The Noise of Time (Julian Barnes)

The Noise of Time

Julian Barnes

This novel tells the life of Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich during the Soviet era.

The story starts with the image of a man waiting outside the door of his flat at night, fully dressed and with a suitcase beside him, while his family is sleeping inside. He is waiting for the KGB officers, to take him to interrogation, to the labour camps in Siberia, to death.

The fear the protagonist Dimitri feels never disappears in the whole narration.Stalin has been in the theatre to evaluate his opera and he has gone before it finishes. Dimitri sees this as a bad omen and decides to be ready and not to give the officers the possibility to humilliate him by taking him away in front of the neighbours in pyjamas.

The novel reflexes the ideas of this composore in a time when old comrades vanish from historical records, burocrats decide over music and art, and children denounce their own parents.

A study on time, Barnes writes that 

' What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.

This was what he held to.'

With the analysis of the protagonist's emotions and thoughts, Barnes is able to face the essential questions people ask to themselves about being a coward or a brave person in moments of terror, when power determines what is art and what is not, making it a good, but above all, the time we have to fullfil our fate or totally avoid it.

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