2025 Readings 87

Lately I've been in the midst of two parallel reading tracks, Albert Camus and Julian Barnes (I'm sure there's something that connects them, but it's not jumping out at me right now). Yesterday I finished Barnes's The Noise of Time, which is a fictionalized retelling of the life of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In that way, it's sort of like his Flaubert's Parrot and The Man in the Red Coat, both of which I love. It deals with the uneasy relationship between the life of the artist and life in an authoritarian regime, among other themes. It definitely made me want to revisit Shostakovich. Highly recommended.