The Noise of Time
Book description
** The Sunday Times Number One bestseller **
A Daily Telegraph / Financial Times / Guardian / Sunday Times / The Times / New Statesman / Observer Book of the Year
'BARNES'S MASTERPIECE.' - OBSERVER
In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a…
Why read it?
2 authors picked The Noise of Time as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
In 1936, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich is spending every night in a hallway by the elevator, ready for the secret police he’s sure are coming for him. By the end of the novel, he’s publicly celebrated, but the requirements of government approval weigh as heavily on him as government threats. What, both Barnes and Shostakovich himself ask, might his music have been like under different circumstances? “The last questions of a man’s life do not come with any answers; that is their nature. They merely wail in the head, factory sirens in F sharp.” Barnes’s slim, swift novel offers no…
From Caitlin's list on featuring classical music.
"Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it….art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time".
This powerful novel, charting the life and career of the Russian composer Shostakovich (albeit a fictional account) reveals how artistic freedoms are stripped away under totalitarianism and what that does to an artist’s soul. It gives a chilling insight into the relationship between art and power, and the way a creative life is utterly compromised by the workings of a Communist regime.…
From Lisa's list on historical creativity and the arts.
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