The Noise of Time
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The Noise of Time
Narrated by:
Daniel Philpott
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Narrated by:
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Daniel Philpott
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By:
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Julian Barnes
About this listen
In May 1937, a man in his early 30s waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now, and few who are taken to the Big House ever return.
©2016 Julian Barnes (P)2016 W F Howes LtdListeners also enjoyed...
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If you could sum up The Noise of Time in three words, what would they be?
An important account of art's relationship to power.How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?
Focussed more on the period of the seige of Leningrad.Would you be willing to try another one of Daniel Philpott’s performances?
Not if he reads foreign voices in such a stereotyped manner, though the narration is fine when it is close to Shostakovich.If you made a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?
Stalin's musical tastes.Any additional comments?
The Noise of Time doesn’t quite work as a novel but is still fascinating as an account of Dmitri Shostakovich’s very difficult, and potentially fatal, relationship with Stalin’s and then Krushchev’s USSR. Although Julian Barnes deals with chronology in an absorbing way, covering the years between the 1920s and the 1960s, this novel is too driven by the desire to spell out those difficulties, notably, as Shostakovich puts it, “that it was impossible to tell the truth here and live.” Finishing a symphony in a minor rather than major key could lead to imprisonment and even execution if the State, and particularly its leader, took against you. However, Shostakovich’s voice is too uniform and analytical to attract much emotional attachment on the part of the reader -- it doesn’t help in the audio-version to have official voices read in a mock-Russian accent -- though the intermittent story it tells is dramatic, beginning, as it does, with Shostakovich waiting by the lift in his apartment block in Leningrad in 1937 for his expected arrest. Although this was the fate of an almost incalculable number of Soviet citizens, particularly in the years before and after the Moscow Trials, Barnes is drawn to the dilemmas and compromises of a world-famous musician, who is even obliged publically to criticize his hero, Stravinsky, and to compose populist works and avoid anything that hinted at the great political sin of formalism. Near the end of the novel, with Shostakovich reinstated but, in his own eyes and those of most critics outside the USSR, diminished, he comments on an ironic gap that he sought to retain between how he had to behave and compose and how he really felt. Even, here, though, he admits that irony can be corrosive for the ironist, who may resort to critical allusions in his music that, probably, no one else noticed.A warning against populism.
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The noise in his head
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In Julian Barnes’ novel the focus is entirely personal, built around a series of historic events rather than a single pivot. Its a more natural choice for a novel, of course, and these days its great to be able to quickly interrogate the British Pathé archive viewing the arrival of Shostakovich in New York as described and do the background checks on Nicolas Nabokov and the CIA.
Entirely satisfying? Not really. Unlike The Sense Of An Ending there is no sense of an edge in that, where historical facts are blended into the narrative, there is no clear cut between that inventive narrative fiction and documentary. That impacted my reading of the latest effort from a great contemporary novelist - not to say that the novel represents beautiful clear writing stopping off at all of the important emotional and intellectual points along the way to enjoy the view. A struggle between 4 and 5 star stuff although I am sure that the author didn’t trouble himself with my tape-measure considerations. A victim of his own high standards in this case, perhaps and emblematic of its subject.
Hey, Shosti......Nabokov and the CIA
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Learned about Stalin's Russia
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Unexpected Pleasure
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Complex but Worthwhile
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Gripping and brilliantly researched
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very entertaining and informative
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Good story
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