The Time of Our Singing: A Novel
by Richard Powers
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard PowersEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2004-01-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 640
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of The Time of Our Singing: A Novel
Book Review: a wonderful voyage into the heart of beauty, music, brotherhood - and racism
Summary: 5 Stars
Where is the sixth star? How come can a hotel in Dubai have more stars than this transporting opus?
Richard Powers writes here about many a theme - music, singing even, brotherhood and its pitfalls and hopes, race and racism, he writes of how our boxes and schemes in our heads lead us to do foreseeable things, and how they prevent us from looking at things in a different way - he writes about finding one's path, albeit at the end of a loooong road.
Powers is the most moving, and besides this, probably one of the most brain-stimulating novelists in English today... He takes you away, into a new dimension of thinking, where science is intricate with daily facts like we would not suspect, to a world full of windows open onto other worlds, then brings you back, and you're left wondering what just happened - you feel better, because he makes you feel richer.
In The Time of our Singing, each page is filled with 2 or 3 sentences you wish you'd be born to write - one about beauty, or music, or love, or about how peop-loe relate to each other. Each page is full with meaning, and the book is so rich, so multi-dimensional, that it really takes time and even energy to - it's like a hike in a superb mountain, each page a summit on the way to the real one, and from which the view only gets better.
Richard Powers does not only write about science and how scientific facts can affect our lives and the way we live them - he writes beautifully about beauty. His understanding of how emotions guide our acts, and they can destroy us and/or our understanding of others is eye-opening - you can see quickly how you could have done the same mistake in real life. Powers is here to give us all this: science, beauty, and a magical writing that aims at making the world right - or at least, just a little better.
What's the story? It mostly goes across 80 years of the XXth century, which the author covers in parallel. A family is torn apart and brought together again by events that shaped that century - race, the eclosion of recorded music, wars. Music is the supporting tree on which a brotherhood story is woven, with a thread made of race and all the misunderstandings it carries.
From Marian Anderson's Washington concert and before to world war 2 jewish emigrants to Kenndy being killed to the Million Man March to the rise of choir music in the seventies to the Black Panthers and after, Powers takes history as a tray to serve us an account of how the XXth century has confirmed or changed some basic human behaviours - and frankly leaves it up to us to choose what to do with this.
Frankly, the book also IS about music - Powers has listened to a lot, and if you care, you could read the book with extracts of the music he mentions - the experience is worth it. It is about how music is white when it's classical, how long it's taken us humans to move away from this view, it is about how music transcends race, and how it can transcend and fill one's life, it is about how music can bring people together, even if not forever, for a potentially brief but beautiful moment.
The book is about brotherhood, and FAMILY - of how those who don't seem to matter so much in fact do - and how those who do sometimes take their toll on you should not. It is about making your own choices, and ensure they're not dictated by those who raised you - and the fact that it's never too late or early to do so, that you just have to know you can.
I finished the book weeks ago, it's still on my bedside table, like a friend you won't leave, like a piece of my own history that I can't just put back on a shelf. It's here, reassuring just by existing, with all its good sense and sheer beauty compacted into 600 or so pages.
Similarly to what Mr Zeidler writes in his critic here, the book is simply too great and inspiring to summarize: it is life-changing in the sense of the new views on things it can give you, life-changing in its accounts of what no choice lead you to, life changing in its accounts of Beauty.
Apologies for a long critic - this book just does this to you...
Summary of The Time of Our Singing: A Novel
Jonah, Joseph and Ruth are the children of mixed-race parents determined to protect them from the grinding effects of race. Hothouse children, they are all musically talented, but they cannot be protected from the world for long. Jonah becomes a successful young tenor, but the world of opera can only accept him as a 'brilliant Negro singer'; Joseph, our narrator, becomes a pianist and devotes his talents to the service of his brother's; Ruth turns her back on classical music ('white music') and disappears, on the run with her black husband under suspicion of being a Black Panther.In some respects, Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing is just a big, absorbing drama about an American family, with the typical ingredients of an immigrant parent and some social obstacles--in this case, a biracial marriage in the Civil Rights era--to be overcome by the talented children. But Powers's lyrical gifts lift this material far above its familiar subject matter. His descriptions of music alone will transport the reader. The Strom family were raised with this common language: "Our parents' Crazed Quotations game played on the notion that every moment's tune had all history's music box for its counterpoint. On any evening in Hamilton Heights, we could jump from organum to atonality without any hint of all the centuries that had died fiery deaths between them." The central figure of this novel is the dazzling Jonah, who makes a life from singing, and who may be the only person around him who regards his racial heritage as irrelevant to his ambitions. Powers's is such a fertile writer, however, that he can't stay with any single story, but plunges into pages and pages of family and social histories. The result is a rambling, resonant, fearless novel that pulls the reader along in its wake. --Regina Marler
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