The Music of a Life: A Novel [Hardcover]

Andrei Makine (Author), Geoffrey Strachan (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 2002

His father is a well-known dramatist, his mother an opera singer. But during Stalin's reign of terror in the late 1930s, both parents are harassed, proscribed. Young Alexei Berg's musical talent, however, is such that he is allowed to continue his studies. His first concert is scheduled for May 24, 1940. Two days before the concert, on his way from the dress rehearsal, Alexei arrives to find his parents being arrested. He flees, and thus begins his 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Makine (Dreams of My Russian Summers) is a Russian emigre who writes in the language of his adopted France, but retains a poetic intensity of vision that seems peculiarly Russian. His latest is an extraordinarily compressed brief novel, but it is a novel not a novella in scope nonetheless. It begins as the narrator, waiting for a train to Moscow somewhere in the wilds of Siberia, meets a mysterious musician, Alexe Berg, and is told his somber life story. Berg, a son of the intelligentsia growing up in the Stalin-shadowed '30s, is about to make his debut as a concert pianist, in 1940, when his parents are arrested, and he barely escapes, taking refuge with relatives in the Ukraine. When the Germans invade, Berg takes on the identity of a dead soldier, fights heroically throughout the war, becomes the prot‚g‚ of a general and briefly imagines himself in love with the officer's daughter. Then the question of his real identity arises once more, and he realizes he can never live the kind of life he had once hoped for. It's a simple story, but Makine's lovely lyric writing excellently translated in which the scenes are imagined with a sharply cinematic focus, gives it considerable depth and emotion; the quiet ending, back in the present time, is wrenching.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Alexe Berg's time has finally come; in two days, he is scheduled to give his first piano recital. But as he heads toward his Moscow apartment, a neighbor furtively signals to him not to return home. His parents, suspect intellectuals who were harassed throughout the 1930s, are being arrested. Alexe flees, hiding out with relatives in the country, and attempts to survive undetected by taking on the identity of a dead peasant soldier and joining the battle against Hitler's invading forces. His deception almost succeeds, but in the end he betrays himself because at a crucial moment he cannot resist playing the piano. This act, of course, is a perfect metaphor for Makine's elegant, heart-rending little gem of a work and for his entire oeuvre: art wills out, ultimately sustaining life and helping to topple dictatorships. This is a brief book, but it is big on ideas, ably carrying on its fragile spine the weight of recent Russian history and a subtle if sharp-tongued mocking of homo sovieticus. Makine here continues the affecting work begun in Dreams of My Russian Summers, and though it resonates with the same themes as that work and others published since, this new novel feels entirely fresh and necessary. Highly recommended. - Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 109 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (August 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559706376
• ISBN-13: 978-1559706377
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,192,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Profund Work from Makine, June 13, 2004

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Music of a Life: A Novel (Hardcover)

Andrei Makine's Music of a Life is a slim book, a mere 144 pages. It a simple story, told in a straightfoward, spare fashion. Yet within the framework of this simple story lies a profund piece of work that has an impact on the reader that, like the most beautiful music, lingers long after the last note fades into the night.

Makine, for those not familiar with his work, was born in the Soviet Union in 1958. He emigrated to France as a young man. He writes in French. (Music of a Life was nicely translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan). At the risk of setting out what may sound like a hackneyed cliche, Makine's work for me combines the grace and elgance of the best French writers and the deep soul and conviction of the best Russian writers.

Music of a Life is set out as the re-telling of a conversation had between two strangers on a train moving slowly west from Siberia sometime around 1958, the year many thousands finally won their release from the labor camps that dotted the Soviet Far East. Two men sit together. One older man, wearing clothes that mark him as someone just released from the Gulag strikes up a comnversation with his fellow passenger. The story is set out in the voice of the other passenger. As the train moves on the older passenger and the narrator exchange slowly. At some point the older passenger, Alexe Berg, slowly sets out his life story.

In 1940, the young Alexe, a classically trained pianist of great talent and promise, was preparing for his debut recital. On approaching his family flat after the dress rehearsal he sees a pre-arranged symbol indiccating that his parents, supposedly dangerous members of the intelligentsia, had been swept up by the NKVD (pre-cursor to the KGB). Alexe makes his escape and finds himself hiding out in the Ukraine in 1941. The devastation of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June of that year engulfs the Urkaine. Alexe comes upon the body of a dead Soviet solider, a peasant, and assumes the dead soldier's identify. Although this provides him some protection from those who might still seek his arrest, Alex realizes quickly that he must maintain this identity at all costs.

Alexe makes it through the war in one piece and, in fact, finds favor with a Soviet general, who keeps him at his side as an aide de camp during the rest of the war. Alexe's survival remains dependent upon his being thought of as a simple peasant. After the war, Alexe finds work with the general's family. The general's daughter takes a liking to the young 'peasant' soldier. Alexe becomes enamored of the daughter. The daughter, whose piano-playing skills are somehwat limited, if earnest, decides to teach the young peasant Alexe a few simple tunes on the piano. These lessons lead, inexorably, to the book's climactic moments.

The book leaves the reader (or at least it left me) contemplating the choices and compromises we sometimes make with life. It left me contemplating the question as to how much of myself would I compromise, how much of myself would I keep hidden in order to maintain some small amount of freedom in an unfree world.

As I noted at the beginning, this is a simple story, simply told. Yet, as with music, sometimes even simple combinations of notes creates a beautiful mosaic of sound. Makine has done this with the graceful combination of notes that makes up his Music of a Life.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The music of anyone's life, January 5, 2005

By 

A. Saltzman - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Music of a Life: A Novel (Hardcover)

This story, told in shockingly clear photographs, details the life of a man, ravaged by the war and Stalin's empire, who chooses against what moves his soul in order to save his body. The book is short, but that's what makes it beautiful. The plot is purposefully underdeveloped in writing; Makine provides the reader with pictures of a time and place, gives them a little knowledge about a man, and leaves the rest to the reader. In this way, Alexei Berg remains mysterious, a shadow, someone who could have been merely part of the homo sovieticus introduced by the narrator in the beginning of the novel. Instead, however, he becomes - in the mind of the narrator and the reader - someone real, someone with a past, but someone who could be one of the a hundred people waiting, silently, on the floor of a cold station, for the train to Moscow.

This is the triumph of this novel - not the story itself, but that the story is not Alexei Berg's in particular, but a story of human spirit in general.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The sounds of self-awareness, February 2, 2005

By 

Friederike Knabe (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Music of a Life: A Novel (Hardcover)

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 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 Alexeď Berg, the pianist. Alexeď 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 Alexeď'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. What happened to his parents? Visions of a life not lived lead him to confront his two realities. In the end, it is the piano and the music that heals and at the same time exposes him. By accepting the consequences of his "crime" he recovers the connection to his former life and his inner voice of music.

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 Alexeď, 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 a recent interview, each observer will interpret it based on his own understanding. 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. [Friederike Knabe]