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Sto caricando le informazioni... The Noise of Time (2016)di Julian Barnes
  
Sto caricando le informazioni...
 Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. 1   totocampobello | Mar 27, 2020 |    ) Marghe48 | Aug 30, 2017 |
 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. Appartiene alle Collane EditorialiGallimard, Folio (6426) Premi e riconoscimentiMenzioniElenchi di rilievo
A compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich--Julian Barnes's first novel since his best-selling, Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending. 1936: Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), he reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, various women and wives, his children all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, for years to come he will be held fast under the thumb of despotism: made to represent Soviet values at a cultural conference in New York City, forced into joining the Party, and compelled, constantly, to weigh appeasing those in power against the integrity of his music. Barnes elegantly guides us through the trajectory of Shostakovich's career, at the same time illuminating the tumultuous evolution of the Soviet Union. The result is both a stunning portrait of a relentlessly fascinating man and a brilliant meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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 Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni...GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia: (3.8)
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Nella sua incredibile ecletticità di soggetti e di stili (da certe comicissime storie della "Storia del mondo in 10 capitoli e 1/2" all'intimismo pieno di mistero de "Il senso di una fine") qui Barnes si misura con Sostakovic e ne racconta la tristissima vicenda di vittima e pedina del potere e del terrore Staliniano. Scrive in prima persona, comunicandoci così in modo vivissimo la paura, la vergogna, il senso di profondo auto-disprezzo che il musicista deve aver provato e sopportato. Documentatissimo nei fatti e nei dati, poetico come solo l'invenzione narrativa può essere, questo libro ci rivela uno spaccato di vita durante il totalitarismo sovietico che è come un incubo kafkiano. Ma per scrivere di Sostakovic non basta conoscerne la storia e la biografia, e neppure "sentirne" sulla pelle il vissuto psicologico: quello che manca qui è la musica. Secondo me Barnes di musica non capisce niente, e infatti la lascia fuori. Peccato.