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Nina asked this question about The Noise of Time:
I have really enjoyed Julian Barnes' writing, especially Sense of an Ending, but I am really struggling with his latest. Is anyone else feeling this way? I'm so disappointed but I haven't quite finished it yet - maybe it will come together in the last 50 pages.
K. McDonnell Perhaps your disappointment comes from the difficulty of the subject matter. Shostakovich survived under a brutal totalitarian regime, terror few, if …morePerhaps your disappointment comes from the difficulty of the subject matter. Shostakovich survived under a brutal totalitarian regime, terror few, if any, of us can imagine, even in today's world.

Sometimes I feel disappointed and don't want to finish a book because I already know the outcome. The problem isn't in the story telling but in the tragedy of life. I think Barnes does an excellent job of bringing to life the horror, sadness and ultimate dissapointment of an artist who survived not for the sake of art but for his own life and those he loved and from that emerged "music which is inside ourselves -the music of our being- which is transformed by some into real music." p 135. We can never truly understand the pressures under which Shostakovich composed his music but Julian Barnes provides an excellent picture of an artist finding meaning despite the forces of despotism coercing him to praise the Soviet Union as a matter of survival.(less)
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The Noise of Time
by Julian Barnes
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