The Noise of Time

super nice, i just personally don't like half-fiction about real people, and also the translation and editing of the Lithuanian version is kind of eh

A great and relevant read for the noisy year that is 2020 about the noise of the time during Stalin’s Russia. We have different conversations with Power than composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the people of Russia had then. Our conversations with Power are somewhat less dangerous (and not in all cases) but just as awkward.

'He could not live with himself.' It was just a phrase, but an exact one. Under the pressure of Power, the self cracks and splits. The public coward lives with the private hero. Or vice versa. Or, more usually, the public coward lives with the private coward. But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they - he - had once fitted together. (p 155) Julian Barnes' elegant masterpiece ponders the shaping effect of politics and authoritarianism on art, art on the self, and power struggles within and without the self that is confronted with political machinery. These nuanced perceptions steal in like a crack of light in the surrounding darkness. One could characterise the contemporary novel, as expressed in the 21st century, as a bizarre piece of work, unbound by the traditional rules of narrative, preferring scattered episodic prose and daring shifts in chronology and geography. And Barnes is a master of the contemporary novel - his character's ruminations go before and beyond the present time, youth and aged man face each other in the space of reflection, 'then' and 'now' ceaselessly overlapping to produce sparkling juxtapositions of ideas. His prose is quiet, almost self-effacing, reflecting the slightly nervous and cautious personality of the main character, but in doing so has also the startling effect of having the public pressures and private terrors of the Soviet Union speak for themselves as matters of fact and experience. The picture is of a single soul surrounded on all sides, threatening to be turned inside out, seemingly undaunted but self-doubting, his courageous resistance the question turning over and over in his head. Subtle, but jarring, its emotional value more potent when laid bare, when the reader is allowed to fully come to terms with what is being said. And when the words truly sink in, they take hold immutably. Barnes shows a gift for striking metaphors that stay with this reader long after the sentence has ended. His images approximate poetic epiphany, deft and piercing: Some thought this the typical buttoned-up formality of a Leningrader; but on top of that - or underneath it - he knew he was a shy and anxious person. And with women, when he lost his shyness, he veered between absurd enthusiasm and lurching despair. It was as if he was always on the wrong metronome setting. (p 12) His body was just as nervous as it always had been; perhaps more so. But his mind no longer skittered; nowadays, it limped carefully from one anxiety to the next. (p 138) All his life he had relied on irony. [...] Irony allows you to parrot the jargon of Power, to read out meaningless speeches written in your name, to gravely lament the absence of Stalin's portrait in your study while behind a half-open door your wife is holding herself in against forbidden laughter. [...] You write a final movement to your Fifth Symphony which is the equivalent of painting a clown's grin on a corpse, then listen with a straight face to Power's response: 'Look, you can see he died happy, certain of the righteous and inevitable triumph of the Revolution.' And part of you believed that as long as you could rely on irony, you would be able to survive. [...] Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered any more, whether anyone noticed. (p 173-4) It is unlikely that I would have enjoyed this, or understood as much, without WWII and Cold War history lessons (this is a thank-you note to my pre-university history teacher who made it all possible with erudition and fun). Without it, all the names in this book would have resounded more dully. (And I recommend picking up a history book on this topic before anyone begins this book.) This proves a point. Without history - who certain people were, what they did, which part of the world they shook up or tore down or balanced delicately between two clauses of an official document - we would not know much. The past must always be remembered, or we risk living in a historical and cultural amnesia, unable to recall where we have been, to regret, to recognise sacrifice and also to know relief, to know that now is not then.