Music of a Life - Softcover

Makine, Andrei

3.92

1,865 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743475607 ISBN 13: 9780743475600

Publisher: Washington Square Pr, 2004

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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. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

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Review:

With matchless delicacy and economy, Makine chronicles a talented musician's victimization by the Stalinist purges of the WWII years ... in scarcely 70 pages, Makine presents a movingly detailed history of survival, adaption and bitter disillusionment ... [it is] perfectly conceived and controlled. Its graceful narrative skilfully blends summarized action with powerfully evocative images charged with strong understated emotion. A masterly dramatization of "the disconcerting simplicity with which broken lives are lived." (Kirkus Reviews)

Makine here is as good as Stendhal - or Tolstoy ... [he is] storyteller, teacher, and enchanter most of all. I would rather read him than anyone else now writing, and then reread him. I think this is his best book so far. (Allan Massie, Literary Review)

Makine here is as good as Stendhal - or Tolstoy ... a marvellous book, beautifully translated ... I've read it now four times and each time found more in it. With each reading it seems better, richer, deeper. On the surface it's simple and beautiful as an autumn morning. So it delights at first reading. But nobody who cares about literature and good writing, nobody who believes that imaginative literature tells us more than any factual work can do, will be content with that first reading ... Makine is storyteller, teacher, and enchanter most of all. I would rather read him than anyone else now writing, and then reread him. I think this is his best book so far. (Allan Massie, Literary Review)

Beautifully paced and filled with a lyricism that weaves reality and fantasy into a far bigger picture ... engrossing (Scotsman)

Makine's novellas are short in length but beautifully paced and filled with a lyricism that weaves reality and fantasy into a far bigger picture. Little wonder, then, that he's frequently likened to other Russian greats such as Nabokov and Chekhov ... an engrossing story of love, tragedy, betrayal and loss. Moving the plot forward effortlessly, he creates a mythic portrait of Communist Russia. (Scotsman)

With matchless delicacy and economy ... Makine presents a movingly detailed history of survival, adaption and bitter disillusionment ... perfectly conceived and controlled. Its graceful narrative skilfully blends summarized action with powerfully evocative images charged with strong understated emotion ... masterly (Kirkus Reviews)

[An] elegant, heart-rending little gem of a work ... entirely fresh and necessary. Highly recommended. (Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (New York))

Andrei Makine's latest novel brilliantly depicts the utter desperation it often took to survive the Stalin years. The philosopher Alexander Zinoviev, a refugee in Munich, coined the phrase 'homo sovieticus' to define the character of the subjects of the USSR. The gist of this character lay in its willingness to accept whatever happened, and yet go on surviving.

The description of this mass of 'homo sovieticus' waiting with infinite patience, without animation or complaint, is memorable, brilliantly done.

This is in a sense an image of [the narrator's] life, spent feeling its way among a cluster of twisting and turning tracks under the snow.His revolt has been pushed to the limit. He has become, as Makine said in an interview, "simply his soul, naked under the sky". In becoming that, he has transcended 'homo sovieticus', or escaped the category, and his terrible story may be read as a victory.

This is a marvellous book, beautifully translated by Geoffrey Strachan. He writes of the "disconcerting simplicity with which broken lives are lived", and an elusive haunting melody sounds in the background beyond the wreckage.

(Allan Massie, The Scotsman)

When I describe Andrei Makine as a great writer, this is no journalistic exaggeration but my wholly sincere estimate of a man of prodigious gifts. In his combination of clarity, concision, tenderness and elegiac lyricism, he is the heir to Ivan Bunin, the first Russian ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Francis King, Spectator)

Makine's lovely lyric writing - excellently translated - in which the scenes are imagined with a sharply cinematic focus, gives it considerable depth and focus; the quiet ending ... is wrenching. (Publishers Weekly)

Book Description:

A magnificent story of courage and survival in the face of great adversity

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