiritually wounded.

Author Barnes has made his fictional Shostakovich a tragic, conflicted figure who was forced to publicly betray admired colleagues and friends, and in turn, endure continuous betrayal and hypocrisy in order to survive professionally and personally. The short novel very effectively conveys to the reader the panic and pain that he lived with for more than 50 years.

This book was a surprise to me. Shostakovitch lives for humanity because of his music,and not because he was an artist who struggled to maintain his life and integrity in a Soviet totalitarian state. But Julian Barnes focus is on the inner life and struggle of Shostakovitch without revealing his struggle as creator of great musical works. In a sense then I felt the book to be much less and other than what I hoped it would be, an illumination of the mind, the thought, of a great creator.
Instead we see Shostakovitch as a kind of ordinary everyman struggling under the Soviet regime. Barnes is of course a writer of brilliance and does his job effectively. But for those who love the music of Shostakovitch and wish to understand his making of it, and relation to it this work does not do the job.
Barnes does show how his Shostakovitch lived a tormented life under constant threat from the Soviet regime. In one notable passage he echoes Shakespeare's 'Cowards die many times before their death, The valiant taste of death' but once, and says a heroic act can be done in a second, but the coward's endless compromises with his own integrity go on through a lifetime. Barnes is not without sympathy for the human-all--too - human Shostakovitch in portraying him as son, husband three times and loyal friend. Mostly he shows himself as a man painfully alone who at every stage of his life in tried upon by the Soviet system.
Yet there is no real hint given at what constitutes Shostakovich's greatness as a composer and why his Music lives when most others do not.

“Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time…Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.”

In this historical fiction, set in the Soviet Union, Julian Barnes explores the meaning and synergy of art and politics during the Stalin era (and beyond). Composer Dmitri Shostakovich, in 1936, is at the epitome of his praise, but his reputation and safety are also on a threatening cusp. His music, which was formerly lauded, is now under scrutiny by the Party, condemned by some as seditious. At the vivid opening of the story, he is waiting by his apartment’s lift, bag packed, paranoid that the Party’s apparatchik are coming to interrogate and possibly kill him, at the very least send him to a work camp in Siberia. What follows is a largely interior story, the action unfolding primarily from Shostakovich’s thoughts and reflections.

THE NOISE OF TIME is not a study of music itself, but is rather a peek behind the curtain of a time when one’s art could be one’s undoing. During the Stalinist era, the U.S.S.R was not a place where an artist or composer could exercise free will of expression without consequences. Shostakovich is trying to come to terms with “whom does art belong to?” and how to be true to his art, yet not be shot dead in the process. He is forced to denounce his most influential composer, Stravinsky, and even agree, in public, that his own music is rife with insurrection. Barnes conveys this with a light, absurdist touch at times, canny and uncanny simultaneously.

Dmitri reflects on his First Symphony, an open-air concert, which set all the neighborhood dogs barking. The louder the orchestra to compensate, the more the dogs yapped, and the crowd laughed. But now: “History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.” The reviewers were now saying (fueled and impelled by Stalin) that that his formerly applauded composition, “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” was “muddle instead of music.” And, although Shostakovich had never joined the Party, he is being coerced to adapt to the Power platform. On a technical issue, he was spared from certain torture, but he knew what the future would cost him--his freedom to compose expressionist music. He would have to compose to the masses, or risk accusation of formalism, akin to rebellion, even mutiny.

“From now on there would be only two types of composer: those who were alive and frightened; and those who were dead.”

Shostakovich’s internal chaos and fear is often transmitted philosophically, most memorably on the question of art’s purpose. At times, I thought the narrative redundant, and the progression of events was occasionally diluted by the baroque events of his love life. However, it was Dmitri’s laconic, aphoristic mind “muddle” that convinced me that Julian Barnes was a first-class writer. I had known he was a prize-winning author, but this was my first entrée (and it won’t be my last). His ability to integrate a tragic story of a thwarted composer with acid levity and droll contradiction persuaded me of the many subtleties of Julian Barnes.

“Here the personality submerges itself in the great epoch that surrounds it, and begins to resonate with the epoch.”

We find The Noise of Time,” Julian Barnes’ most recent novel, to be “short, lean, and well-written.” The Oxford grad (and Booker prize winner) worked for some time with both Kingsley Amis and Christopher Hitchens at "The New Standard," honing his literary skills—and most admirably.

In "The Noise of Time," we find Stalin is cementing his powers in vast grabs, bent upon making the USSR an extension of Lenin’s dreams and his own dictatorial goals. The main character is the noted composer Shostakovich, 30 and on Stalin’s “bad list” (his music is too modern, too revolutionary, too decadent). Shostakovich finds himself in great limbo: tomorrow will he be dead or not?

As it turns out, it was “not.” Instead of “eliminating” him, Stalin seeks to use his talents “for the greater good” and here we find the crisis of conscious that Barnes examines and which Shostakovich must live with. What’s Shostakovich to do? He yields to the pressure of the state and it is this crisis of conscious that Barnes explores.

"The Noise of Time" focuses on defining moments from the composer's life during Stalin's reign and after his death. It begins in 1936, when his new opera, "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," was not well received by Stalin, who left the performance early. He condemned the opera and denounced Shostakovich as an enemy of the people, banning his work for almost 30 years.

The novel opens with Shostakovich standing outside his apartment in the night, waiting to be taken away by the NKVD, hoping that the secret police will come just for him and not his family. But they never do. Instead of being confined to a small prison cell, the composer has to endure something much worse: the suffocating claustrophobia of an entire society of constant fear, where anyone can disappear at a whim of the Powers that be. He is 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 uses real events from Shostakovich's life: rather, it's a historical essay on the nature of artistry and freedom of thought in the Soviet Union, using Shostakovich as an example of a great talent targeted and molded by the system. And we remember that it is Barnes who is putting what he thought his thoughts would be into the composer’s head.

At the same time, Barnes gives us plenty of accurate observations of Soviet life during and after Stalin. History buffs no doubt will find that, although this is fiction, there’s enough real historical events and characters to give the book some shocking realism.
And enough depression to make the reader depressed. In addition to this spring’s hot political news about Russia, it strikes a cord! Still, a worthy, educational read.

Here’s the scene: A man is standing in front of the elevator outside his apartment in the Soviet Union, a small suitcase at his feet. The year is 1936. He has been standing there for hours, waiting. For what? For the secret police to haul him away to the “Big House” for questioning. Not wanting his wife to be disturbed or his daughter to be frightened, he has left the apartment to silently await what appears to be inevitable. And what is the great crime for which he expects to be hauled away? He has composed a piece of music which is deemed insufficiently proletarian and he is therefore suspected of having impure ideological tendencies. And who is this man? Only the acclaimed composer Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich. At times celebrated, at times vilified, Shostakovich and his music are the vehicle for Julian Barnes’s meditation on art and power. The book will not suit everyone’s tastes, but I enjoyed it, as much for Barnes’s sensitive writing as for the story itself.

The waiting composer is the first of three settings (“On the Landing,” “On the Plane,” “In the Car”) Barnes uses in this novel of psychological depth that explores the Russian soul, the ability of truth and art to withstand encounters with Power, and the question of whether or not music, residing inside oneself, can overcome the noise of time. Barnes is skillful at creating an atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion, which opens the way for a critique of Soviet Russia and its use of power. There is much discussion of pessimism, which at least in this novel seems to be the essence both of Shostakovich (at certain times anyway) and of the Russian character. There are also poignant observations on memory, and on the corruption of “pure” memory by things one would rather not remember.

In the end, Shostakovich comes across as a tragic but oddly content figure. Perhaps that is an accurate representation of what it meant to be an artist in the Soviet Union, when one’s ability to be true to one’s art often required a Janus-faced stance, with one face directed resolutely inward, where the purity of one’s art might be preserved. But because the other face of necessity had to point the other way and engage with the world of Power, the question is unavoidable: Can there be “pure” art in such a regime, if the artist is a public figure?

It would be best to read this short novel in one sitting—a leisurely Sunday afternoon, say. That would be the best way to catch both the passage of time and the continuity of themes. In the end, it doesn’t much matter whether one is on the landing, in the plane, or in the car. Power is there, visible or otherwise. “When truth-speaking [becomes] impossible,” including the truth of art, does it really matter whether the artist is hauled off to the Big House or hailed as a hero of the state? The peril for the body is different in each case, but what about the peril for the soul?

It is May 1937. Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, has been savagely criticized by Stalin himself in a Pravda editorial, not just for being “a muddle”, but for the ideological shortcomings og the work and its composer. Shostakovitch is expecting imminent arrest. While he is waiting, his mind moves back and forth over his life so far: his family situation from childhood up that moment; how, though he was assured in his music, his personal relationships were insecure and erratic; his youthful fame as a composer both inside and outside the Soviet Union; the patronage of Marshal Tukhashevsky who loved music; the state control over the arts; the constant fear of what might happen if something said or done offended the Party. Tuchashevsky was accused of treason in May 1937 and Shostakovich was called in for interrogation and ordered to give evidence against him: he was given two days to prepare it. What would he do? But then, by the time the two days were up, the interrogator was himself arrested and Shostakovitch was not summoned again. Later that year he composed his Fifth Symphony whose musical language was more acceptable than the opera had been. It was described (not by him) as “A Soviet Artist’s Creative Reply to Just Criticism”, and it was met with great acclaim by the public and the Communist Press. The only softening of his conformism lay every now and again in irony, in music and in words, to which he was sure the authorities would not grasp. During the war his Seventh Symphony won world-wide acclaim for its portrayal of Leningrad under siege. By 1949 he was so much back in favour that he was included in the Soviet delegation that attended the pro-Communist Peace Conference in New York.

On the flight back from that conference, he recalled what had happened to him since his escape in 1937: once the war was over, the crazy harrassment of composers continued, and in 1948 Shostakovitch’s Eighth Symphony was condemned for formalism, and once again he was forced to “see the error of his ways”. He was dismissed from his professorships at the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories and his work was banned from being performed - yet a short time later Stalin phoned him and ordered him to join the Soviet delegation in New York and the banning of his work in Russia was declared to have been illegal. But in New York he was made to read out the Soviet line on music, and, when asked whether he personally agreed with what he had read out, he did not have the courage to say that he did not. It was utter humiliation, utter shame, and utter self-contempt. These were not wiped out by being awarded the Stalin Prize (six times) and the Order of Lenin (three times).

So far, I have felt sorry for Shostakovitch: Barnes has made a case for a man, who was tortured by guilt for the things he has done because he was, understandably, fearful of his life. Which of us would have behaved more heroically in Stalin’s Russia? But such extreme dangers disappeared under Khrushchev, and it is hard to make a case for the compromises he made then. He was offered the Chairmanship of the Russian Union of Composers in 1960, and it was made clear to him that this would involve him joining the Communist Party, something he had managed to avoid even under Stalin. He struggled against both the appointment and the party membership. Refusal would not now lead to a Gulag or worse, but the pressure was so unrelenting that in the end he gave way. Barnes writes that his spirit and his nerve had been broken, and that “once that nerve was gone, you couldn’t replace it like a violin string.” But never, according to this novel, had his self-accusation of cowardice been so crushing: “all he knew was that this was the worst time of all.” After that he made more compromises: signing a letter - not written by him - denouncing Solzhenitsyn, and another denouncing Sakharov. In the face of such betrayals, there was really no way in which he could any longer comfort himself with irony.

This is only an outline of the book. The narrative proceeds swiftly in the first half, but slows down in the second which contains more reflections on how power was exercised in the Soviet Union, much on the nature of music, material about other composers and musicians, much on the psychology of courage, cowardice, and self-awareness, and, possibly, Barnes’ own ideas on what Shostakovitch thought and felt: I have not read the Memoirs which Shostakovitch apparently related to Solomon Volkov. The authenticity of these memoirs has been debated, and in any case in the Author’s Note at the end, Barnes says he has not taken them completely at their face value.

“The Noise of Time” is a fictional memoir of what it meant to Shostakovich to be an artist living under tyranny. I would recommend the review by the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick to those readers who wish some insight into how accurately the novel captures the real man. To quote her: “It’s the same characterization that Solomon Volkov gives in his ventriloquist Testimony (remembered Shostakovich table talk), misleadingly cast in the form of memoirs”. There was a body of letters to Isaak Glikman (1941-1975) available as a primary source. Shostakovich met with more success than opprobrium, but he feared for his life with apparently good reason at one point.

The prose reminded me of the novelist Milan Kundera, not just the irony, but the cadence, although there are many more quotable phrases here than I recall of Kundera. The book begins with the image of three men, including a beggar, drinking Vodka at a desolate railway stop during WWII --- when the image is repeated and resolved at novel’s end I found it memorable, and at least a hint of the privation which is not a focus of the book .

“Perhaps courage was like beauty. A beautiful woman grows old: she sees only what has gone; others see only what remains......He saw only what was gone”. Perhaps as the the store reviewer Bjoro (May 16, 2016) points out, the last period of Shostakovich’s life, in which he almost compulsively ruminates about his accommodation to becoming a tool of the state, went on a bit too long.

For this reader, Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time, based on the life of composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s and his difficulties under Stalinism, comes off as the outline for or skeleton of a fuller novel.

Even so, the book has its moments. After Stalin attends the premiere of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and walks out before the end, an editorial denouncing both the opera and its composer appears in Pravda. Barnes gives us this reaction from Shostakovich:

“He remembered an open-air concert at a park in Kharkov. His First Symphony had set all the neighborhood dogs to barking. The crowd laughed, the orchestra played louder, the dogs yapped all the more, the audience laughed all the more. Now, his music had set bigger dogs barking. History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.”

Yet nothing in this book has the stinging, incontrovertible eloquence that Pasternak gives to the title character in Doctor Zhivago, as translated by the invaluable Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky:

“In our time the frequency of microscopic forms of cardiac hemorrhages has increased greatly. Not all of them are fatal. In some cases people survive. It’s the disease of our time. I think its causes are of a moral order. A constant, systematic dissembling is required of the vast majority of us. It’s impossible , without affecting your health, to show yourself day after day contrary to what you feel, to lay yourself out for what you don’t love, to rejoice over what brings you misfortune. Our nervous system is not an empty sound, not a fiction. It’s a physical body made up of fibers. Our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like teeth in our mouth. It cannot be endlessly violated without impunity.”

(I’ve read that the original English translation of Doctor Zhivago, which gave me considerable trouble during high school, was rushed to completion and into print in order to take advantage of the publicity surrounding Pasternak’s Nobel Prize. The new Pevear/Volokhonsky translation is obviously painstaking and eminently readable.)

Incidental treats in Barnes’ novel include Shostakovich’s extremely unflattering assessment of the conductor Toscanini. George Bernard Shaw, Picasso and Sartre also come up for drubbings.

N.B.: The British first edition of The Noise of Time has a striking period dust jacket designed by Suzanne Dean and featuring a drawing by Vladimir Zimokov of a man nervously looking back over his shoulder.

The confusing opening pages of this fictional life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) read as the tunings of instruments of an orchestra. But they are fragments, sound bites, soothing and anxious memories from the artist’s lifetime under tyranny. How to fulfill one’s vocation and destiny when Power decrees that ‘art belongs to the people’? When one’s creations are judged by committees before they can be performed or shown, where rejection means penury, internal exile or worse. DS was anxious about many things such as his family, his art, even leap years: he had three serious run-ins with Power, in 1936, 1948 and 1960, all leap years, first seeing his opera banned, next, seeing it banned again, finally, being arm-twisted into joining the Communist Party.
Somewhere in the novel Julian Barnes casually remarks that Stalin may have decreed that ‘Shostakovich must be left alone’ Why? Because of “The Song of the Counterplan”, an ‘optimistic’ composition glorifying higher production for the fatherland? [YouTube has three very brief piano versions plus a stunning 3:11' recording of two German tenor singers and a hoompah orchestra, along with his opera and numerous other serious works of which “Waltz no. 2” is the best known and possibly another example of Art for the People].
Julian Barnes’ 1992 novel “The Porcupine” dealt with the rise and demise of communism in Bulgaria in pretty harsh terms, despite occasional bits of comedy and sarcasm. Found “The Noise of Time” an uncompromising indictment of totalitarianism and its defenders, brilliantly emphatic towards perpetrators and victims alike and rather depressing overall. Its structure and a number of scenes and anecdotes beyond my comprehension prompt me to read it again, soon, not now. Highly recommended.

If you are searching for what exactly motivated dmitri shoshtakovich during the stalin and kruschev autocratic dictatorship eras, best not to take this NOVEL as the final word. We don't know much more about this era of musical composition in russia after finishing julian barnes episodically told story.
What we do learn, is how the human mind and soul can be twisted and distorted by fear. Fear is the anti-hero of "the noise of time", a beautifully crafted novel that reveals the misery in an apparachnik society, where a state run musicology office fears any diversion from the norm in compositions...this at a time when stravinsky wrote what he liked in america, and shoshtakovich stayed in russia, only to be vilified whenever his music showed any sign of originality or creativity. His early opera, " lady macbeth from mtsensk" was barred from being performed, once stalin and his gang scoffed at the " muddle, rather than music" that they demanded it was.
The author, has dealt with shostokovich's daily fear of being murdered for his "sin" in a brilliant, ironic masterpiece of a novel.
Don't worry so much about whether the 'true" story unfolds exactly as it did...whether it did or it didn't happen this way, it certainly could have.

Steve aronoff

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).

Although I have enjoyed Julian Barnes's books in the past (his <i>Flaubert's Parrot</i> remains a masterpiece, surpassing some of his later production; but I did not dislike <i>The Sense of an Ending</i>, 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 <i>One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich</i> 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 the 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.

Julian Barnes gave us a picture of a depressed, suicidal and nonchalantly Shostakovich. Shostakovich coward and fighter, tonal and atonal, concrete and abstract, dull and brilliant. Barnes thesis is that he survived because he didn’t care for surviving. Shostakovich constantly put his life on a scale and wondered if it was worth it. It always was. Shostakovich signed the papers they asked him to sign, read the speeches they asked him to read. Even so, Shostakovich was certain that they would once come in the middle of the night. It was a close call on a couple of occasions, but they actually didn’t come. For Barnes, their punishment was to let Shostakovich live.

Barnes selected a handful of well-known episodes in Shostakovich’s life and penciled the book around that. The emphasis is on the relationship between Shostakovich with himself, his country and the regime.

This book made me think quite a bit about the usual comparison between Shostakovich and Mahler. Shostakovich didn’t have the freedom to talk about himself, as Mahler did. Shostakovich’s music (at least some of them) has the notes that the regime expected him to put. But between these notes, he also talked about him and - something that I don’t see much in Mahler - his opinions. It is unlikely that the regime didn’t understand the message. Shostakovich could have been easily shot for promoting the “cult of personality”, but they let him live. Barnes wondered if the protector was Stalin himself, which makes sense.

This book is class act. It is intellectually stimulating, amazingly well written and easy to get through.

Mr. Barnes made at least one egregious mistake in his historical recontructions, which makes me not quite confident in his factual reconstructions.
Here is the mistake:
On page 80 of The Noise of Times, he states that" ...the Georgians and Ossetians joined hands with the Russian Bolsheviks .." (in the period 1918-1920)
Correct for the Ossetians, but nothing could be further from the truth in what concerns the Georgians, as any cursory look at the history of the period shows.
Georgia declared independence 26 May 1918, established a social-democrat enlightened republic,that was brought to an end by the invasion of the Red Army in Feb-March 1921.
FYI: from Generations of Winter by Vassyil Aksyonov, (pp. 246-249)
The Civil War, a conflagration extendmg over thousands of miles, had cut
Tiflis off from Moscow completely. An independent republic had sprung up in Geor-
gia, led by the Liberal Menshevik Noi Zhordania. Iniquity raged everywhere, fam-
ine and pestilence reigned, but on the other side of the peaks of the Caucasus free
Georgians, together with Armenians, Persians, Russians, Greeks, and Jews, sat be-
neath chestnut trees, drinking wine and Lagidze mint and eating fresh lavash bread;
radishes, herbs, shashlik that wasn’t bad for the times, and, as always, the excep-
tional satsivi chicken with nuts lobio beans and tskhinvali fish."
.....By the end of 1920, all of this Silver Age that had been transplanted to the South had vanished, perhaps flown back to its sources, to the Greek islands. The Georgian Republic was in its death throes. In 1921 the Red Army burst in, freedom came to an end,

This short novel is a deep, insightful and brilliant analysis of how the Communist Soviet regimen destroyed individuals and, in particular, how it prevented artists to create authentic art, with a main character, Dmitri Shostakovich, who fell from favor during Stalin’s rule, as a perfect example of all this.
The novel consists entirely of the interior monologue of Shostakovich in three important moments of his life. With an elegant prose, this monologue shows how he lived in utter terror under the Stalin’s rule and how, through compromise, irony and sometimes even betrayal, he learned to survive through the manipulative “softer” regime that came after Stalin’s death. A monologue that is sad and moving, but also full of irony, and absorbing at all times, which shows Shostakovich as a complex and brave person who did his best to fight repression and terror while trying at the same time to protect his family and friends, an impossible and exhausting task under the repression of the Communist dictatorship.
A quick, insightful and fascinating novel. A must read.

Readers should not approach The Noise of Time expecting an exploration of Shostakovich as a musician; Barnes' interest is more in the way his status as an artist conflicted with the ideological rigor and looming terror of Stalinist Russia. And that's fine: it's never worthwhile to criticize a novelist for writing the book he wanted to write rather than the book you might have wanted to read. Barnes' themes here are not new, and I must say that I get wearier every day of the novel that dips into the horrors of life and emerges with an amorphous postmodern optimism; at least old-fashioned moralists had an intellectually satisfying system. But Barnes is a fine and a compact stylist, and his exploration of Shostakovich's compromises and complications is moving. The Noise of Time is a worthwhile exploration of how the abstractions of the creative imagination must coexist with the tedium and the terror of life in the real world.

This fine but often disjointed novel is a fictionalization of the life of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, a shy, timid, musically gifted boy born in the year 1906. Dmitri's mother is a protective and loving person who has encouraged her son to pursue his great gift with music. Like so many of the great scientists and musicians and artists of that time, life was a lot more complicated than just creating their art; they had to deal with the terrible circumstances of what was happening in Russia starting with the reign of the tyrant Joseph Stalin.

At the age of 30, Dmitri composes an opera that had previously gotten good reviews, but Stalin decides to attend and due to factors beyond his control the performance is flawed. It is at that moment that Dmitri realizes how disappointing Stalin will lead to a life of constant fear of an administration that is both capricious and thinks nothing of executing or sending off to the Gulag anyone with whom they don't approve. Even the mere suspicion of any treasonous behavior or beliefs contrary to Stalin would cause complete ruin. Friends and neighbors were around one day and gone the next; either murdered or sent to the camps. The uncertainty of life and the constant paranoia was overwhelming. Even the prosecutors could turn victims themselves by the whim of the powers that be; it was hard to trust in anyone.

The book is divided into three sections, each starting off talking about it being the worst time; but the worst time really being something that was a constant in Dmitri's life. We see how the artists of the day were so fearful of offending Stalin and how life was so tenuous under his reign. The book goes on to show how even after Stalin's death, there was still the terrible threat of retribution under future Soviet leaders and how it was almost impossible for an artist to be able to express themselves and yet keep their morality and their heads held high. It was easy for those Russian artists and intellectuals who had escaped to America to openly and honestly express themselves; it was entirely different for those who remained in Russia who often had to say and so what they were told. And even then...

This book started off as a tough read for me and I almost stopped reading it early on. If this happens to you, I urge you to continue and by the middle section I was really fascinated. Just a few months ago I read a book with a similar theme - Us Conductors - which had a similar theme and was about the life of inventor and musician Sergeyvich Termen. That book was told in a more straight-forward manner and showed us the punishments heaped upon anyone who offended Stalin and showed us life in the Gulag.

This book does not do that, yet it manages to get across the constant fear and the turmoil faced by so many artists and intellectuals living in Russia at that time and it makes you wonder just what you would do under similar circumstances. The book manages to put us inside the head of Dmitri Shostakovich and have us understand why he often acted and said things against his beliefs and why he was so conflicted and felt so cowardly till the end. Would we have acted any differently?

There were many times - such as the time Stalin first disapproved of his musical composition - that Dmitri's life and that of his family was in imminent danger. Yet he found he was constantly going back and forth from being in favor (he won the Stalin Prize six times) to once again wondering if he or those he loved were to be whisked away by the powers that be.

"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."

Recommended. Like I said, if you feel like it's starting off a little slow for you and is somewhat confusing, keep on reading. It was a memorable read for me by the end.

It was a short book, but it took me a long time to read because I was never really engaged. I felt detached from the narrative and characters. I admit I had trouble keeping all the Russian names straight. I got the gist of it - that it was hard to be an artist in the Soviet Union and that compromises had to be made to stay alive. I would rather have read a real biography - so perhaps I will try the Elizabeth Wilson one that Barnes mentions in the author's note at the end.

An interesting and thoughtful approach to the inner life of Shostakovich, told with wit and the requisite irony. Once senses the composer's growing weariness as he copes with the pressures of being an artist within the crazy-repressive Soviet regime. (Probably why he could never give up the cigarettes and vodka?) I desperately wanted more about his music, however. (What was his music trying to do? How did he approach melodies, themes, instrumentation? What aspects of music was he most passionate about?) I'm sure the author had his reasons. But it was almost like outlining the inner life of Hemingway while saying next to nothing about his actual writing.

The life of Dimitri Shostakivich according to Julian Barnes, who is, as always one of my favorite author, but this time what it is missing in my opinion, is the atmosphere of the Stalinist Russia, or the atmosphere I think there should have been in that time and place. Barnes is very good in describing the interior torment of the musician but in a way it seems misplaced compared to what it happens. Mixed feelings about this book in the end.

La vita di Dimitri Shostakovich secondo Julian Barnes, che resta uno dei miei scrittori preferiti, ma quello che manca in questo libro, secondo me ovviamente, é l'atmosfera che ritengo avrebbe dovuto esserci nella Russia staliniana del momento, una specie di assenza di contorno. Se Barnes é senza dubbio molto abile nel descrivere l'ansia e i tormenti del musicista, quello che emerge peró é che sembra sempre che lui si stia preoccupando troppo e per niente tanto é piena di cliché e stereotipi l'atmosfera che lo circonda. Direi che questo libro mi ha lasciato sentimenti contrastanti.

This book not only about music, but about life in Russia, which is very hard to understand to western people.
I consider author carried through titanic job before he was able to write this novel. Beside that, I can see how good author is in knowing music,
how he loves Shostakovitch's music. This book doesn't leave you, after it's finished.
I recommend it to thinking people.

Julian Barnes writes in a way that lets the reader into the world of a tortured, but brilliant mind. Shostakovich is one of my favorite composers and a revered figure in 20th century music. The stories of his existence under Stalin and communist control are often told, but It is fascinating to read the point of view told by Barnes. There are many poignant moments that display the inner pain Shostakovich dealt with for so long. This is a tragic, but also fascinating story. Many aspects of his life are covered, I only wish there were more writing about his music.

This is brisk" biographical" rendering of a long dark night in the artistic history of the former Soviet Union. Barnes is obviously inspired, here, by the works of Arthur Koestler and Franz Kafka in his depiction of Shostakovich's fraught relationship with Stalin's totalitarian state, or what he ironically calls "the Power". Incidentally, readers may find it helpful to listen to Shostakovich's symphonic and other works while reading the book.

Beautifully written fictional memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich and the soul-crushing struggle of being an artistic genius in Soviet Russia. I alternated reading the chapters with listening to his music, and it really did highlight the ironies of his life.

The Noise of Time, by Julian Barnes, © 2016.

Anyone who gets past the first 20+ pages of this incoherent muddle, replete with bad grammar, awkward syntax and jumbled story-line is a demonstration of high-hope-over-obvious-reality. I suppose I should do what everyone else must have done, just assume that since this author has won so many prizes, he must be good. If any of the high-praise reviews above said, "Don't worry about the first X pages; just press on", I might press on. As it is, "I'm plucky but not that plucky". Shame on the publisher, too; money over principle.
ITEM: for those who might be interested in this sort of thing, i.e, Standard American English Grammar.
Page 14, second paragraph, after a break, denoting a change of scene: "He had been sixteen, at a sanatorium in the Crimea, recovering from tuberculosis." There is no context on either side of that sentence that would possibly excuse such bad grammar.
ITEM: Note a paragraph on page 20 of The Noise, as follows:
"A psychiatrist researching the creative process had once asked him about Dmitri Boleslavovich. He had replied that his father "was an extremely normal human being". This was not a patronizing phrase: it was an enviable skill to be a normal human being, and to wake up every morning with a smile on your face. Also, his father had died young--in his late forties. A disaster for the family , and those who loved him; but not, perhaps a disaster for Dmitri Boleslavovich himself. Had he lived any longer, we would have watched the Revolution turn sour, paranoid and carnivorous. Not that he was much interested in the Revolution. This had been another of his strengths."
There are 5 had's in the paragraph and only ONE of them is used correctly.
On the recto-verso in which the paragraph appears. the word 'had' appears 16 times, of which only 3 are used correctly. That performance won't get you out of the 6th grade, much less earn high praise from the high-praisers.
.brad.sunday.16october2016. I cannot reply to comments, so if you want to be heard, including Author Barnes, write to me at -bradvines-at-gmail-dot-com-

Shostakovich Is the subject of this book but its central tenet is the effect of a totalitarian government on an individual. I found this book fascinating as it really forced me to think about what options an individual has, when confronted by extreme political power, that is based on fear and violence.

This book starts out nice with astute observations about the composer Shostakovitch and his relation to the Power of the Sovjet Regime. Sadly, it peters out quickly and the book becomes increasingly boring. I don't much care much for biographical and philosophical musings about this dead composer whose life has been described elsewhere in great detail. Barnes' book adds nothing. It is a dull and lifeless read, there's no story. I did not finish it, I felt cheated.

In his middle years, when the composer Dmitri Shostakovitch is fulfilling his required function as examiner at the Moscow Conservatoire, he asks a trembling student, "Tell me, whom does art belong to?" Perhaps terrified rather than aided by her examiner's repeated gestures with his head to the banner hanging over the table ("ART BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE -- V. I. LENIN"), the girl remains tongue-tied. At the very end of his life, Shostakovitch recognizes that she was right: "Not being able to answer was the correct answer. Because music, in the end, belonged to music. That was all you could say, or wish for."

In artistic terms, this is a truly positive statement, and the only triumph the composer would achieve over the forces of Power that tried to harness his music, indeed all Soviet art, to political ends. Musicians everywhere respect Shostakovitch as one of the great composers of the twentieth century, and if they hear his major music in a political context at all, it is as a veiled criticism of the regime rather than a glorification of it. But the phrase is not a helpful mantra for a novelist. If music belongs only to music and not to politics, it does not belong to words either, even those written by a master like Julian Barnes. In this lightly fictional look the composer, Barnes has done something rather odd -- written a novel about a musician that makes no attempt to capture the experience of his actual music.

Barnes could well have done so if he wanted. I consider him one of the greatest living English novelists, not least for the career he has made out of oblique glimpses of the lives of artists. In fiction long or short, he has shown us writers, painters, actors, and musicians. He will often start from relatively private moments in their lives that, under his pen, become iconic. But up to now all these portraits have been distinguished by two qualities: a revealing humanity and feeling for the art. For humanity, I need go no further than LEVELS OF LIFE, in which some minor but touching anecdotes about the actress Sarah Bernhardt and the photographer Nadar set the stage for Barnes' utterly personal and deeply moving elegy on the death of his wife. For art, look at the central chapter in A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10½ CHAPTERS, a brilliant analysis of Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa," later expanded into a series of essays on art in Barnes' recent KEEPING AN EYE OPEN. Often he conveys the essence of the art by metaphor rather than direct description; who can forget the image of the cranes flying south in "The Silence," Barnes' story about Jean Sibelius that closes his collection THE LEMON TABLE?

I thought that metaphor might rule here also. Barnes opens on a station platform somewhere in Russia during WW2. Shostakovitch and an unnamed companion descend from their "soft class" carriage to offer vodka to a legless veteran begging alms. Following a Russian proverb, Barnes characterizes them as "one to hear, one to remember, and one to drink." He will return to this scene at the very end of the book, in the one musical metaphor that truly worked for me, when the three clink glasses and Shostakovitch hears a perfect triad. I wondered if the opening image might resonate through the rest of the book, which is after all in three sections, or if the unnamed "one to remember" might turn into an alter ego for the author himself, but it does not work that way. Indeed, I cannot exactly say just how this framing scene is meant to tie in with the rest.

Private moments that become iconic -- Barnes has three of them here. Part One, "On the Landing," shows the composer, fully dressed and with a packed case by his side, keeping vigil outside the elevator of his apartment, so that the KGB will not arrest him in front of his wife. This is after Stalin has had a bad reaction to the opera LADY MACBETH OF MTENSK, and has declared the composer an Enemy of the People. This whole episode, though, is a well-known story; only the elevator-lobby setting gives it an original perspective, and apart from that, I found it lacked the personal touch. Neither the flashbacks to the composer's amorous adventures as a young man, nor his chilling interviews with authority figures later managed give Shostakovitch much more personal reality than the outline of the man I already knew -- nor does Barnes go much beyond William Vollmann's portrait of the composer in EUROPE CENTRAL. Part Two, "On the Plane," shows Shostakovitch returning from a conference on World Peace in New York in 1949, humiliated by being forced to read a propaganda speech in words that were not his own, and taking refuge in vodka. Part Three, "In the Car," shows the composer as an older man, being driven around Moscow by a chauffeur, laden with honors that have been forced on him at the price of his soul. Perhaps the three sections indeed refer to the one to hear, the one to drink, and the one to remember, but as a conceit it seems whimsical rather than organic.

This is a sad, indeed tragic story -- but it might equally well have been told about a painter or poet. What I missed was any real sense of Shostakovitch as a musician. Oh yes, you hear about his performances and struggles with soloists and conductors. From time to time, works are mentioned, but if you do not know the actual pieces, Barnes offers nothing to help you imagine them. Even the celebrated finale to the Fifth Symphony, which one critic hailed as "a Soviet artist's creative response to just criticism" but others have seen as covertly subversive, remains a matter of mere description; you are not taken into the concert hall at its premiere, or made to hear a single note that you do not already have in your head. Music lovers will know the savage intensity of Shostakovitch's reactions to fascism and crimes against humanity like those at Babi Yar; they will know his searching response to Yevtushenko's ironic poetry in his Fourteenth Symphony; they will perceive the pessimism behind his seeming jollity. Barnes will remind you of all these things, yes, but he will not recreate them for readers who do not come to his book as experienced listeners.

======

The surprising dryness of Barnes' style here is increased by the format of the book, which uses triple-spacing between paragraphs, giving a curiously aphoristic effect when these are very short:

-- On his bedside table, always: a postcard of Titian's THE TRIBUTE MONEY.

-- Chekhov said that you should write everything -- except denunciations.

-- Poor Anatoli Bashashkin. Denounced as Tito's stooge.

-- Akhmatova said that under Khrushchev, Power had become vegetarian. Maybe so; though you could just as easily kill someone by stuffing vegetables down their throat as by the traditional methods of the old meat-eating days.

Four brief paragraphs in a row, almost impossible to understand out of context. Barnes will go on to elaborate on most of these themes, explaining the "Render unto Caesar" subject of the Titian, for example, as a reminder of the dues the artist owes the state. But for some reason, he likes to mystify before explaining, building his novel out of disconnected fragments that only slowly join up to form a life. But not a fully-connected or consistent life -- indeed, that is probably his point. A life that is led around music, certainly, but (in this novel) not THROUGH music. Which is a disservice to a composer who created so much of lasting value, despite all the restrictions placed upon him.

An excellent study of the use of tyranny to maintain political order and control propaganda, told through the eyes of composer Shostakovich. The author adroitly uses fiction join together facts to show the madness of Stalin’s terror and the survival of the “party machine” during the political thaw of Khrushchev. A great page turner.

Anyone who has enjoyed the Noise of Time should consider The Memory Artist by award winning Australian author Katherine Brabon as a point of juxtaposition.

Not Barnes best, in my opinion, a bit too convoluted and not grabbing the significance of the conflict Shostakovich must have been experiencing. Classic Barnes allegorical writing, perhaps, but to obscure for me.

This book provided a fascinating and disturbing insight into the culture and climate in which Shostakovich lived and composed. This included the personal and moral sacrifices he had to make. As a reader we can imagine alongside Julian Barnes how the composer was able to reconcile his choices....or not.

I've just finished reading The Noise of Time. Disappointed. The author, with his concentration on the strangeness and cowardice of his antihero, has failed to paint a portrait of D. Shostakovich as the 20 century's musical giant. Even when mentioning some of his great compositions Barnes remains emotionless. At the same time, he mentions, unjustly, Stravinsky as a real pinnacle of the last century music.