RaveHarpersLucid ... Neither an argued thesis nor a full biography drawn from fresh archival research, Sachs’s book is a succinct guide to Schoenberg’s life and work, one designed in part to make the composer’s music accessible to a wider audience. Much of the book’s appeal lies in that implicit promise to help find the beauty hidden in what can seem, to the uninitiated, a writhing mass of noise.
Henry Bean
RaveHarpersA mature work, a novel about people coming to terms with the end of the collective mania of Berkeley in the Sixties as much as it is about sex and violence. It’s mordant, dark, and funny, written with an eye for the telling detail, through which an entire personality unfurls itself before our eyes, fully formed. It is disturbing and unsettling in the way of great writing. It even has a plot ... It’s a disturbing enough premise...but the grimness of it is leavened by Harold’s charm. He’s funny and beguiling ... Complaints notwithstanding, the book is remarkable. It manages an acute realism even as the artifice of Harold’s notebook—the way that his entries seem at times to give rise to the action of the book as much as to depict it—functions as a meta-commentary on \'the disease of narrative.\'
Julian Barnes
MixedThe Wall Street JournalThe book is beautifully written. There is a wonderful rhythm to the prose—long passages are broken up by staccato bursts of single sentences—and Mr. Barnes writes with a crystalline clarity. Yet watching Shostakovich writhe in inner torment can be tedious, especially since his music, so much the cause of his concern, is almost entirely absent from the book. It’s tempting to imagine what a writer of Mr. Barnes’s skill might have done when attempting to capture the sound of Shostakovich in words. Mr. Barnes, who once described literature as 'a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts,' seems to have missed an opportunity to provide more insight into the man.
James McBride
MixedThe Wall Street Journal...it comes as something of a disappointment that Brown’s music isn’t discussed at more length. The section of the book in which Mr. McBride compares the differences between jazz and funk soloing, emphasizing the deceptive difficulty of playing funk, is so well done that one wishes for more, especially since the book is often marred by clichéd phrasing and puzzling similes ... Even so, Mr. McBride provides a sympathetic and deeply knowledgeable portrait of one the 20th century’s most important musicians.
