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The Music of a Life: A Novel

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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.

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.

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 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. 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 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 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]

Years ago, the celebrated Russian logician Alexander Zinoviev coined the sarcastic phrase Homo Sovieticus to explore how a new species with a specific mindset evolved as a result of the Communist system. In Andrei Makine's exquisite and dreamlike novella, the reader learns about this new species through the person of Alexei Berg, a one-time brilliant young pianist.

Not unlike Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner, he happens across the narrator who is enduring a transportation delay with "human matter, breathing like a single organism, its resignation, its innate disregard of comfort, its endurance in the face of the absurd." Together, they manage to get aboard an archaic third-class coach, where Alexei weaves his story to his new friend.

Alexei's parents are arrested by the pre-KGB for being part of the "rotten intelligentsia" during Stalin's reign of terror in the 1930s, just as Alexei is posed to make an eagerly-awaited solo debut. Knowing his own arrest is imminent, he flees to his fiancee's father's home, waking up in the middle of the night convinced that he is about to be betrayed. After hiding briefly in his uncle's barn, Alexei scours the bodies of dead Russian soldiers to find one who is close to him in appearance. He assumes that soldier's identity and enters the war "indistinguishable in the column", cloaked in his disguise.

In taut, lyrical, beautifully-paced notes, Makine traces Alexi's survival trek, and with an extraordinary economy of words, captures the terror of striving to make it through the Stalin years. The sparse portrait of a man caught up in a forgotten life is described thus: "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 greviously confused, at living and loving."

There is, of course, a denouement scene: creativity, in Makine's world, is indestructible and survives in whatever spare soil it is planted. This exquisite elegy of loss - a multi-note symphony to the indestructibility of the human spirit--reaches a crescendo that is beautifully realized and will not soon be forgotten.

Music of a Life: A Novel is a poetic masterpiece, a beautiful novella of intensity, strength and economy. With dreamlike lyricism and bold metaphor, it is tale within a tale, a journey within a journey, the riveting and evocative story of twenty years in the life of a classical pianist turned soldier in Russia during the end of World War II.

His name is Andrei Berg and his story is told by an unnamed narrator who is marooned in a train station during a snowstorm in the Ural Mountains. While stranded in the waiting room of the icy train station and scorning the other travellers who engulf him ~ the "homo sovieticus" ~ the narrator hears and is pulled toward the brief stirrings of a piano keyboard. Following the sound of the music down a long corridor to a storage room, he discovers an old man, the aged Andrei Berg, sitting at a grand piano and producing the sound that drew him. Thus Berg and the narrator become acquainted, end up travelling together and Berg reveals his story.

Berg's life story is a heartrending and harrowing tale of survival. It is a haunting tale of the Russian experience from World War II through Stalinization and the later de-Stalinization. Through the narrator's reflection a complex and layered epic unfolds ~ an epic of good and evil, peace and war, love and loss, loyalty and betrayal, resignation and rebellion, endurance and resistance.

Makine has written an emotional, lyrical elegy with great precision and a brilliant economy of words. This moving novella is less than 110 pages but it is rich with atmosphere, characterization, action and imagery. It is a marvel, a masterpiece ~ and deserves to be read again and again.

This is really a treasure of a book. A musician is forced to assume the identity of a dead soldier in Russia during WWII to save his life. It's a tight, taut lyrical little novel that can be read in an afternoon. To say too much about it deprives the reader of the magic that awaits them, so I will just say this: read it. If you like historical fiction you will be enchanted by this lovely small treasure.

This novel is lyrical, wonderully written, economical with language, and deeply emotional. In this age where post-modern writers craft 700 page monsters that are in dire need of editing (of course there are wonderful novels this size, but mostly written before 1970), here is an intimate tale that is excatly as long as the story requires. With all due respect to the two reviews below--ignore them and you won't be sorry. Their criticism reminds me of Salieri's critique of Mozart's work in Amadeus--"sire, there are too many notes"--to which the proper response here is the same--"too many, there are just the right amount". The writing here is wonderful, straightforward and most of all, lacking attitude and artifice (for another writer similarly talented, try Ha Jin). Buy it.

Do not let this book's brevity fool you. In so few words, it tells a story of a life time, and gives a panoramic view of the strange age that he lived in.

Andrei Makine told an engaging story of a character before, during, and after the war. It was told from a third person point of view, which I didn't really care for, and think the story could have been better told if it was told from first person. Makine did an excellent job taking you to the place by his descriptions. He paints a very vivid picture with his choice of words, and uses an extensive vocabulary. I enjoyed the story. Although the story was short, it got the point across very well. Great story, but did I enjoy it enough to read it again, no.

Our narrator (name unknown) is waiting in a snowbound train station in the Urals when he encounters a peculiar man silently running his hands over the keys of the grand piano upstairs. The next morning, on the train together, he learns the man's name -- Alexei Berg -- and his story. When Alexei was young and living in Moscow, he was on his way to becoming a classical pianist. And he was engaged to be married. But on May 22, 1941, two days before his first solo concert, he was on his way home to his parents' apartment when a neighbor hurried past warning him not to go back. The secret police had come. And so he fled. After his fiance's family betrayed him, he took the identity of a dead Russian soldier and spend years fighting in the Soviet army. He was befriended by a General, taunted by his daughter, cast adrift without name or family ... but he has never forgotten his music.

Despite a very real poignancy, MUSIC OF A LIFE is far too short (109 pages) and undeveloped to be a truly satisfying novel. As I read I kept thinking that if Makine had spent more time on his plot and allowed it room to grow, the story could have been a winner. All the necessary elements -- danger, love, loss and rediscovery -- are present. Yet they're crammed into a few spare paragraphs and the reader is mostly told things, not shown them, between great jumps in time and place. Makine has obvious talent for description, for picking out the forgotten snapshots of life and portraying them as something strangely beautiful, but in this effort at least he lacks the ability to create an impression strong enough to last.

I wish I could recommend this little book because I really wanted to like it, but in truth I found MUSIC OF A LIFE only a rough draft, not a finished symphony, and so I can't.