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Lädt ... The Noise of Time (2016)von Julian Barnes
  
Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.  Margaret09 | Apr 15, 2024 |    ) MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |  ) harishwriter | Oct 12, 2023 | Wow. This book is a masterpiece. So profound. I have never before read a book that more perfectly enscapsulates the anxious mind. Would recommend having some background knowledge of Shostakovich and Soviet Russia before reading. ( ) RRabas | Jun 16, 2023 |  ) gjky | Apr 9, 2023 |
 In 1979, a book purporting to be Shostakovich’s memoir, entitled “Testimony,” appeared in the West, depicting a frustrated composer who despised Communism and hid veiled critiques of the Soviet regime in his music. . . . Barnes, who acknowledges “Testimony” as one of his major sources, 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. ... ... [W]ith this drily self-chastising, depressed, and exhausted composer, Barnes is also shielding himself from other Shostakoviches, such as the one who fiercely criticized an avant-garde young composer, whose work he had hitherto supported, when he discovered the deputy culture minister sitting in the audience and became frightened.  Music was what Shostakovich "put up against the noise of time." 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.  Using this third-person “Shostakovich,” but often switching into an unlocatable voice, like a biographer behind a literary veil, Barnes deftly covers three big episodes in the composer’s life: denunciation in Pravda and subsequent implication in an assassination plot; his trip to America, where he is humiliated as a Soviet stooge; and lastly, being forced to join the Communist Party. This story is truly amazing, as Barnes knows, an arc of human degradation without violence (the threat of violence, of course, everywhere). . . . . . . It’s a powerful portrait, and readers will have to decide whether they think this is “really” Shostakovich. I felt that he emerged as a (strangled) hero, but wished that Barnes would explain a little less, and show a bit more. The book is, partly, an exercise in cold war nostalgia. But it’s also, more interestingly, an inquiry into the nature of personal integrity. Shostakovich made his accommodations with “Power”, and survived. For some people that damns him unequivocally. For Barnes, the matter is more complicated, and he weighs it carefully. The composer’s decline into ill health, the withering of his spirit, his hope that “death would liberate his music… from his life” – Barnes presents Shostakovich’s final downward spiral with a kind of ruthless inevitability (and inevitability is, as Susan Snyder says, the signal note of tragedy). Alexei Tolstoy wrote in Pravda of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony: “Here the personality submerges itself in the great epoch that surrounds it, and begins to resonate with the epoch.” Barnes has achieved a similar feat with a period of history, and a place, that despite their remoteness, are rendered in exquisite, intimate detail. He has given us a novel that is powerfully affecting, a condensed masterpiece that traces the lifelong battle of one man’s conscience, one man’s art, with the insupportable exigencies of totalitarianism. Gehört zu VerlagsreihenGallimard, Folio (6426) AuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
Dmitri Schostakowitsch gehrt zu den renommiertesten Komponisten seines Landes, als Stalin der Auffhrung einer seiner Opern beiwohnt und schon in der Pause den Saal verlsst. Fortan gilt Schostakowitsch als zum Abschuss freigegebener Mann. Er entgeht der Suberung, doch wie lebt es sich als Knstler unter stndiger Beobachtung? In welchem Verhltnis stehen Kunst und Unterdrckung, Diktatur und Kreativitt zueinander, und ist es verwerflich, wenn man sich der Macht beugt, um knstlerisch arbeiten zu knnen? Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. 
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 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (3.8)
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We only really meet the composer at three points in his life. As a young and frightened married man expecting to be denounced and taken away by Stalin's regime at any moment: as a propoganda vessel for the Soviet regime, sent to tour America: and a finally as a very elderly man, spiritually shattered and exhausted by the regime changes he has lived through.
This is a book which denounces spirit-sapping totalitarianism, while giving a real feel of the day-to-day reality of living under such a regime. As such, it's not an easy read, despite being a relatively short one. It's a book to reflect upon and to take quite slowly. It's not at all a feel-good holiday read. (