Staff Pick
I enjoy Julian Barnes's prose immensely. He has a wonderful and poetic way of phrasing things, and I find myself rereading sentences over and over again just for the pleasure. This makes for very slow reading! Ordered by Stalin to denounce Igor Stravinsky while on a propaganda tour in the U.S., Dmitri Shostakovich is torn: Should he obey, or follow his conscience and refuse? Recommended By Sheila N., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich: Julian Barnes’s first novel since his best-selling, Man Booker Prize–winning The Sense of an Ending.
In 1936, Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, executed on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, various women and wives, his children—and all who are still alive themselves hang in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, for decades to come he will be held fast under the thumb of despotism: made to represent Soviet values at a cultural conference in New York City, forced into joining the Party and compelled, constantly, to weigh appeasing those in power against the integrity of his music. Barnes elegantly guides us through the trajectory of Shostakovich’s career, at the same time illuminating the tumultuous evolution of the Soviet Union. The result is both a stunning portrait of a relentlessly fascinating man and a brilliant exploration of the meaning of art and its place in society.
Review
"Magnificent...Novels about artistic achievement rarely do justice to their subjects. The Noise of Time is that rarity. It is a novel of tremendous grace and power, giving voice to the complex and troubled man whose music outlasted the state that sought to silence him." Anthony Marra, Publishers Weekly
Review
"A great novel, Barnes's masterpiece—the particular and intimate details of the life under consideration beget questions of universal significance; the operation of power upon art, the limits of courage and endurance, the sometimes intolerable demands of personal integrity and conscience. This novel, like [The Sense of an Ending], gives us the breath of a whole life within the pages of a slim book." Alex Preston, The Guardian
Review
"This story is truly amazing...an arc of human degradation without violence (the threat of violence, of course, everywhere)....The whole Kafka madhouse brought to life." Jeremy Denk, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"As elegantly constructed as a concerto...another brilliant thought-provoker which explores the cost of compromise and how much confrontation and concession a man and his conscience can endure." Heller McAlpin, National Public Radio
Review
"A tense and elegant study of terror, shame and cowardice, of a celebrated artist capitulating to power, yet on his own terms....Barnes interweaves the painful and the sublime to achieve an epic orchestral effect." Tom Zelman, The Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review
"Stands in an honored literary tradition that includes such predecessors as Barnard Malamud’s The Fixer, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son or this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen [and] another even more audacious tradition, one that includes J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, Colm Tóibín’s The Master, and Kafka’s Leopards by Moacyr Scliar....What can be more ambitious than a writer who seeks to capture the inner life of another great artist?" Chauncy Mabe, The Miami Herald
About the Author
Julian Barnes is the author of twenty previous books including, most recently, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art. He has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature, and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in France, the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina; in Austria, the State Prize for European Literature. In 2004 he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in London.