The Man Booker-winning novelist on Shostakovich,western triumphalism and the intimacy of the third person narratorFind out more approximately Guardian Live eventsIf the reviews of his latest novel are anything to go by, Julian Barnes’s study of Dmitri Shostakovich, or The Noise of Time,may just be his masterpiece. And if it is not his masterpiece in the singular sense, then the critical consensus seems to be that it ranks tall in his long list of achievements. With characteristic modesty he acknowledges he’s ecstatic with the reception so far, and though he bristles slightly at the notion its a “biographical novel”.“I judge biographical novels are kind of cheesy,” he told Hermione Lee when she asked him approximately genre at a recent Guardian Live event in London. “All novels are biographical – it means the study of life. Madame Bovary was the study of the life of Emma Bovary. Anna Karenina was a study of the life of Anna Karenina. It’s just that in some novels the people are real and in some novels they aren’t.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com