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    Music of a Life: A Novel
    Music of a Life: A Novel
    Music of a Life: A Novel
    Ebook89 pages1 hour

    Music of a Life: A Novel

    By Andreï Makine

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    A brief but extraordinarily powerful novel by the author of Dreams of My Russian Summers and Requiem for a Lost Empire, Music of a Life is set in the period just before, and two decades after, World War II.
    Alexeï Berg’s father is a well-known dramatist, his mother a famous opera singer. But during Stalin’s reign of terror in the 1930s they, like millions of other Russians, come under attack for their presumed lack of political purity. Harassed and proscribed, they have nonetheless, on the eve of Hitler’s war, not yet been arrested. And young Alexeï himself, a budding classical pianist, has been allowed to continue his musical studies. His first solo concert is scheduled for May 24, 1941. Two days before the concert, on his way home from his final rehearsal, he sees his parents being arrested, taken from their Moscow apartment. Knowing his own arrest will not be far behind, Alexeï flees to the country house of his fiancée, where again betrayal awaits him. He flees, one step ahead of the dreaded secret police until, taking on the identity of a dead soldier, he enlists in the Soviet army. Thus begins his seemingly endless journey, through war and peace, until he lands, two decades later, in a snowbound train station in the Urals, where he relates his harrowing saga to the novel’s narrator. An international bestseller, Music of a Life is, in the words of Le Monde, “extremely powerful . . . a gem.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcade
    Release dateOct 28, 2011
    ISBN9781628722109
    Music of a Life: A Novel
    Author

    Andreï Makine

    Andreï Makine is an internationally best-selling author. He is the winner of the Goncourt Prize and the Medicis Prize, the two highest literary awards in France, for his novel Dreams of My Russian Summers, which was also a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Makine was born in Siberia in 1957 and raised in the Soviet Union. Granted asylum in France in 1987, Makine was personally given French citizenship by President Jacques Chirac. He now lives in Paris. Arcade Publishing has published ten of Makine’s acclaimed novels in English.

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    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Alexei Berg comes from a family of artists. His mother is an opera singer, his father a dramatist and Alexei is a budding young pianist. Unfortunately, it is Russia in the 1930s, and on the eve of his first public concert, his family is detained for political reasons. Alexei escapes imprisonment and survives by impersonating a Russian soldier. This short novel is only a little over 100 pages, but each word is carefully chosen, describing a life of someone who has to choose between his love of music and survival. I loved the lyricism of this book - it almost felt like poetry with a plot. Beautifully crafted and very descriptive. Enchanting.
    • 5/5
      The more I read Makine the more I get convinced that he is an undisputed master of content and form. This book is about how a burgeoning life can be ruthlessly broken by a tyrannical regime (Stalin's, in this case), a life that - but for that regime - could have flourished and, through its talent, could have brought joy to thousands of people, but instead had to be dwarfed into some semblance of an existence. Makine's thoughts on "Homo sovieticus" run alongside this sad story.--
    • 5/5
      This is the story of a thwarted life told to a stranger on a train. And there's a fair amount of time to tell it. The train runs from Siberia to Moscow, but still, considerable compression is necessary. The book is short and the end is always near. I stared into space a good 15 minutes once it came. I had to get my bearings again. This is a story that could have been mired in all kinds of sentimental cliché. The man was, after all, almost a concert pianist. And at least 2 moments occur in the tale where I was willing him to shock everybody and play that piano in the room. Show them, Alexei! Show them you aren't that rude scarred soldier they think you are. Show them! Because we all love that moment when it is revealed that someone is of finer stuff than we ever imagined.At one point, Makine even winks at this cliché, "They examined the hole, touched it, laughed at it. Then went across the road to collect the German's rifle. Alexei stopped beside the piano, let his hand come down on the keyboard, listened, closed the lid again. His joy at not feeling within himself the presence of a young man in love with music was very reassuring. He looked at his hand, the fingers covered in scars and scratches, the palm with its yellowish calluses. Another man's hand. In a book, he thought, a man in his situation would have rushed to the piano and played it, forgetting everything, weeping perhaps. He smiled. Such a thought, such a bookish notion, was probably the only link that still bound him to his past."It is a fine tension that is very well played in this book, without a lead foot on the damper or an inappropriate emphasis on rubato. Makine writes with class, the story coming out in exquisite morceaux, like the flowers that fall out of old poetry books. The mystery of the owner's life no longer resides in the unturned pages but lives instead in those lowly pressings picked up from a kitchen floor.

    Book preview

    Music of a Life - Andreï Makine

    I COULD QUITE EASILY PINPOINT THE DATE of that encounter. It goes back at least a quarter of a century — more precisely, to the year when a celebrated Russian philosopher, then a political refugee in Munich, coined a phrase that quickly gained currency, an expression thinkers, politicians, and even mere mortals would go on using for a good decade or more throughout the world. The extraordinary success enjoyed by his formula stemmed from one palpable merit: in two Latin words the philosopher had succeeded in summing up the lives of the 240 million human beings who, at that time, peopled the land of my birth. Men and women, children and adults, old people and newborn babes, the living and the dead, the sick and the healthy, innocents and murderers, the learned and the ignorant, workers in the depths of coal mines, cosmonauts in their celestial orbits — these and thousands of other categories of people were all linked to a common essence by this innovative expression. They all began to exist under one generic name.

    Both before and since this inspired invention, people have endlessly dreamed up combinations of words to characterize the country in question. The Evil Empire, barbarism with a human face, the shattered empire — each of these locutions made its mark on Western minds for a time. Nonetheless, the Munich philosopher’s definition was by far the most often quoted and the most enduring.

    To such an extent that, barely a few months after the phrase made its appearance, I heard it on the lips of a friend who, like me, lived on the banks of the Neva, and like so many others listened secretly to Western radio stations and had heard an interview with the philosopher. Yes, to such an extent, in fact, that once, when I was returning from a trip to the Far East and was held up by a snowstorm somewhere in the heart of the Urals, I recalled this term, extolled in the West but prohibited in our country, and spent part of the night applying it to the passengers who surrounded me in the waiting room of a dark, icy railroad station. The term coined by the philosopher proved to be devastatingly telling. It embraced the lives of the most diverse individuals: two soldiers, hidden behind a pillar, taking turns drinking from a bottle; an old man who, since there were no more seats, was sleeping on a newspaper spread out along one wall; a young mother whose face seemed as if it were glowing slightly, lit by an invisible candle; a prostitute watching at a snow-covered window; and a great many others.

    Marooned there amid my fellow human beings, some sleeping, some wakeful, I was privately marveling at the philosopher’s perspicacity…. And it was at that very moment, in the depths of a night cut off from the rest of the world, that the encounter took place.

    Since then a quarter of a century has passed. The empire whose fragmentation was predicted has collapsed. Barbarism and evil have manifested themselves under other skies as well. And the formula invented by the Munich philosopher, who was, of course, Alexander Zinoviev — the defining phrase, almost forgotten today — simply serves me as a signpost, marking the moment of that brief encounter in the muddy tide of the years.

    I HAVE JUST AWOKEN, having dreamed of music. The final chord fades away within me while I try to focus on individuals amid the living, breathing mass packed into this vast waiting room, in this mixture of sleep and weariness.

    A woman’s face, there, close by the window. Her body has just been giving pleasure to one more man; her eyes are searching among the passengers for her next lover. A railroad worker comes in quickly, crosses the room, leaves through the big door that leads out onto the railroad platforms, into the night. Before closing, the door hurls a violent flurry of snow into the room. The people settled near the door stir on their hard, narrow bench, tug on their coat collars, shake their shoulders with a shiver. From the other end of the station comes a muffled guffaw, then the crunch of a fragment of glass beneath a foot, an oath. Two soldiers, their shapkas pushed back on their heads, their overcoats unbuttoned, beat a path through the mass of huddled bodies. Snores call out to one another, some of them comically in harmony. The wail of an infant rings out very clearly in the darkness, fades into little whimperings as it sucks, falls silent. A long argument, dulled by boredom, is taking place behind one of the pillars that hold up a varnished wooden gallery. The loudspeaker on the wall crackles, hisses, and suddenly announces, in astonishingly soothing tones, that a train is going to be delayed. An ocean swell of sighs ripples through the waiting room. But the truth is that no one expects anything anymore. Six hours’ delay — it could be six days or six weeks. Numbness returns. The wind whips heavy white squalls against the windows. Bodies settle down against the hardness of the benches, strangers press close together, like the scales of a single protective shell. Night fuses the sleepers into one living mass — a beast savoring, with every cell in its body, its good fortune at being under cover.

    From my position I can hardly see the clock that hangs above the ticket windows. I turn my wrist, the dial of my watch catches the glow from the nightlight: quarter to one. The prostitute is still at her post; her silhouette stands out against the window made blue by the snow. She is not tall, but very broad in the hips. She towers above the ranks of sleeping travelers. It looks like a battlefield strewn with dead…. The door leading to the town opens, new arrivals come in, bringing with them the cold and discomfort of open spaces scoured by snow flurries. The human protoplasm shivers and grudgingly makes space for these new cells.

    I shake myself in an attempt to wrest myself away from this conglomeration of bodies. To wrest those immediately around me from the blur of the whole mass. The old man, who has just arrived and lays no claim to a seat in this crowded station, spreads a newspaper out on the tiled floor, filthy with cigarette butts and melted snow, before lying down, his back against the wall. The woman whose features and age are concealed by her shawl, an unknowable being swathed in a huge, shapeless coat. A moment earlier she was talking in her sleep, a few pleading words that doubtless surfaced from many years back, from her life long ago. The only clue to her humanity I’ll ever have, I muse. This other woman, this young mother, bowed over the cocoon of her baby, which she seems to envelop in an invisible halo made up of anxiety, wonder, and love. A few steps away from her the prostitute is busy negotiating with the soldiers: the two men’s excited jabbering and her whispering, a little disdainful but warm and as if moist with luscious promise. The soldiers’ boots clatter on the flagstones; one can sense, physically, the eagerness her body provokes, with its broad, heavy backside and thrusting bosom under the coat. And there,

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