Audiobook9 hours
The Song of Names
Written by Norman Lebrecht
Narrated by Simon Prebble
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
Martin Simmond#8217;s father tells him, #8220;Never trust a musician when he speaks about love.#8221; The advice comes too late. Martin already loves Dovidl Rapoport, an eerily gifted Polish violin prodigy whose parents left him in the Simmonds#8217;s care before they perished in the Holocaust. For a time the two boys are closer than brothers. But on the day he is to make his official debut, Dovidl disappears. Only 40 years later does Martin get his first clue about what happened to him.In this ravishing novel of music and suspense, Norman Lebrecht unravels the strands of love, envy and exploitation that knot geniuses to their admirers. In doing so he also evokes the fragile bubble of Jewish life in prewar London; the fearful carnival of the Blitz, and the gray new world that emerged from its ashes. Bristling with ideas, lambent with feeling, The Song of Names is a masterful work of the imagination.
Author
Norman Lebrecht
Norman Lebrecht is the world’s bestselling author on classical music. His Whitbread Award-winning novel, The Song of Names, is currently being developed into a feature film. Aside from the history of Western music, he has a lifelong passion for the culture and chronicles of the Jewish people and is the author of Genius & Anxiety. He lives in London.
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Reviews for The Song of Names
Rating: 3.923076923076923 out of 5 stars
4/5
13 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A terrific story, well told and very well read. It was a shame that the reader mangled almost every Hebrew and Yiddish word, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility, but that didn’t take away from the larger experience of listening to a very interesting, absorbing, and engaging book. And the reader really was very talented, just unfortunately unfamiliar with words not in English.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A promising storyline that just never reached its potential.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I have to say that I didn't really enjoy this book. The story itself is a good one, but it just wasn't told well. I was bored most of the time and I didn't feel sympathy for or even like any of the characters, except perhaps the wife who was only a very minor character anyway. The story wasn't told chronologically which made especially the beginning quite boring. When I found out what the "Song of Names" actually was, it was a bit heart-stopping, but that was one of the few touching moments in the book, and it was short-lived. I did enjoy that large vocabulary in this book--I came across a word I didn't know every twenty pages or so--that's something that doesn't happen often. Overall, I wouldn't recommend this. Too boring. I'm sure you can find similar stories told much better elsewhere.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Well-written, interesting story of two young boys who grow up together, almost as brothers. One is involved with the commerce of music, and the other is a musician. Each chooses a very different path to reach their goal of inner peace.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A very good book with flashes of brilliance (see photocopied pages in my journal) in observations about music & musicians & Jewish traditions & faith in the wake of the Holocaust. (Lebrecht is a lifelong music critic who here tries his hand--very successfully--at fiction. There are two main characters: the son of a musicians' manager who takes over his father's business; and the young vioilin prodigy that the former's family harbors as his family perishes in the concentration camps of WWII Poland. Here, the Holocaust plays a critical role in the story without making this a Holocaust novel. It's a rich, intelligent story friendship & betrayal, music & tradition.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Until the arrival of a young musical prodigy, Martin’s childhood is the unfavourable child’s stereotype. Bullied, overlooked and with a stutter to round things off, his friendship with Doivdl (as he is nicknamed) becomes something necessary to Martin’s survival and sense of self-worth. David, meanwhile, is the hope of everyone around him, including Martin’s parents who are staking so much on his debut, and his own parents, from whom he has heard nothing since their disappearance in Warsaw. When he disappears, Martin's life seems on hold, passionless, until he stumbles across a musical clue forty years later.There was nothing technically wrong with this novel, and I’d be hard pressed to explain why it failed to reach the giddy heights of the four-out-of-five-star rating that I would have like it to have achieved based on its premise. There was just something uninspiring about the bulk of this story… there are a few moments where it rises above its own weight of back-story and outdistances the present-day narration to tell something important and profound, but it is lost again so quickly that the overall impression of this book is of waiting for the point to be made.It might be that this lacklustre atmosphere and crushing anticipation are the author’s intended results. His first-person narrator is afflicted by both, so why not the reader? Unfortunately, the banality seeps over into the character of those who were supposed to shine. I am not capable of reading about the holocaust – even in fiction – without being moved, and the passages regarding ‘the song of names’ itself were beautiful, and yet because they were told to the narrator, as more back-story, it was as though the importance were being stifled. Everything else about the story left me largely unaffected. I didn’t hate it, but it did disappoint me.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A wonderful story brilliantly written. The cadence of Lebrecht's words are musical poetry.