The Noise of Time
Night after night, in the year 1936, a man stands on the landing outside his Moscow apartment. Dressed for travel, with a small suitcase at his feet, he waits for the lift doors to open, ” . . . for the sight of a uniform . . . and the clamp of fist on wrist.” Across the city, terrified individuals keep a similar nocturnal vigil, knowing that in Stalin’s Russia, “They always came for you in the middle of the night.” Better to meet them than to be dragged from your bed. Particularly if you are the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, ” . . . a meticulous man,” living in a time of madness. Throughout Julian Barnes’s meditative biographical novel, The Noise of Time, Shostakovich works in the midst of terror, heartbreak, and war. “He could always work,” Barnes writes, “regardless of chaos and discomfort around him. That was his salvation.”
Redemption is another matter. Shostakovich was often condemned for remaining in the USSR, denouncing fellow artists, and writing patriotic works on demand, none of which Barnes overlooks. “In all, he had won the Stalin Prize six times,” we learn. “He also received the Order of Lenin at regular ten-year intervals . . . He swam in honors like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce. And he hoped to be dead by the time 1976 came around.” Because the axe is always poised to fall, even on the lucky. Toward the end of his life, the composer observes, “They had come for him every twelve years,” starting in 1936 when an ill-received opera made him “an enemy of the people.” This is when Barnes’s compressed narrative begins. Divided into three sections — prosaically titled On The Landing, On The Plane, and In The Car — the novel alights on three critical years: 1936, when Shostakovich’s arrest, even execution, seems imminent; 1948, when he visits the USA as part of a Soviet delegation; and 1960, when he is forced to join the Communist Party. Inside this elegant frame, Barnes creates an impressionistic portrait of an astonishing mind confronting a monstrous era.
The Noise of Time: A novel
Hardcover $25.95
The Noise of Time: A novel
Hardcover $25.95
“Faces, names, memories . . . Fields of sunflowers . . . Sweat coming off a widow’s peak . . . ” Remembered characters and images flash across the novel’s early pages while Shostakovich waits in the dark, his mind “skittering.” In these abbreviated paragraphs, we can only glimpse a man who seems to keep his distance. And Barnes’s allusive, epigrammatic style keeps us at arm’s length as he dramatizes Shostakovich’s life in a series of potent scenes and muted reflections. Brian Hall, in his superb 2008 novel Fall of Frost, took a similarly oblique approach to Robert Frost, but Hall seemed to penetrate the poet’s heart, whereas Barnes enters this composer’s consciousness, it often seems, purely as an observer. (The other obvious comparison is with Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, whose theme echoes through The Noise of Time but whose labyrinthine structure could not be more different.)
Childhood, first love, three marriages, children. The Bolshevik Revolution, World War II, Stalinism. With cerebral precision, Barnes depicts a life encased by history and defined, from the outset, by music. “Like his sisters, he had first been put in front of a keyboard at the age of nine. And that was when the world became clear to him.” In 1926, the premiere of his First Symphony brings the nineteen year-old Shostakovich not only fame but also the political scrutiny that shadows him until his death in 1975. By which time, Barnes imagines the composer’s pessimism curdling into desolation when he instructs that ” . . . the first movement of his Fifteenth Quartet should be played ‘so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall in sheer boredom.’ ”
The novel is leavened throughout by this kind of self-mockery and ironic wit. Each New Year’s Eve, for example, since “Paradise had been created, or would be created quite soon when . . . a few hundred thousand more saboteurs had been shot,” Shostakovich makes the same toast: “That things don’t get any better!” Elsewhere, a brief rumination on cigarettes, (interrogators favor Belomory, intellectuals Kazbeki) prompts an image of Stalin crumbling his own brand into his pipe, making his desk “a terrible mess of discarded paper and cardboard and ash,” followed by this observation: “No one else would smoke a Herzegovina Flor in Stalin’s presence — unless offered one, when they might slyly attempt to keep it unsmoked and afterwards flourish it like a holy relic.”
Prokofiev and Stravinsky materialize briefly and with startling clarity alongside legendary soldiers like Marshal Tukhachevsky, “The Red Napoleon,” tortured and executed in 1937. For all its turmoil, however, Barnes’s novel remains a quiet meditation. “Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time,” he concludes. And the artist? Growing old and enduring the humiliation of fame and totalitarian favor, “What he hoped for was that death would liberate his music: liberate it from his life . . . his music would be . . . just music.” The final note in this elegiac and ultimately affecting novel is the simple sound of three vodka glasses clinking, ” . . . .a perfect triad” Shostakovich notes, as he and a companion, waiting on a railway platform in midwinter in the middle of war, raise a toast with a crippled beggar.
“Faces, names, memories . . . Fields of sunflowers . . . Sweat coming off a widow’s peak . . . ” Remembered characters and images flash across the novel’s early pages while Shostakovich waits in the dark, his mind “skittering.” In these abbreviated paragraphs, we can only glimpse a man who seems to keep his distance. And Barnes’s allusive, epigrammatic style keeps us at arm’s length as he dramatizes Shostakovich’s life in a series of potent scenes and muted reflections. Brian Hall, in his superb 2008 novel Fall of Frost, took a similarly oblique approach to Robert Frost, but Hall seemed to penetrate the poet’s heart, whereas Barnes enters this composer’s consciousness, it often seems, purely as an observer. (The other obvious comparison is with Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, whose theme echoes through The Noise of Time but whose labyrinthine structure could not be more different.)
Childhood, first love, three marriages, children. The Bolshevik Revolution, World War II, Stalinism. With cerebral precision, Barnes depicts a life encased by history and defined, from the outset, by music. “Like his sisters, he had first been put in front of a keyboard at the age of nine. And that was when the world became clear to him.” In 1926, the premiere of his First Symphony brings the nineteen year-old Shostakovich not only fame but also the political scrutiny that shadows him until his death in 1975. By which time, Barnes imagines the composer’s pessimism curdling into desolation when he instructs that ” . . . the first movement of his Fifteenth Quartet should be played ‘so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall in sheer boredom.’ ”
The novel is leavened throughout by this kind of self-mockery and ironic wit. Each New Year’s Eve, for example, since “Paradise had been created, or would be created quite soon when . . . a few hundred thousand more saboteurs had been shot,” Shostakovich makes the same toast: “That things don’t get any better!” Elsewhere, a brief rumination on cigarettes, (interrogators favor Belomory, intellectuals Kazbeki) prompts an image of Stalin crumbling his own brand into his pipe, making his desk “a terrible mess of discarded paper and cardboard and ash,” followed by this observation: “No one else would smoke a Herzegovina Flor in Stalin’s presence — unless offered one, when they might slyly attempt to keep it unsmoked and afterwards flourish it like a holy relic.”
Prokofiev and Stravinsky materialize briefly and with startling clarity alongside legendary soldiers like Marshal Tukhachevsky, “The Red Napoleon,” tortured and executed in 1937. For all its turmoil, however, Barnes’s novel remains a quiet meditation. “Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time,” he concludes. And the artist? Growing old and enduring the humiliation of fame and totalitarian favor, “What he hoped for was that death would liberate his music: liberate it from his life . . . his music would be . . . just music.” The final note in this elegiac and ultimately affecting novel is the simple sound of three vodka glasses clinking, ” . . . .a perfect triad” Shostakovich notes, as he and a companion, waiting on a railway platform in midwinter in the middle of war, raise a toast with a crippled beggar.