Music of a Life

by Andreï Makine, Geoffrey Strachan (Translator)

Pursuing a musical career despite the persecution of his performer parents during Stalin's late 1930s reign of terror, young Alexi Berg, on the brink of his first concert, is forced to flee into a violent world when his parents are arrested. 25,000 first printing.

Genres: Fiction, Russia, Historical Fiction, Music, France, Russian Literature, Literature

109 pages, Hardcover

First published January 10, 2001

About the author

Andreï Makine was born in Krasnoyarsk, Soviet Union on 10 September 1957 and grew up in city of Penza, a provincial town about 440 miles south-east of Moscow. As a boy, having acquired familiarity with France and its language from his French-born grandmother (it is not certain whether Makine had a French grandmother; in later interviews he claimed to have learnt French from a friend), he wrote poems in both French and his native Russian.

In 1987, he went to France as member of teacher's exchange program and decided to stay. He was granted political asylum and was determined to make a living as a writer in French. However, Makine had to present his first manuscripts as translations from Russian to overcome publishers' skepticism that a newly arrived exile could write so fluently in a second language. After disappointing reactions to his first two novels, it took eight months to find a publisher for his fourth, Le testament français. Finally published in 1995 in France, the novel became the first in history to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis plus the Goncourt des Lycéens.

Reviews

[Ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the haunting life story of Alexeï Berg, Andreï Makine engages himself into the tradition of the framing story as a narrative strategy, a technique so often used by Turgenev (First Love, Rudin) and by Makine's choice for a train journey to create a forum for Berg’s story, particularly reminiscent of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata.

While waiting in some crowded train station in the Urals, the unnamed narrator encounters Alexeï Berg, once a budding pianist whose life will radically change when he gets towed into the whirlwind of the second world war and has to make some tough choices in order to survive. During the train journey Alexeï Berg will tell the narrator about his eventful life, from the moment he had to flee Moscow in 1941 when his parents are arrested until the moment both men will disembark from the train in Moscow – the history of one individual caught and almost crushed by the horror of 20th Century History.



Once the atmospheric but slightly overlong introduction in the train station shifts for the train journey, the story unfolds elegantly . The novel seems as intricately structured as a musical piece which reflects its title beautifully, as this is not as much a book about music as it is a book about broken lives - and broken dreams. Makine’s storytelling is compelling and engrossing, his prose is lyrical and sparse at once, glowing and imaginative. Cinematically drawn war and snow scenes echo Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The story sparks and smoulders under the skin, propulsing dexterously towards the apotheosis, unleashing jubilantly – dissimulation gives way to the authenticity of truth, which cannot go without consequences in Stalinist Russia.

As his hands fell upon the keyboard, it was still possible to believe a beautiful harmony had been formed at random, in spite of him. But a second later the music came surging out, the power of it sweeping away all doubts, voices, sounds, wiping away the fixed grins and exchanged glances, pushing back the walls, dispersing the light of the reception room out into the nocturnal immensity of the sky beyond the windows.

He did not feel as if he were playing. He was advancing through a night, breathing in its delicate transparency, made up as it was of an infinite number of facets of ice, of leaves, of wind. He no longer felt any pain. No fear about what would happen. No anguish or remorse. The night through which he was advancing expressed this pain, this fear, and the irremediable shattering of the past, but this had all become music and now only existed through its beauty.



Music of a Life conveys a acute illustration of the profound and powerful wisdom in Epicurus’ device to live hidden - as in some places and times this simply makes the difference whether one will live or not.
(*** ½)

(Photographs by Joseph Koudelka)

[Gaurav Sagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.”
― Anton Chekhov



link: source

Talk about himself? But who was he? That soldier washing in a pool of water, after a bout of hand-to-hand combat, while the water turned red, with the water turned red, with his own blood and the blood of those he had just killed? Or that youth shaking a dead man to get his boot off him? Or else that other one, watching at a dusty window, in another life, in a forbidden past? No, what was most real in all those years was the day he lost consciousness in the cemetery, when he was as good as dead and when all there was between him and the world was that unsteady line: an unknown woman sleeping beside him and giving him her warmth…


I often find myself fascinatingly struggling with an intriguing dilemma about the mere size of books, often, I wonder whether we need epic, voluminous books in the contemporary literature when so much could be said in just over a hundred pages. Emotions speak louder than words but it takes something extraordinary to weave ordinary human emotions in just a few words, in an efficacious manner. Such that the sound of silence could be heard through the clamor of your heart, the richness of emptiness could be felt through the plumpness of the universe. Time and again, I find myself absorbed by a vague thought that the literature has evolved from humungous, periodical creations of art to slim, poignant, lively ones that emanate life through their pages and words. But then, reality strikes me and I am taken aback with piercing realization that each fabrication of art has a being of its own, the being of the author exudes from it; and the worth of the art may not be judged from the number of pages. Having said that I must admit that A Life’s music is a unique achievement in the contemporary literature having richness which is equivalent to those of having several hundreds of pages. The author does a remarkable job to infuse the various tints of life in just enough pages of the historical novel which might be considered as a novella- in length but certainly not in scope.


The author has been able to craft very rich text by fusing memories of varied colors of life, from painful agonies, pent-up desires to enriching, soul-fueling remembrances, meticulously spun around pieces of inheritance of Byzantium history, serfdom, Tartar yoke, and the revolutions. The poetic agonies and painful despair are amalgamated together to yield a vivid, heart-wrenching experience. Though the joyous moments of the present, which hold in itself a promising, reassuring future beaming with potential but the mad and absurd heart longs for the quintessential phase of life, crafted over the thread of space-time through the gravity of emotions, no matter how painful it might be. Does it essentially mean the human heart finds solace in the pain? And what do these embittered experiences do to us, they, in essence, catapult us from dreaming, ruminating and exalted childhood, where nothing seems to be impossible, to mundane, banal and dull adulthood, wherein we may have acquired most of the accessions we long for throughout our lives but we still feel the emptiness as profound as the universe of our imagination, as if nothing could assuage our bemoaning heart. And the realization of this overwhelming emptiness fills our heart with a strange torpor, leapfrogging the beats of heart, which again puts us before the probing eyes of our existence.


The novella seems to have the essential elements of Russian literature, the opening scene of the novella is reminiscent of a typical Russian microcosm- the narrator remembering waiting for a train amidst the snowstorm of the Urals. The author, a French who was born in Siberia, though writes in French but seems to retain the poetic and poignant intensity, typical of Russian literature, perhaps his roots contributed towards it. We find the story of Alexi Berg, a pianist, through the acute eyes of an unnamed narrator, waiting for a train among the superorganism of human beings in a vestibule on a snowy night in Moscow. The narrator chances upon the encounter with the pianist through the music emanating from the second floor where the pianist, through the darkness, murkiness of Russia emerges from the nothingness that extends as far as the horizon can be seen.

The business with violin, the nocturnal terror, his years of loneliness as a plague victim, still came back to him from time to time, but mainly to give a keen edge to the happiness he now enjoyed. His parents whispering in the night, the acrid smell of burning varnish, this was only residue of those three black years, ’37,’38,’39.


link: source

The sentences have been formed with an air of forthcoming climax, leaving the reader in the anticipation of a literary pinnacle. The colossal details are being announced quite discreetly which essentially makes the event all the more pronounced. We have been taken through the haunting memories of the past of Berg, which come back sometimes to give way to current happiness, sometimes to revive some painful remembrances. The poetic notes of violin left stranded in the string of memories, which try to break free from the enduring remembrances of the soul blazing in fire of nothingness, dying away inch by inch with every creak of the wood. The reader is being thrown into the spring of 1941 to witness the shattering events of Berg’s life wherein his dreams are snatched away from him as if they don’t even belong to him, by taking his parents away. Alexi Berg has been robbed of his existence, he has to refuge at his uncle’s place, where, ironically, he has to keep himself apparently invisible to the world to keep himself alive, as if his existence becomes an apparition. The pianist has to keep running hither and thither, forced to forget his identity amidst the sea of fallacious identities he has to forge. He has to expose himself to certain death in order to escape the death itself, as he loses himself among the crowd of soldiers of variegated backgrounds and fate (as some are dead too) eventually to become one of them, his being took refuge in the hell of nothingness in which all the soldiers were burning, indistinguishable as a mass of killing machines.


Having come among these soldiers to escape death, he was exposing himself to much more certain death here than in re-education colony, where they would have sent him after his parents’ arrest. He would have been safer behind the barbed wire of a camp than in possession of this lethal liberty.

During all these years of endurance, what keeps the being of Alexi Berg intact is his music. His devotion to it though could never really express itself, living as a surpassed element of his being. As he moves on in his life, having mend his physical wounds, through the journey of forged identities among the perilous world of war and death, only to find his soul deeply wounded through heart-wrenching revelations. The author has been able to craft dreamlike prose here which works in the same way our memory works. The author brings the vast details compressed in a few pages in a very coherent manner such that it leaves almost a cinematic experience on the reader, of such kind in which minute details are being given attention without making those superfluous. Perhaps that’s why Andrei Makine is regarded one of the best contemporary authors and is often compared with Proust, Nabokov, Stendhal and Russian giants such as Chekov but this novella reminds me more of Candide by Voltaire since authors in both novellas have been able to carve out humongous works of art, in scope, with precision and economy of a master craftsman of words.

Moreover he had long ago learned that in war truth and falsehood, magnanimity and callousness, intelligence and naivety could not be so clearly told apart as in the life before .


The author proposes war as one of those vagaries of life which are considered as necessary evils to comprehend it, in an idiosyncratic manner. We know that death is a certain truth of our lives but to present it in a whimsical way creates an altogether different experience for the reader, it is being presented as a kind of revelation, a man encounters as he steps in to world out of his den of comforts. The other theme explored by the author is freedom, it holds in itself life as much as it holds death. However, we see right through the novella that the concept of freedom is skewed and compromised at different stages due to various reasons, such as the crisis of identity, war, and fear. Andrei Berg braves himself through various vagaries of life, at any probable cost, even if he keeps silence of death lodged in his thoughts, he keeps on moving even if it means semblance of untrue intentions as a sort of suspended existence in which even the shadow of a being left it.

He sensed that all the life that was left to him was concentrated in this faintly springlike breeze, in this airy, misty sunlight, in the scent of the waters awakening beneath the ice. And not in his emaciated body that no longer even felt the wind’s scorching.


It is the first time that I come across the author but it was a great experience, one that left me with a sad but poetic taste. It is a tragic story that has been crafted with the harmony of a musician, infuse with in-between tinges of acerbic humor. It’s an endearing tale of a man who strives all his life to give his suspended existence (perhaps inspired from the life of the author himself, he always maintains that Russia left him rather than he leaving it) a sort of meaning or reference to hold on, a struggle of ghostly existence to keep its being intact in a poetic manner, probably the novella could be taken as a long poem written through the remembrances from some distant memory. One thing which makes him unique among contemporary authors is the usage of words: words are somewhat like necessary evils of art, they are important but one has to have the precision of an artist to create such a profound effect, the inappropriate usage may leave the reader with an unpleasant or superfluous taste.


Through half-closed eyelids he watched this rather bumpy haulage and felt as if nothing belonged to him, neither the frozen shadow that was his body, nor what his own eyes saw, nor what was visible of him. There was nothing left of him.

He did not feel as if he were playing. He was advancing through a night, breathing in its delicate transparency, made up of an infinite number of facets of ice, leaves, of wind. He no longer felt any pain within him. No fear about what would happen. No anguish or remorse. That night through which he was advancing expressed this pain, this fear, and the irremediable shattering of the past, but this had all become music and now only existed through its beauty.

4.5/5

[Candi · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

This novella by the Russian writer Andreï Makine left me with a question I considered for a long time afterwards. I’m not certain if this was the author’s intention or not, yet it lingered, haunting me before drifting off to sleep at night. In trying to preserve yourself from horror and isolation, can you be truly saved if in return you have given up the essence of your true self? Your identity, your love, those things that bring you joy?

Music of a Life is a story of a musician, a classical pianist named Alexeï Berg. His tale is told to an unnamed narrator upon their meeting on a snowy night while waiting for a train to Moscow. The narrator first stumbles upon Alexeï after nodding off in the waiting room only to be awakened by the sound of a piano. The feeling of fatalism he felt emanating from the mass of his fellow countrymen resignedly accepting the delays is replaced by a new emotion upon hearing those subdued notes played.

“Suddenly everything is illuminated by a truth that has no need of words: this night lost in a void of snow, a good hundred travelers huddled here, each seeming to be breathing gently upon the fragile spark of his own life; this station with its vanished platforms; and these notes stealing in like moments from an utterly different night.”

It was the spring of 1941 and the brink of Alexeï’s debut concert. His dreams are thwarted when his family becomes ensnared in the web of Stalin’s purges. He flees to the countryside and is forced to take on a new identity in order to survive. His new life must never betray his gift for music, yet this passion is never far from his thoughts, remaining forever in his soul. With World War II now at Russia’s doorstep, Alexeï’s journey is both perilous and heartbreaking. The prose is beautiful and evocative, and his story as told to the narrator takes on almost a dreamlike quality. Now and then along the way he encounters something resembling the emotion of love. Most are fleeting impressions and he struggles to name this ephemeral feeling.

"He reflected that there must be a word for it, some key to understanding this suffering and this moon, and his own life, changed beyond recognition, and above all, the simplicity with which two human beings could give one another not love, no, but this peace, this respite, this release, derived simply from the warmth of a hand.”

I don’t know how an entire man’s life can be so perfectly encapsulated in a book just a little over 100 pages. Yet Makine does just that with elegant and masterful writing. In few pages he also manages to depict the mindset of an entire country during this time period. It’s a story of survival – of the body as well as the spirit. Makine conjures the beauty of music and how its loss affects a life. Ultimately, it’s a story about betrayal, particularly of one’s self. This author is another gem that I would not have discovered without the blessing of my Goodreads friends.

"He told himself that in this life there should be a key, a code for expressing, in concise and unambiguous terms, all the complexity of our attempts, so natural and so grievously confused, at living and loving.”

[Brina · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguingly haunting novella about Russian concert pianist Alexei Berg; how he took on the identity of a deceased soldier during World War II to escape deportation and the consequences that came in later years. This book and author are an example of a book that I would have never heard of it it hadn’t been for Goodreads. I will be on the lookout for Makine and hope to read his award winning Dreams of Russian Summers because this prose was exquisite.

4 stars

[Helga · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

It’s a night without end.
A night discarded on the verge of time.
It’s a night of reminiscing; a night of memories and of dreaming of music.

He was not running, he was falling…

This elegantly written and moving novella tells the story of a chance encounter and of a baring of a soul.
Set in post WWII Russia, the story begins at a train station where our unnamed narrator meets Alexei Berg, once a gifted pianist and now a wanderer thanks to Stalin and his purges.
Hence begins Alexei’s life story; a life shaped by war, exile and music.

While reading this lyrical but melancholy meditation on life in Soviet Russia, one is able to sense the cold, the desolation, the desperation and the tragedy that emanate from its restrained prose.

He did not feel as if he were playing. He was advancing through a night, breathing in its delicate transparency, made up as it was of an infinite number of facets of ice, of leaves, of wind. He no longer felt any pain. No fear about what would happen. No anguish or remorse. The night through which he was advancing expressed this pain, this fear, and the irremediable shattering of the past, but this had all become music and now only existed through its beauty.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

At 106 pages, this is a very short novel, but a very powerful and haunting one - Makine is a master at finding emotion in small details.

This book opens with a narrator who is forced to spend a snowy night at a crowded station in the far east of the Soviet Union. He stumbles on an old man at a piano going through the motions of playing but barely touching the keys. This man helps him find a way on to the train and describes his life story over the course of the train journey to Moscow.

Like the first Makine book I read (The Life of an Unknown Man) this is a tale of survival told by an old man. This one's life as a concert pianist was curtailed when his family were caught up in one of Stalin's purges - he escapes from Moscow and steals the identity of a dead soldier, but is found out when his love of music betrays him. Makine's writing is luminous and elegiac throughout - I have yet to find anything by Makine that isn't worth reading.

[JimZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

One good thing about reading novels is that depending on its nature it can sometimes take you away from your troubles to a better place or time, or it can make you realize that if you think things are bad now, well they could be worse and indeed have been worse.

For this novel, it’s the latter. This is a beautifully written book, and I heartily recommend adding it to your TBR list. 4.5 stars so up it goes to 5. 😊

It is about pre-WWII in Soviet Russia during the Stalin purge years of 1937-1939 then it’s into WWII and Germany’s entry into Russia, then Germany’s exit from Russia then post WWII and follows the life of Alexei Berg. On May 24, 1941 Alexei Berg is 14 and is looking forward to a piano recital he is to give 2 days later. His justifiably proud parents of course will be in the audience. But then things happen, and there is no piano recital. And there is betrayal. The betrayal is told in just one sentence. That’s how sparse this novel is but how good it is—that a betrayal could be told in one sentence and you get it.

Near the end of the novel Alexei has one more recital to give. That is interesting and perhaps a fitting end to this elegiac novel. It is sparse, only 109 pages.

The novel was awarded the Grand prix RTL-Lire in 2001.

The watercolor painting on the front cover of the US edition is incredibly beautiful. It is “Birch Grove” by Isaac Levitan, and at the time of this publication it was at the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow.

Reviews:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/...
This book made it into The New Yorker in its Briefly Noted section: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
From a blog site: https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress....

[Paula Mota · Rating 5 out of 5]

Versão portuguesa: "A Música de uma Vida", Difel, 2003

Ele não tinha a impressão de estar a tocar. Avançava através de uma noite, respirava a sua transparência frágil feita de infinitas facetas de gelo, de folhas, de vento. Já não se sentia mal. Nenhum receio do que ia acontecer. Nada de angústia ou de remorso. E a noite através da qual ele avançava dizia: e esse mal, e esse medo, e irremediável rotura com o passado, mas tudo isso já se tinha tornado música e não existia senão pela sua beleza.

Já algum tempo que achava que devia ler alguma coisa de Andreï Makine, nascido na Sibéria em 1957 e exilado em França desde 1987. Tendo um fraquinho por todo o élan de escritores nesta situação, acabei de acrescentar mais um à minha lista de favoritos.
Em 1941, embora a guerra já se estendesse a quase toda a Europa e chegasse praticamente às portas da Rússia, havia uma ameaça mais premente para a sua população: as purgas de Estaline.

No pátio do imóvel, não pôde evitar um breve despertar da angústia: “A batalha naval!” Foi assim que um dia, durante os anos de terror, se lhe haviam apresentado todas essas janelas, e as do seu apartamento no meio da fachada – casos que a mão invisível, imprevisível, eliminava, atirando para uma viatura negra que vinha pelo fim da noite e partia com a sua presa.

É nesta clima de temor e suspeição que fica marcado o concerto de estreia do pianista Alexeï Berg, cujos pais haviam sido saneados nos anos 30, o qual não se realizará porque ao regressar a casa é avisado por um vizinho para não o fazer, lançando-o numa fuga até à Ucrânia, para simplesmente aterrar em plena invasão alemã. Aí, é accionado o seu instinto de sobrevivência e faz tudo o que é necessário para sobreviver, incluindo assumir uma nova identidade.

Pensou que, num livro, um homem na sua situação deveria ter-se precipitado para esse piano, tocado esquecendo tudo, chorado talvez. Sorriu. Esse pensamento, essa ideia livresca era provavelmente o único laço que ainda o ligava ao seu passado.

Em terminando a guerra, já como motorista de um general, perante um piano a que tanto resistiu e a uma rapariga que o espicaça sem se dar conta do peso que Alexeï carrega há 10 anos nos ombros, dá-se a desmistificação.

O homem que tinha à sua disposição podia ser repreendido, lisonjeado, gentilmente martirizado, cumprimentado por um arpejo bem tocado, consolado depois de um erro. Ela descobrira um dos atrativos mais intensos do amor, o de se fazer obedecer, de manipular o outro e, com o seu consentimento fervoroso, de lhe tirar a liberdade.

Muitas décadas depois, numa estação apinhada dos Urais, a divagar sobre o termo criado por um filósofo dissidente e cujo fim foi celebremente assinalado por Svetlana Aleksiévitch, o “Homo sovieticus”, o narrador ouve uns acordes de música que o atraem a uma sala de arrumos.

Tem dedos que nada têm a ver com os dedos de um músico. Grossas falanges rudes, com protuberâncias, cobertas de rugas acastanhadas. Estes dedos deslocam-se sobre o teclado sem se apoiarem, marcam pausas, animam-se, aceleram a sua corrida silenciosa.

Nesta sofisticada novela, Andreï Makine fala da “dignidade dos vencidos”, como afirma a sinopse, do poder do estoicismo e do silêncio, mostrando a impossibilidade de alguém suprimir indefinidamente a sua verdadeira forma de ser, porque a mentira que prolonga a vida é a mesma que mata a alma.

[Roya · Rating 4 out of 5]

اعتراف می‌کنم که اولش به خاطر جلدِ خیلی خیلی خیلی خوشگلی که داشت شروعش کردم 😍😅
هیچ آشنایی قبلی با روند کلی کتاب و موضوع و داستان و حتی نویسنده‌ش نداشتم.
ولی تو این لحظه که تمومش کردم، می‌تونم بگم مثل همیشه نشرِ ماهی نااُمیدم نکرد و از خوندنش لذتتتت بردم.
نویسنده با ادبیاتِ لطیفش تونسته بود روایتی از چهره‌ی خشن جنگ و اوضاع نابسامان روسیه در زمان استالین رو به «تصویر» بکشه. یعنی واقعا توصیفات و تصویرسازی و ظرافت قلم نویسنده جوری بود که انگار داشتین فیلم می‌دیدین💙
و مثل همیشه این مردمِ عادی هستن که قربانیِ قدرت طلبی‌های سران کشورشون میشن. وقتی پای جنگ وسط بیاد، رؤیاها، جوانی، آرزوها، آینده، خانواده،... بی‌معنی میشه.
عمیقا دلم برای شخصیت اصلی داستان کباب شده😭💔
یه اندوهِ دوست داشتنی داره!
قراره چند روز تو سرمای سیبری یخ بزنم و صدای پیانو بپیچه تو گوشم. بوی خون به دماغم برسه و گرما و نرمیِ بدن سنجاب رو با سر انگشتام حس کنم و سفیدیِ برفِ تموم‌نشدنی چشم‌مو بزنه ......
چند روز قراره تو این کتاب حبس شم :)))

🤩پ.ن: اصلا فکر نکنین این کتاب از این کتاب جنگیای حوصله سر بر و فلانه 😅😂 لطفا بهش فرصت بدین.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 3 out of 5]

I need to be gut honest here...
I wanted to love this book....
The writing is gorgeous... I can see that... I could feel the beauty of horror....but I didn’t want to.
I struggled...
I WISHED FOR MORE MUSIC in this novel.....( less brutal graphic scenes of bloody soldiers).

I love the people who read this before me - with so much respect and admiration for all of them. My friends seemed to easily understand this book’s brilliance. I just feel loss, small, stupid, and not up to par.

If there is a low review- I don’t remember reading any.
Not sure what I should rate this book.
Jim inspired me to read it - which warmed my heart. Still warms my heart.
But....
when I finished reading this book - I bawled- then laughed while bawling. I felt sad and inferior. Paul and I are taking an afternoon rest - reading and lying down together — he knows how I can get. His advice — “put the darn book down”.

Then a second ago my close friend from childhood texted me a photo of her hubby with the dog on his lap reading a book. They were in a park relaxing and reading.
I told her I had just read a book that zapped my energy and left me depressed.
She ordered me —“no more depressing books”. She’s a tad older - so she’s the boss she tells me.

...I HONESTLY THOUGHT I’D HEAR AND FEEL THE BEAUTY OF THE MUSIC.....But forgive me.... I couldn’t feel it.

...I DIDN’T WANT TO READ ABOUT EARS SHOT OFF ....or BLOODY bodies, or amputated legs, .....then be tossed a ‘treat-moment-scene’ of a man lusting after a woman eating candy....with bloody bodies just steps away.

...I didn’t want to be in the cemetery with coffins covered with frozen snow.

...I didn’t want to know that our main character was emaciated, exhausted, with a fixation about death.

...I didn’t want to have to visualize our main character stepping into clothes of a dead soldier - then think about how lucky he was to find some boots that fit his feet.

... I didn’t want to read that his parents died.

BUT I READ ALL THESE THINGS.

NOW I’m a sad zombie.

3 apologetic stars

[Laysee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Music of a Life is a slim but poignant historical novel by Andrei Makine, a Russian novelist who wrote in French. It is translated into English by Geoffrey Strachan who lent it an elegiac elegance.

In the waiting room of a railway station in a Russian town in Urals, the unnamed narrator recounts an encounter twenty five years ago with an old musician, Alexei Berg, when they were both stranded by a snowstorm. Makine’s vivid prose captures the apathy and resignation of the diverse throng of passengers huddled in the cold, trying to find a place to lay down and sleep. The narrator’s fretful waiting is suddenly broken by a strain of music: ‘The music! On this occasion I have enough time to catch the reverberation of the last notes, like a silken thread from a needle’s eye.’ The episode to follow moved me.

In an upper floor waiting room, an old man is mutely playing the piano. The narrator is first drawn to the silent flourish of Alexei’s gnarled fingers and then is surprised to see the tears in the pianist’s eyes as one of his hands comes crashing on the keyboard. This choked, yet voluble, communion with the keyboard encapsulates the heart of this story. In the long conversation on that interminable train ride to Moscow, what unraveled is Alexei’s story and that of the artists and musicians, and members of the intelligentsia who lived during the years of Stalin’s Great Purge (mid 1934 to the 1940s). Alexei’s plight calls to mind a similar fate that befell Count Rostov in Amor Towles’ A Gentleman From Moscow and Dmitri Shostakovich in Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time. In 1941, Alexei was a 21-year-old concert pianist, eagerly looking forward to his debut recital. Of course, it did not happen.

Makine keeps the reader invested in Alexei’s fight for his own life and his remaking of a life without music. Alexei steals the identity of a fallen German soldier and is sent to the war front in WW2. A couple of women who nursed him to health when wounded rendered his battled life more bearable. Thus, ‘He reflected that there must be a word for it, some key to understanding this suffering and this moon, and his own life, changed beyond recognition, and above all, the simplicity with which two human beings could give one another not love, no, but this peace, this respite, this release, derived simply from the warmth of a hand.’ He heroically saves a general and is deemed an honorable soldier.. Alexei vigilantly guards himself against a sinking feeling in his heart by not allowing himself to become nostalgic whenever he hears music or sees a piano. But how long can he withhold music from himself? Will his true identity become known? Makine keeps the plot tensed and taut, and I felt torn between wanting Alexei to show the world who he is and fearing for his life.

Music of a Life is a melancholic but inspiring story about shattered dreams, stoic determination, and the indelible traces of a musical talent. This is not a sentimental story and the ending is realistic. When I turned the last page, I was left with this thought that even though Alexei is compelled by circumstances to leave his music, his music never left him. Great book. Highly recommended.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short novel this, almost a novella. If I enjoy a novel I normally get through it quickly but I actually surprised myself in just how quickly I finished this one. Having said that the story was high quality enough to keep me reading.

This is the third Andreï Makine novel I've read and all 3 have shared a theme, which is how the titanic events of Russia's 20th century history have impacted on the lives of ordinary people. In particular this novel has a similar structure to "The Life of an Unknown Man", (although this book actually predates "...Unknown Man" so it would be more accurate to say that novel resembles this one). We are introduced at the outset to a character who effectively performs the role of a narrator. He has a chance encounter with an elderly man who has lived through WWII and the Stalinist period, who relates his life story in flashback. I can't really describe the plot without including spoilers, so I'll confine my comments to saying that the author keeps a decent level of tension going, keeping the reader interested in the outcome.

I'm up for reading more of Andreï Makine's work, but I'm hoping the next novel won't be as similar.

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful. Yet another author I’ve discovered through the serendipity of a charity bookshop. I couldn’t put this down. From the first word to the last, I was totally immersed not just in the story but in the power of the writing.

The narrator meets an old man in a railway station and travels with him to Moscow. When he first sees him, the old man is playing a piano silently, moving his fingers above the keys, and he is weeping. During the course of the journey, the pianist relates his life story. The prose is beautiful, the story full of suspense, raw emotion, and the horrors of life in Stalinist Russia, before, during and after WWII.

I’m looking forward to reading more Makine. His works published in English all use the same translator, Geoffrey Strachan, and he is excellent. An easy 5 stars from me and the best 99p I’ve ever spent.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first introduction to Andreï Makine, French author of Russian descent, was a disappointment. I found this book, which was actually nothing more than a novella, overly sentimental. I also don't understand why Makine turned it into a frame story, as if the tragic life of musician Alexei Berg couldn't stand on its own. To me, this short novel has value only as an illustration of the reign of terror in the Soviet Union.

[Ingrid · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars
Only a short novel, but what an extraordinary and beautiful story about a Russian soldier in WWII.
I have the feeling that I've watched a film just now.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have just awoken, having dreamed of music.

I closed this book and thought long and hard about what it is to have the remnants of a life. This is what this short novel does, helps the reader understand loss and how a person deals with meandered memories.

Music is memory. Music is survival. Music softens the story. The prose is music. A child, a budding pianist, loses his parents to hate during Russia's doomed years. He flees to a friend's house where he is met with betrayal. He flees. He hides between the boards of a house, a place unfit for a human. And when there is nowhere else for him to go, he takes on another person's identity.

Years go by. The child ages. Yet despite his loss, music never leaves him:

He has fingers that are nothing like a musician's fingers. Great, rough, lumpy knuckles, tanned and wrinkled. The fingers move about on the keyboard without depressing the keys, pausing, springing to life, accelerating their silent course, getting carried away in a feverish flight: one can hear the fingernails tapping on the wooden keys.

He lives in despair, with all of the guilt a survivor endures. Unsure of himself, unsure of the life he has chosen for survival, he exists emptily. When he receives a woman's attention, he does not know what to do, for betrayal is all he has become accustomed to:

He reflected that there must be a word for it, some key to understanding this suffering and this moon, and his own life, changed beyond recognition, and above all, the simplicity within which two human beings could give one another not love, no, but this peace, this respite, this release, derived simply from the warmth of a hand

To think, the reader receives all of this on a train ride to Moscow, when two people's lives are changed by a story that needed to be told. The narration starts in the present and smoothly delves into the past tense. Even when the shorter spaces of story left me puzzled and the spaces between paragraphs left me wanting more, one of the things I enjoyed was the drastic yet subtle movement of time because of how tense is utilized. Like a piano recital, this novel occurs in refined cadence. The reader traverses a symphonic order that is alluring and graceful, yet strident and at times pandemonic. A slow read is definitely recommended.

[Amirhossein · Rating 4 out of 5]

تو کتابخانه سرو لاله پارک همراه برادرم داشتیم کتاب ها رو بررسی میکردیم که مسئول اونجارو دیدیم. یه آدم خوش صحبت و مهربان. خیلی حرف زدیم. 1 ساعت حرف زدن تو اونجا رو به 100 بار گردش کل لاله پارک ترجیح میدم😂😂. بعد همینطور که حرف میزدیم اون آقا گفت که این کتاب رو بگیرید مطمعنم خوشتون میاد. موسیقی یک زندگی!

جلد کتاب از همون اول جذبم کرد واقعا خیلی خوشگله. بعد همون شب کتاب رو شروع کردم. داستان برمیگرده به زمان شوروی استالین. راوی داستان خیلی رندوم با آدمی تو ایستگاه قطار اشنا میشه به نام "آلکسی". داستان در مورد آلکسی هستش که عاشق نواختن پیانو و برگزاری کنسرت هست. ولی پلیس ها تقریبا چند روز قبل از برگزاری کنسرت میان خون شون و پدر و مادرش رو دستگیر میکنن و این هم مجبور به فرار میشه. به اوکراین در خونه خاله‌ش پناه میبره و مجبور میشه جعل هویت کنه و درنهایت سریه ماجراهایی زندگی یه ژنرال رو نجات میده ولی بعدش هیچی به هیچی.

فضاسازی داستان و روایت اون جوری بود وقتی که میخوندم قشنگ احساس سرما میکردم. حس بدبختی و ناامیدی از تمام آدم ها. حس خیانت و فرو کردن چاقو از پشت. آندره مکین نویسنده روس-فرانسوی هستش و احساس میکنم یکی از دلایل زیبا نوشتنش هم همینه😅. خلاصه که بخوبی تونسته بود وضعیت زندگی در زمان حکومت استالین رو شرح بده

[Wyndy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Update 8/8/2019: Because Alexeï Berg is still hovering around my psyche days after reading his story, I’m rounding my rating up to five stars and adding it to my favorites shelf for a reread. Sometimes I’m too stingy with my fives.


Like some of my favorite blues tunes, this tiny novel fed my soul. Makine packed an incredible amount of imagery, emotion and exceptional prose into these 112 pages, beginning with a snowed-in, overcrowded railroad station in the Urals and its sad samples of “Homo Sovieticus,” and continuing through the unforgettable life of promising classical pianist Alexeï Berg, also known as Sergei Maltsev - an identity Berg steals from a dead soldier in order to avoid arrest during Stalin’s reign of terror. Alexeï’s harrowing story is told to an unnamed fellow passenger (the narrator of the novel) on the long, snowy train ride from this isolated railroad station to the city of Moscow. It is a story of displacement, risk, survival, love, loss and the encompassing power of music. 4.5 outstanding stars, rounded down only because it takes this novel some time to hit its stride due to the story-within-a-story technique. I felt Alexeï’s story was strong enough to stand on its own.

“As his hands fell upon the keyboard . . . the music came surging out, the power of it sweeping away all doubts, voices, sounds, wiping away the fixed grins and exchanged glances, pushing back the walls, dispersing the light of the reception room out into the nocturnal immensity of the sky beyond the windows . . .”

[Betsy Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Music of a Life by Andreï Makine

This is a wonderful portrait of a Russian musician who flees his life to preserve his life when the "artistic elite" are being imprisoned by Stalin. It is also a portrait of the battered Russians Makine labels "Homo soviéticas"—people who are so numbed by the unfair whims of those in power as well as their broken infrastructure that they simply bear it.

It is a cautionary tale for our times.

A note: The library Kindle copy I read needs a good proofing. Possessive apostrophes as well as other punctuation are often missing.

[سلطان · Rating 4 out of 5]

رواية جميلة، متقنة في بنائها، ولغتها بعيدة عن التعقيد، ورغم أن معظم الأحداث تدور في أجواء الحرب، إلا أننا لا نجد مشاهد للعنف فيها.
أليكس بطل الرواية شاب في مقتبل عمره، يحب العزف على البيانو، لكنه ينفذ بجلده هربا من القوات الاستخباراتية في بلاده التي داهمت بيته واعتقلت والديه نتيجة وشاية ظالمة بأسرته. وفي مشوار هربه يتقمص شخصية جندي في الجيش، ويجد نفسه في صفوف المعركة حاملاً للسلاح.
ثم تحدث تغيرات مهمة في حياته بعد إصابته في إحدى المعارك.
من الجوانب الملفتة في أسلوب الكاتب في هذه الرواية تلك التفاصيل الخاصة بالضوء والأصوات والروائح، والتي أضاف بدقة وصفه لها وكيفية توظيفها، أبعاداً سيميائية جميلة ومؤثرة في وصف الحدث ككل.
الرواية جميلة وتسحق القراءة.

[Amirhosein · Rating 3 out of 5]

رفتند بالا. زن خدمتکارِ ساکت و سالمندی الکسی را در اتاق کوچکی جنب سرسرای آپارتمان نشاند و برایش لیوانی چای آورد. اتاق هم رختکن بود و هم صندوقخانه. پنجره‌ی باریکی هم داشت که دانه‌های اولین برف آن سال پشتش جمع شده بودند. در آن اتاق تنگ و تاریک، بی‌درنگ احساس خوشایندی به الکسی دست داد، انگار آن حال و هوا نشانه‌ای باشد از بازگشت به زندگی عادی. با بی‌اعتنایی فرو ریختن دانه‌های برفی را پی می‌گرفت که گویی در روزی از روزهای قدیم بر شهر فراموش‌شده‌ای می‌بارید. چای هم طعم گذشته را می‌داد، مثل سکوت آن آپارتمان بزرگ در هنگام غروب با حضور ناپیدای زن خدمتکار که صدای آه کشیدنش از آشپزخانه می‌آمد. در این میان، ناگهان صدای آمیخته به تردید چند نت برخاست که حین پیمودن راهرو رنگ می‌باختند. بعد از آن نوبت به جمله‌ی آهنگینی رسید و بعد هم موسیقی.
از اتاق کوچک بیرون آمد و چند گامی برداشت، اما ناگهان ایستاد. نمی‌خواست جلوتر برود. آنچه دید کفایت می‌کرد: آن پیراهن مخملین سرمه‌ای، درخشش گیسوانی روشن و دست راستی که الکسی در لحظه‌ی لغزیدنش به سوی نت‌های بالا آن را می‌دید. دست چپ را نمی‌دید و و در نتیجه صرفا فشار آن را تصور می‌کرد. در غروب سایه‌افکنده بر راهرو بی‌حرکت ایستاده بود، شانه بر دیوار و آگاه از این نکته که جهان به نقطه‌ی کمال رسیده‌ است. این برف پشت پنجره، راز این آپارتمان بزرگ و ناشناخته، این موسیقی و خاصه نقص این موسیقی! آری، آن دست‌ها هرگاه به ترکیبی از نت‌ها که جداکردنشان دشوار بود می‌رسیدند، پس می‌نشستند و بعد دوباره خیز برمی‌داشتند. الکسی احساس می‌کرد این خطاها برای کمالی که اینک به جلوه درآمده بود لازم است. نمی‌شد هیچ‌چیز به آن افزود.

[Emmkay · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a beautifully written novella. Some authors write fat books that manage to say little and outstay their welcome - somehow this little jewel manages to tell a sweeping story perfectly in just over a hundred pages, without feeling rushed or simply sketched in.

The narration opens in a rural train station in the Soviet Union in winter, as the train to Moscow is announced to be six hours late. The narrator looks at the mass of humanity round him and muses somewhat superiorly about ‘homo sovieticus,’ always content with whatever the grim situation brings. Then his encounters a rough-handed old man who plays piano beautifully though in tears. On their journey, we learn more about Alexei Berg’s early life as a young musician in the Stalinist 30s and 40s. 4.5.

“At the conservatory it seems as if the people he passes have all become short-sighted; they squint, to avoid catching his eye. Their faces remind him of those masks he once saw in a history book, terrifying masks with long noses, with which the inhabitants of cities invaded by the plague used to rig themselves out. His friends acknowledge his greetings, but only obliquely, furtively, turning their heads away, and this evasive action - half in profile, half face-to-face - stretches their noses into the long incurved stings of insects. They stammer out excuses for making off and gasp, as if they were inhaling the aromatic herbs that used to be stuffed into those antiplague masks....”

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a short book, this packs a huge punch. The story is told through a narrator of a Russian man who, several days before his debut performance as a concert pianist, must flee Moscow. His is a harrowing tale of fear, uncertainty, determination, and adaptation to a "new" life as a soldier. The emotions are palpable and, in the end, the resolution a relief. This book, which was written in French, was the winner of the 2001 Grand Prix RTL-Lire and is a great introduction to the work of this Russian author who has been called "a Russian Proust and a French Chekhov".

[Deea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novel that appeals to the sensitivity of the reader through its simplicity and musicality. Framed by the waiting in a train station, the ride by train through the immensity of Russian lands covered by snow and the arrival to Moscow, this is a story of a life whose musicality although extirpated with brutality by the regime of those times, was mended by its hero with whatever meager means he had in hand. The story of a person who longs for music in his life and who, thanks to the power of music on his spirit keeps fighting up to the end to gather together the obliterated fragments of his soul and the bits and pieces of his fragmented life.

As his hands fell upon the keyboard, it was still possible to believe a beautiful harmony had been formed at random, in spite of him. But a second later the music came surging out, the power of it sweeping away all doubts, voices, sounds, wiping away the fixed grins and exchanged glances, pushing back the walls, dispersing the light of the reception room out into the nocturnal immensity of the sky beyond the windows.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

This beautiful novella resonated deeply with me. It tells the story of Alexei Berg, a young classical pianist, whose parents (also artists) are arrested in 1941. Berg escapes what he deems to be his own certain arrest by fleeing east into the beginning of WWII. He assumes the identity of a dead soldier and witnesses the incredible brutality of the Eastern Front. He returns to Moscow and falls in love with a general’s daughter (which, of course, doesn’t end well). He lives through lies and truth, brutality and love, and always is haunted by loss. However, music is his heart and soul and, although it, too, betrays him, it also brings him to peace.
I am doing an extremely inadequate job of describing the outstanding writing and the emotions this novella brought forth within me. It was a wonderful experience, and I highly recommend it.

[Zeinab khatoon · Rating 5 out of 5]

خب!
راستش اولش یکم گیج شدم ولی یکم که داستان جلو رفت عجیب شیفته‌ی داستان و قلمِ نویسنده شدم
اگر اشتباه نکنم تا حالا کتابی با حال و هوای جنگ به این صورت نخونده بودم و خیلی دلنشین بود
کوتاه، پر کشش و عمیق...

[Angelina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short novel begins with the author’s ruminations about “Homo sovieticus” - a sarcastically critical phrase used to describe the population of the Soviet Union. At the time he’s stranded at a crowded train station in the middle of winter in Siberia with no train in sight. Observing the people around him he muses:
“The judgment I have been trying to keep at bay floods in on me, a combination of sympathy and rage. I contemplate this human matter, breathing like a single organism, its resignation, its innate disregard of comfort, its endurance in the face of the absurd. “
***
“And this station besieged by the snowstorm is nothing other than a microcosmos of the whole country’s history. Of its innermost character. “
And then, completely by chance, he meets Alexei Berg, a former piano player, who tells him his life story. It’s a life full of shattered dreams and hopes, constant uncertainty, lost identity and only fleeting moments of beauty, joy and love. It’s a life indelibly marked by the years of terror and purges in Stalin’s Russia before WWII, a life scarred by war and always in the hands and at the mercy of the ones in power.
There are some beautiful moments in this slim novel and Makine’s Russian sensitivity is quite palpable at times, but ultimately there was something missing to make it truly unforgettable.

[Walter Schutjens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this book was finished in a day, and read in less than an hour, when finished it feels as if you have read an epic, not a novella. The novel, a sweeping portrayal of a pianist caught in the drama of war, demonstrates the value of primacy of essence above form. Falling in line with the weighty prose of Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy.

"No anguish or remorse. The night through which he was advancing expressed this pain, this fear, and the irremediable shattering of the past, but this had all become music and now only existed through its beauty.”



When first picking up the book my English teacher (creds to G Rob), told me to pay special attention to the opening pages. The lyrical portrayal of the Russian 'diaspora', as they embody what Makine refers to as being a 'homo sovieticus'. And true to his word, the first chapter was very enjoyable, you could hear the snow storm sweep against the paneled glass of the station. The end too was very moving, but the middle of the book lost the verbosity to content, making the final rating of the book a solid 4/5.

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gem of a book, set in Russia pre and post Second World War. It sets into context an individual life with upheaval, death and chaos all around.

[Friederike Knabe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A train station like a dot in the snow-covered expanse of the Siberian plains. People, thrown together by chance, patiently waiting hours for the delayed train to Moscow. Reflecting on the crowd as a collective sample of "homo sovieticus", the narrator singles out some individuals. He describes them in minute detail, bringing them alive for the reader. Suddenly, a piano tune, played elsewhere, breaks the multitude of muted night noises in the waiting room. For the narrator, the music transcends place and time and reveals a glimpse into a different, luminous reality... Following the tune through the station, he comes across as an unlikely pianist. Rough, deeply scarred hands hardly touching the keys, then hesitating, confusing a note - and the pianist weeps.

This chance meeting of two strangers in the night frames like a picture the extraordinary and deeply moving story of Alexeï Berg, the pianist. Alexeï grew up during the years of arbitrary detentions and executions of Stalin's reign of terror. His parents, suspects for a while, seem to have averted the worst. The old violin, played sometimes by a family friend, since executed as a traitor, is thrown into the fire by the father in the hope of avoiding a similar fate. To Alexeï's ears, the exploding strings make the sound of staccato played on a harp. This sound is engraved in his memory forever. Yet, on the eve of his debut concert, their time has run out and he must flee to escape his own certain arrest. To survive he follows the road west, hides, and, as last resort, takes on a dead soldier's identity. Creating an imagined personality, always conscious of dangers to his double life, he joins "his" unit on the frontlines in the war against the Germans. Not surprisingly, Alexei's attempts to drown his previous self, that of the high-spirited young pianist on the verge of success in Moscow, only succeeds so far. After the war ends, memories of the past start re-emerging. He can no longer pretend without difficulty... Visions of a life not lived lead him to confront his two realities. In the end, can the "inner voice of music" heal, as well as expose him?

Makine does not need many words to convey the intricacies of his hero's experiences. Using the precise, yet detached, language of an observer, he succeeds in conveying the reality of the Stalin purges, the horrors of war... the challenges of a generation, represented by Alexeï, that is caught in a life beyond its control. His intention is not to give his readers a grand epic of the man and his time. Rather, like a sculptor crafting a relief, Makine chisels out small pieces, highlighting minute details in some parts and using broad strokes in others to create his masterpiece. It succeeds also by drawing on the reader's understanding of the context, his empathy and power of imagination to visualize what is hinted at but not spelled out.

"You can never describe the life of another person" Makine said in an interview. The "perfect novel" is beyond description, he asserts, the reader should loose himself in it, observe and contemplate its meaning and, at the end, emerge transformed. Music can have that same quality as it carries the listener beyond the present reality. With "Music of a Life" Makine is living up to his own definition.

The relative brevity of the story should not be seen as a disadvantage. On the contrary, this is a highly charged and emotional story. A thin layer of "objective" reporting by the narrator only obscures for a short time the underlying intensity and the author's deep concerns for his country and its people. This is a treasure of a book, to be read more than once. This review refers to the original French version. Others have commented on the excellent translation into English.