His narrative, as elegantly structured as a concerto in three movements bookended by a resonant overture and coda, captures the strain of an innately Russian pessimist forced to toe the Soviet optimistic line in both his music and in public pronouncements he was compelled to sign as his own... Barnes' stirring novel about what is lost when tyrants try to control artistic expression leaves us wondering what, besides more operas, this tormented, compromised musical prodigy might have composed had he been free.
It’s lovely, but even at this moment you might wonder: Is this how a man thinks, in the throes of mortal fear for himself and for his family? Or does it sound a tad like a novelist contemplating a man contemplating these things? Shostakovich’s musical voice is far more jittery and austere: uncanny, often maniacal, hollow. Either you accept Barnes’s premise, and the resulting style, or you may find yourself dissatisfied, wishing for the narrator of Notes From the Underground to come and make everything feel more neurotic and Russian...I felt that [Shostakovich] emerged as a (strangled) hero, but wished that Barnes would explain a little less, and show a bit more.
The 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.
It’s hardly uncommon for historical fiction to take liberties. And certainly Barnes knows how to tell a tale. But for all its polished surface, this novel is equivocating and cautious. It backs its way into the story, groping toward a fragmented sense of the main character. We’re confronted with short paragraphs that offer epigrammatic patness and a lot of motivic repetition of phrases or images as a mask for a certain amount of narrative uncertainty, be it on the part of the protagonist (Shostakovich) or, it often seems, the author himself...Barnes’s The Noise of Time is merely an adroit rephrasing of an argument we’ve heard before. The result is a pretty enough piece of writing that may well be embraced by those to whom the story is new. But it remains as shallow as — well, a snapshot.
In recent books like The Lemon Table and The Sense of an Ending, Mr. Barnes has become increasingly preoccupied with characters looking back over the receding vistas of their lives. Here, he has tried to echo Shostakovich’s work with an aphoristic, irony-laden style of his own. His composer is so given to bellyaching and navel-gazing, however, that the novel gains power and resonance when it steps outside its hero’s head, and instead uses Shostakovich’s story to probe such favorite themes as the relativity of history and the subjectivity of experience (the same themes that animated earlier Barnes novels like The Porcupine and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters), and to chronicle the absurdities that artists suffer under totalitarianism.
The Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich is the man remembering in Barnes’s The Noise of Time, a novel that, like Flaubert’s Parrot, mixes fiction and biography, memory and myth ... But unlike Flaubert’s Parrot, which revels in the impossibility of ever reconstructing a biography, The Noise of Time makes just that claim. In it Barnes assumes a knowingness about the private thoughts and emotions of Shostakovich, a knowledge largely based on memoirs about him, and asks us to believe that he is taking us inside his head ... From the disjointed fragments of the opening paragraphs, the reader has the confidence of being in the hands of a master storyteller, knowing that these images will all return with symbolic significance... Barnes has a good sense of what life was like in the Soviet Union. He captures well the black humor, irony, and cynicism that pervaded the intelligentsia circles in which Shostakovich moved.
Barnes gives us a mournfully sarcastic, frustrated Shostakovich, at once mocking of his Soviet patrons and stymied by his inability to break with them fully. In a sort of third-person monologue of impressions, vignettes, and diaristic reflections, he comes off as neither heroic nor craven, though he exhibits both traits on occasion ... The murderous carnivalesque of Stalin’s Russia, as captured in novels like Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—the atmosphere of fear mixed with proliferating ironies and sudden plot twists, the island on the Gulag archipelago reserved entirely for jokes about the Gulags—gets reanimated in The Noise of Time.
The tension between revolutionary discipline and artistic freedom might sound like a familiar theme, yet I can’t recall any other recent book which offers such a prismatic perspective on the matter...If Barnes’s moving, Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, which similarly charted the course of a life in less than 200 pages, was a book of the heart, this one is very much of the head. But it is a brilliant head, which leads us to places only a handful of novelists have the skill and the courage to go.
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...For all its turmoil, however, Barnes’s novel remains a quiet meditation.
[Barnes] has overcome the challenge of living up to his previous novel by doing what he has always done — producing something totally different ... Barnes tells us little about the content and effect of Shostakovich’s music. Instead he uses musical form and motifs to both shape the work and stand in for the music. Dividing the book between three time periods 12 years apart, all leap years, these three sections act like movements in a work of music, each with its own mood.
Barnes’s storytelling is phenomenal; Shostakovich, as tragic and anxious as he is, is utterly fascinating. The story ricochets from one moment to another, with each memory acting as a piece of a patchwork quilt that will ultimately be sewn together to make sense of Shostakovich’s life.
In his impressionistic portrait of Shostakovich, the man and the artist, Barnes balances sympathy with a tough-minded clarity, the more potent for being presented via the composer’s own point of view...This is likely a minor novel in the Barnes oeuvre, but what can be more ambitious than a writer who seeks to capture the inner life of another great artist?
...[a] novelistic reinhabiting of the composer’s world... The Noise of Time makes itself interesting by refusing such stable positions. It is a short work that dramatises an aesthetic and ethical muddle of enormous complexity — a life of immense musical triumphs counterpointed with endless compromises, humiliations and small defeats ...an episodic, diary-like work that is probably too fragmented, fidgety and neurotic to be called a historical novel, but is certainly thick with period detail ...The Noise of Time is stuffed with world historical detail. It darts from one astonishing scene to the next, lurching from the spectacular to the banal ... Other characters, particularly women, read largely as ciphers. At points The Noise of Time comes across like Julian Barnes writing impressionistic notes towards a life of Shostakovich — which of course it is; but sometimes one might like to forget that, to have more narrative momentum accrue.
Mr. Barnes focuses on the political environment in which Shostakovich worked, an emphasis that may disappoint readers more interested in the composer’s music. But anyone who has read Mr. Barnes’ previous works won’t be surprised to discover that he uses Shostakovich’s story as a meditation on death, one of the author’s recurrent themes...And that’s the author’s achievement here: to not only capture the mood of fear under which Shostakovich worked but also create a tribute to the struggle of all artists.
The Noise of Time portrays the conflict between Shostakovich’s desire for integrity as a composer and his instinct for survival in a society that derides formal experimentation as 'decadence' and treats old-style Russian 'pessimism' as a betrayal of Soviet 'optimism' ... Barnes’s preferred manner of rummaging through Shostakovich’s mind aims for paradox but ends up feeling circular, with a movement less symphonic than sing-songy ...Barnes has constructed the novel as a series of snapshots and vignettes, roughly 230 in all. Besides killing off momentum, this approach puts a great strain on Barnes’s rhetorical powers, which while strong are not equal to conjuring up so many mini-endings and partial pay-offs without a certain deadening ... The overall effect is of Shostakovich being chopped up and hemmed in. At times it can be hard to tell between the Soviet version of culture that Barnes is condemning and his own brusque pronouncements.
In Barnes' adept hands, the work is a tense and elegant study of terror, shame and cowardice, of a celebrated artist capitulating to power, yet on his own terms ... Barnes interweaves the painful and the sublime to achieve an epic orchestral effect — Shostakovich shedding his sense of purity and honor over the course of four decades to preserve his art.
Barnes constructs his penetrating nonfiction novel through third-person free indirect style, in which the consciousness is Shostakovich’s. So, instead of a detailed account of people, places and events, the book consists largely of the fearful meditations of a cultural celebrity who is convinced that 'it was impossible to tell the truth here and live' ... As striking an invention as any fictional character, Barnes’ Shostakovich is a man who has sacrificed his soul to save a life he dismisses as 'a farce.'”
Despite its promise and subject matter, Barnes' novel is a disappointing mishmash of ponderous essayistic musings and standard biographical material on Shostakovich ... Barnes' novel remains so tied to its sources and eager to explain its own meaning that it shows precisely the sort of unambiguous simplicity that Shostakovich's music resists.
Barnes has composed The Noise of Time like a piece of orchestral music. The third-person narrative features numerous leitmotifs: the fear of detainment, the obsession with being on the right side of the party line, the fear of getting blacklisted from Soviet concert halls — none of which had been fears of a paranoid mind: Shostakovich experienced them all. His life was shaped by a series of catastrophes...As I listened to his 'Prelude and Fugue no. 4,' all the pains Shostakovich took, all the paranoid acts Barnes meticulously details in his book, suddenly made sense.
