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A review by emmkayt
Music of a Life by Andreï Makine
4.0
What a beautifully written novella. Some authors write fat books that manage to say little and outstay their welcome - somehow this little jewel manages to tell a sweeping story perfectly in just over a hundred pages, without feeling rushed or simply sketched in.
The narration opens in a rural train station in the Soviet Union in winter, as the train to Moscow is announced to be six hours late. The narrator looks at the mass of humanity round him and muses somewhat superiorly about ‘homo sovieticus,’ always content with whatever the grim situation brings. Then his encounters a rough-handed old man who plays piano beautifully though in tears. On their journey, we learn more about Alexei Berg’s early life as a young musician in the Stalinist 30s and 40s. 4.5.
“At the conservatory it seems as if the people he passes have all become short-sighted; they squint, to avoid catching his eye. Their faces remind him of those masks he once saw in a history book, terrifying masks with long noses, with which the inhabitants of cities invaded by the plague used to rig themselves out. His friends acknowledge his greetings, but only obliquely, furtively, turning their heads away, and this evasive action - half in profile, half face-to-face - stretches their noses into the long incurved stings of insects. They stammer out excuses for making off and gasp, as if they were inhaling the aromatic herbs that used to be stuffed into those antiplague masks....”
The narration opens in a rural train station in the Soviet Union in winter, as the train to Moscow is announced to be six hours late. The narrator looks at the mass of humanity round him and muses somewhat superiorly about ‘homo sovieticus,’ always content with whatever the grim situation brings. Then his encounters a rough-handed old man who plays piano beautifully though in tears. On their journey, we learn more about Alexei Berg’s early life as a young musician in the Stalinist 30s and 40s. 4.5.
“At the conservatory it seems as if the people he passes have all become short-sighted; they squint, to avoid catching his eye. Their faces remind him of those masks he once saw in a history book, terrifying masks with long noses, with which the inhabitants of cities invaded by the plague used to rig themselves out. His friends acknowledge his greetings, but only obliquely, furtively, turning their heads away, and this evasive action - half in profile, half face-to-face - stretches their noses into the long incurved stings of insects. They stammer out excuses for making off and gasp, as if they were inhaling the aromatic herbs that used to be stuffed into those antiplague masks....”