Derailed by History
[In the following review, Thompson asserts that Makine makes the most of the novella form in A Life's Music.]
Andreï Makine left his native Russia in 1987 after glasnost, and travelled to Paris, where he was initially homeless. He has now published seven highly acclaimed novels in French. Like the author's own story, A Life's Music is a tale of dispossession and survival. At a railway station in a remote part of the Soviet Union, the nameless narrator discovers an old man, Alexeï Berg, playing an abandoned piano; as they travel to Moscow together, Berg tells the story of his life. In 1941, he is a young man on the brink of a career as a concert pianist, but his family falls victim to one of Stalin's purges, and he becomes a fugitive. Assuming the identity of a dead soldier, he plunges into the Second World War and survives, only to find himself stranded in a life not his own.
Makine manages to compress great swaths of time and space into a 106-page novella and still have it sparkle with detail; perhaps it is unsurprising that A Life's Music is a cinematic piece of writing, with the pace and structural economy of a well-edited film. The short, well-turned sections seem to take their cues from the master scene, the single shot and the montage, while the climactic moments have a sentimental drama that would not be out of place in a Hollywood movie. The story is efficiently curtailed at the climax: “knocked off balance by this arrival [in Moscow], which we had given up hoping for, the narrative hesitates and is then polished off in a few hurried sentences”, says the narrator, and so it is; decades at a stroke.
There is a tension here, in that the novella is concerned precisely with the messiness and imperfection of the individual life, but it applies a highly patterned narrative form to this subject matter. As the title suggests, this is a very deliberate approach—a life is reduced to its formalized essentials, as if it were a piece of music. Nevertheless, the consequences of chance events and impulsive actions are followed through rigorously. Berg risks death for the sake of music, and in the process, his story becomes an exploration of how it can be possible to say: “this pain, this fear, and the irremediable shattering of the past … this had all become music and now only existed through its beauty.”
Despite its affinities with other media, the novella is memorable for effects possible only on the page. (It is well served by a translation that gives the impression of complete transparency.) It is always lucid, although some sentences are also deceptively complex, rewarding careful listening: “Alexeï stopped beside the piano, let a hand come down on the keyboard, listened, closed the lid again. His joy at not feeling within himself the presence of a young man in love with music was very reassuring.” The shadowy Berg is, at first, almost an absence at the centre of his own story, on whom the twentieth century merely imprints its outrages; but he emerges as a quietly passionate man. His nostalgic Nabokovian sense of lost time and dislocation is caught in simple penetrating images:
Sometimes he came to his senses, observed his life as if over the bannisters of a staircase, with a feeling of giddiness.
A Life's Music can feel almost oppressively worthwhile, with its edifying themes, unmitigated formal beauty and note-perfect prose; but then it overturns all scepticism with some startling, luminous phrase. A whole life's story can seem concentrated in one glimpse: “the sun, still low, filled the interior of the abandoned car with a golden light; it looked like a car left there by a family who had spread out among the trees, to gather wild strawberries.” Andreï Makine makes fresh images that are also profound and poignant, and this gives his portrait of a life derailed by history an irresistible authority.
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