Reinterpreting a Soviet genius who spoke art to power
Barnes works with consummate artistry
Fiction; The Noise of Time; By Julian Barnes; Jonathan Cape, €20
Julian Barnes’s trim, resonant new novel is a gloss on Shakespeare’s famous line about “art made tongue-tied by authority”. The authority, in this case, is that of Joseph Stalin and his heirs; the artist in question is Dmitri Shostakovich, the Soviet Union’s most famous composer.
Shostakovich was born in 1906; later, he would tell the story of how, as a schoolboy in ...
