The Noise of Time
https://www.ibs.it/rumore-del-tempo-libro-julian-barnes/e/9788806230876
Has anyone read it? The review reads:
On the morning of January 29, 1936, the third page of "Pravda" commented on the recent performance at the Bolshoi of Dmitrij Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District," titling it "Chaos instead of music" and accusing the opera of caressing "the morbid taste of the bourgeois public with restless and neurasthenic music." It was not just a negative review capable of ruining an artist's day. Nor was it a scathing critique capable of destroying his career. In the Age of Terror of Comrade Stalin, such an editorial, and the consequent stigma of being an enemy of the people, could interrupt life itself. And thus, punctually, for the famous Shostakovich, comes the first in a series of dialogues with Power. It is a trap with no way out that is set for him—to bend to denunciation or to succumb—and Shostakovich prepares himself for the inevitable. At nightfall, for ten consecutive nights, he leaves the apartment he shares with his wife Nita and little daughter Galja and settles next to the elevator that will presumably bring his tormentors, meditating until dawn on his destiny and that of his time. But the ways of regimes are inscrutable; the interrogator can easily become the interrogated, and the outcast may be saved, even being "forgiven."
