Julian Barnes: "The Noise of Time"

[Nick Armstrong]

Slightly off topic, but I'm really looking forward to The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes's novel about Shostakovich and Stalin. Out on 28th January.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb...+noise+of+time

Published today - anyone dipped in yet? Reactions, reviews etc. would be welcome.



.

Footnote

Julian Barnes was a guest on In Tune today, interviewed by Suzy Klein (it starts around 43:00 here)

There was a thought-provoking discussion about DSCH's Prelude & Fugue in F minor (Op. 87 / 18) which JB said had been criticised on the basis that "it sins against surrounding reality".... JB intended it as jaw-dropping example of the sort of bizarre dogma Shostakovich had to deal with, and of the absurd "doublethink" of the Soviet régime...

However, Suzy Klein greeted the phrase with a "Wow" and ironically seemed to think it was rather a good phrase, saying “I must use it myself”.

It prompted the thought that this was a tell-tale, exemplifying that there is something totalitarian about her insistence on compliance with a relentless, enforced trendiness and the automatic fabulousness of anything that crosses over into pop &c., and her suspicion of anyone daring to be slightly more selective (remembering for instance her relegation of those who disagreed with her to non-people in relation to the Ibiza Prom...).

Then again, maybe I'm reading too much into it - poor SK is one of the worst sufferers of gushitis and greets everything, good or bad, with a "Wow"... so it is probably just as meaningless as any other of her reactions.

[DublinJimbo]

[ ... ] There was a thought-provoking discussion about DSCH's Prelude & Fugue in F minor (Op. 87 / 18) which JB said had been criticised on the basis that "it sins against surrounding reality".... JB intended it as jaw-dropping example of the sort of bizarre dogma Shostakovich had to deal with, and of the absurd "doublethink" of the Soviet régime...

However, Suzy Klein greeted the phrase with a "Wow" and ironically seemed to think it was rather a good phrase, saying “I must use it myself”.


[ ... ] poor SK is one of the worst sufferers of gushitis and greets everything, good or bad, with a "Wow"... so it is probably just as meaningless as any other of her reactions.

With Suzy's permission I'd like to apply her sentiment to that excellent word — I must use it myself.

[jayne lee wilson]

.... a better interview with Kirsty Wark on Newsnight last night (28/01/16).... but best to read the book itself, not something I get much time to do now. So grateful for its brevity.

My feelings 30 pages in....

"It is time to consider how
Domenico Scarlatti
Condensed so much music into
so few bars
with never a crabbed turn or
congested cadence,
never a boast or a see-here..."

(Basil Bunting, Briggflatts)

And so it goes with the words of Julian Barnes...

[eighthobstruction]

....I could do with cheering up....what was that magic word again??....surely saying it aloud , doesn't work for everyone....


....say it soft and it's almost like.....

[Serial_Apologist]

....I could do with cheering up....what was that magic word again??....surely saying it aloud , doesn't work for everyone....


....say it soft and it's almost like.....

Music in so few bars... apart from Karioke.

[Richard Barrett]

something totalitarian about her insistence on compliance with a relentless, enforced trendiness and the automatic fabulousness of anything that crosses over into pop &c., and her suspicion of anyone daring to be slightly more selective

Capitalist realism innit.

I've read mixed reviews of this book but I'm quite looking forward to reading it myself, though it will be the first by JB I've read for many years.

[vinteuil]

I've read mixed reviews of this book but I'm quite looking forward to reading it myself, though it will be the first by JB I've read for many years.

... I used to read everything by Julian Barnes : for all sorts of reasons he 'clicked' with me. Less addicted now; Shostakovitch and the world he had to deal with is not something that particularly presses my buttons, and, as Richard Barrett says, the reviews have been mixed. As a completist, I'll probably pick up a cheap review copy / paperback / secondhand idc...

[jean]

Julian Barnes writes of his 'Hero' in today's Guardian, here.

[Padraig]

Julian Barnes writes of his 'Hero' in today's Guardian, here.

I have not yet started the novel. This trailer is not encouraging.

[Richard Tarleton]

Just finished it. Am left feeling - vaguely puzzled and dissatisfied. As an exercise in getting inside Shostakovich's head in a way a biographer can't I suppose it works on its own terms (another such I read not long ago was Mario Vargas Llosa's novel based on the life of Roger Casement), but....it all seems a bit arbitrary, and left me wanting to know more, and how much is Julian Barnes's imaginings (I've ordered Elizabeth Wilson's biog ).

Three arbitrary points in DSCH's life, twelve years apart, all leap years, all critical confrontations with the realities of life for an artist in the USSR...."He thought of his life as arranged into twelve-year cycles of bad luck. 1936, 1948, 1960...Twelve more years led to 1972, inevitably another leap year, and so one in which he had confidently expected to die". In 1972 he would be sitting in a box at the RFH, watching Maxim conduct the first performance in the West of his 15th symphony, with me in the stalls looking up and wondering (even then) what was going on behind those inscrutable glasses.

Not the first time I've been left feeling puzzled by a Julian Barnes "novel". I could never understand, then or now, why "History of the World in 10½ Chapters" called itself a novel....I came to the reluctant conclusion after hearing JB talk about it that I was just too dim

PS a scary autobiographical insight into these years is to be found in Rostislav Dubinsky's (Borodin Quartet) Stormy Applause. On the stage at that concert in the RFH, playing DSCH 2nd VC, was David Oistrach, who endured a similarly terrifying time.

[ahinton]

and how much is Julian Barnes's imaginings

The phrase "testamentary dispositions" comes to mind (although, to be fair, Barnes' book is what it sets out to be - a novel - not a contrived confection of "memoirs")...

I've ordered Elizabeth Wilson's biog

As good as it gets, methinks - as in as close as you're likely to get to DSCH himself in a literary work...

[Richard Barrett]

Now finished... first impressions: anyone who knows more than a superficial amount about Shostakovich and his music on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other, isn't going to gain any great new insights about either from this book. But no such novel is written for specialists of course. As I mentioned before, the writing style is precise and evocative enough to make reading attractive, and chimes with what little is really known about how its subject lived and thought (I would say it probably gives a more believable picture than Volkov's book of alleged interviews, and probably isn't much more fictional), but I was left at the end thinking that one of the problems with writing a whole book about a composer that doesn't really mention his music is that there isn't that much left to write about without descending into a morass of detail that belongs in a scholarly biography. Shostakovich spent the vast majority of his time, energy and thought making music, after all. If someone who knew little or nothing of the music read this book, would it encourage them to seek it out and listen? Not that this is its purpose either - but it left me asking why and for whom it was written.

[Richard Tarleton]

Thank you for that, Richard, I understand my dissatisfaction better, you've put your finger on it. Who is it for?

If anyone would like a second hand (good as new) copy, PM me - I don't think this is a keeper.

As good as it gets, methinks - as in as close as you're likely to get to DSCH himself in a literary work...

The penny has just dropped (the book has arrived) - this is the Elizabeth Wilson who was in that marvellous documentary about Rostropovich, a Slava pupil for 7 years.... I do like Julian Barnes's Author's Note at the end - "Elizabeth Wilson is paramount among those who have helped me with this novel. She supplied me with material I would never otherwise have come across, corrected many misapprehensions, and read the typescript. But this is my book not hers; and if you haven't liked mine, then read hers."

As I am just about to do