Synopses & Reviews
MUSIC OF MY LIFE begins as a narrator, waiting for a train to Moscow somewhere in the wilds of Siberia, meets a mysterious musician, Alexei Berg, and is told his somber life story. His father is a well-known dramatist, his mother an opera singer. But during Stalin's reign of terror in the late 1930s, both parents are harassed. Young Alexei Berg's musical talent, however, is such that he is allowed to continue his studies. His first concert is scheduled for May 24, 1940. Two days before the concert, on his way from the dress rehearsal, Alexei arrives to find his parents being arrested. He flees, and thus begins his endless journey through war and peace. He took refuge with relatives in the Ukraine. When the Germans invade, Berg takes on the identity of a dead soldier, fights heroically throughout the war, becomes the protege of a general and briefly imagines himself in love with the officer's daughter. Then the question of his real identity arises once more, and he realizes he can never live the kind of life he had once hoped. Until he lands, two decades later, in a snowbound train station in the Urals, where he relates his harrowing saga to the novel's narrator.
Review
The Denver Post [A] tour de force...about partings, death, love, solitude, art, identity...[that] leaves the reader with the feeling of having gone through an epic.
Review
The New Yorker Makine's dreamlike prose works beautifully when combined with a strong plot, as it was in his first novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers, and as it is here.
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The Atlanta Journal Makine belongs on the shelf of world literature -- between Lermontov and Nabokov, a few volumes down from Proust.
Review
The Wall Street Journal [C]oncise, fable-like, light-textured yet morally serious in the highest degree....[R]ead it with delight and astonishment.
Synopsis
May 24, 1941: Alexeï Berg, a classical pianist, is set to perform his first solo concert in Moscow. But just before his début, his parents -- his father a renowned playwright, and his mother a famed opera singer -- are exposed for their political indiscretions and held under arrest. With World War II on the brink, and fearing that his own entrapment is not far behind, Alexeï flees to the countryside, assumes the identity of a Soviet soldier, and falls dangerously in love with a general officer's daughter. What follows is a two-decades-long journey through war and peace, love and betrayal, art and artifice -- a rare ensemble in the making of the music of a life.
About the Author
AndreÏ Makine was born in 1958 in the former Soviet Union. In 1987 he emigrated to France, where he still lives. He is the author of six novels including, most recently, Requiem for a Lost Empire and Dreams of My Russian Summers, which won France's prestigious Goncourt and Médicis prizes in 1995.