The Noise of Time (Hardcover)

from

Years back, I had greatly enjoyed Julian Barnes' novel Arthur & George. Drawing on the real-life case of the “Great Wryley Outrages” which saw Arthur Conan Doyle embarking on some sleuthing of his own to disculpate wrongly-convicted suspect George Edalji, Barnes gave us a fictional but plausible ...

from geza.tatrallyay

Excellent book; Barnes draws you into the soul of Shostakovich, a composer trying to make a living in Stalinist Russia. The encounters with the tyrant and the horrific system are believable, and Shostakovich comes across as an all too human character. The writing is wonderful; this is an enchanti...

from Crazymamie

"Turgenev was not to his literary taste: too civilised, not fantastical enough. He preferred Pushkin and Chekhov, and Gogol best of all. But even Turgenev, for all his faults, had a true Russian pessimism. Indeed, he understood that to be Russian was to be pessimistic. He had also written that, h...

from Clara53

Brilliant. Brilliant, bold and insightful.​ I started marking quotes while reading this novel and very soon realized that I wanted to quote from every page!!! The author so vividly describes the life of Shostakovich under "Power" (Stalin at first, then Khrushchev), the torment of being in conflic...

from EBT1002

"Why, he wondered, had Power now turned its attention to music, and to him? Power had always been more interested in the word than the note: writers, not composers, had been proclaimed the engineers of human souls. Writers were condemned on page one of Pravda, composers on page three. Two pages a...