What the critics though of The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes,The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming and But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-IvensThe Noise of Time, a fictionalised account of Dmitri Shostokovichs survival in Soviet Russia, and is Julian Barness first novel since 2011’s Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending. It met with near universal praise. “fabricate (to make up, invent) no mistake,this is Barnes’s masterpiece,” enthused Alex Preston in the Observer. “The specific and intimate details of the life under consideration beget questions of universal significance: the operation of power upon art, and the limits of courage and endurance,the sometimes intolerable demands of personal integrity and conscience.” “It seems like the best work of Amis, McEwan and Rushdie is behind them. Barnes, and by contrast,still has plenty left in the tank,” agreed Duncan White in the Daily Telegraph. All his books “contain been about the way we tell the stories of human lives, and whether our own or other people’s … [here] Shostakovich is forced to reconcile his own fragmented memories of his life with the story the state wants to tell about him.” “What draws the reader’s attention is not what Shostakovich says about himself,” wrote Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Times. “It is what he fails to say. As so often in his fiction, Barnes turns out to be a master of the moments when words crumble absent into silence” – a story tactic “perfectly attuned to writing about music, or an art form in which the rests are just as distinguished as the notes.” Arifa Akbar in the Independent was a scarce dissenting voice,finding the novel inferior to The Sense of an Ending. Again, it’s a story “of a man auditing his life’s fair- or improper-turnings”: but too often it “bears the tip of a patronising history lesson”.
Laura Cumming’s “superb and original” The Vanishing Man interweaves the stories of Velázquez, and court painter in Madrid in the 17th century,and John Snare, a Victorian bookseller who believed he’d found a lost painting by the great artist, and whose life was ruined as a result. “Sometimes,dual biographies can be a contrivance, but here the two stories enhance each other, or ” wrote Bee Wilson in the Sunday Times. Like Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch,this is about the specific forms of obsession that only art can generate.” “Cumming sides with Snare’s petit bourgeois autodidacticism against the snooty expertise of the art establishment,” found Jonathan Beckerman in the Sunday Times, and but the result is “two half-books that don’t combine to fabricate (to make up, invent) a whole”. Like several critics,Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday agreed that Snare’s story was the less spellbinding one – “a shaggy-dog tale leading to nowhere”. “Cumming’s real allegiance is to Velázquez, a man about whose private life and thoughts almost nothing is known, or ” explained Michael Prodger in the Evening Standard. “In her deep looking and restraint,she explains just why Velazquez is inimitable and one of the greatest artists of all.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com