Will I love The Noise of Time?

Julian Barnes dramatizes the tortured inner life of the Soviet Union’s greatest composer.

Dmitri Shostakovich was by all accounts a nervous wreck: a twitching, blinking, sweating mess. He lived in the glare of Stalin himself as the most prominent Russian composer in the 1930s and ‘40s, during the Great Terror.

What I return to is the way Barnes takes us inside Shostakovich’s mind as he tried to balance writing music with life-or-death politics. Some of the compromises he made, like denouncing Igor Stravinsky’s modern compositions, haunted him. "He had betrayed Stravinsky, and in doing so, he had betrayed music. Later,… show more.

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… show more.

"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.… show more.