The sound of time
The sound of time , original title: The Time Of Our Singing (2003), is the eighth novel by the American writer Richard Powers , who is best known for his convincing combination of scientific topics with psychological and philosophical implications. The German translation of his linguistically very complex work, which was praised as excellent and congenial, was provided by Manfred Allié and Gabriele Kempf-Allié, who also jointly translated Powers' bestseller Das Echo derenken ( The Echo Maker , 2006) into German, which was published three years later .
The sound of time tells an epic family saga, in particular the life of two musically extremely talented brothers, the sons of a German-Jewish physicist and his black wife from Philadelphia . American racism and the civil rights movement form the political foreground . The main theme, however, is the power and beauty of the music and singing that permeates and pervades all events, the emotionality and perfection of which are enthusiastically described and, despite all the tragedy, are celebrated as ultimately triumphant.
content
The family story begins on Easter Sunday 1939, when the black singer Marian Anderson , who remain closed the concert halls of the White, an open-air concert in front of the monument of Abraham Lincoln are in Washington. In the huge crowd that has gathered there, Delia Daley from Philadelphia meets David Strom, a Jew who emigrated from Germany. He is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Columbia University and is busy studying the phenomenon of time. Their conventional division into past, present and future has nothing to do with reality, but is a mere construct of human thought.
Delia is an African American and a member of Philadelphia's most renowned gospel choir. David is the first to see her, not Delia's skin color, and to share her enthusiasm for music. She falls in love and marries him. Delia's father, a general practitioner, is appalled by his daughter's naivete. Later he would philosophize often and intensely with David about the question “What is time?” And in 1945 argue with him indignantly about the dropping of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the scientific development of which David was secretly involved.
The Stroms don't send their children to school, they raise them at home. They pretend that there is no racial discrimination because they believe it is better for their children to grow up without such discrimination. This also leads to violent arguments between them and Delia's father, which ultimately become so bitter that contact between the two generations is broken off. Shortly thereafter, Delia is killed in a mysterious house fire. It is never fully established whether the incident was not racially motivated. Years later, old Daley dies of cancer without being reconciled with his daughter.
There is nothing that the Strom parents do not teach their two boys and their daughter Ruth, who was born later, by singing and making music. All family members have wonderful voices, but especially the musicality of the older son Jonah, who sings Bach and Monteverdi , Schubert and Orff with a steadily increasing mastery, are not only highlighted as outstanding and emotionally rousing, but are also portrayed by Powers with corresponding virtuosity contrasts with the racist humiliations to which the Strom children are increasingly exposed.
The narrator of the novel, however, is not the child prodigy Jonah - later heavily attacked and despised by his politically committed sister Ruth because he adapted his singing to the culture of the whites - but his younger brother Joseph (Joey), who is also extremely musically talented, but basically just a talented pianist who knows how to accompany his brother on the piano in a brilliant way and who helps him win the America's New Voice singing competition . While the older one lives his musical career as a gifted tenor and, after sensational national stage successes, leaves the USA, shaken by racial riots, and gives guest performances in the concert halls of old Europe with his specially founded Voces Antiquae (old voices), is brilliant and enthusiastically celebrated everywhere the younger one again and again how one can offer the variety of timbres against the monotonous color theory of racism, how music and politics can be combined or whether one should not have to give up one for the other. Towards the end of the novel, Joey says goodbye to artist life. Instead, he becomes a teacher and takes care of the music lessons for black children at his sister's elementary school, who (after initially threatening to slip into the drug scene) has now obtained a doctorate in education and founded the "New Day Elementary School".
When the Voces Antiquae return to the USA during a tour, Joey invites his brother to visit him at his school. Jonah is enthusiastic about the music lessons, which his brother designed according to their parents' example. Ruth also reconciles with Jonah again. Afterwards he flies to his performance in Los Angeles, which has to be canceled because serious racial riots break out there on April 29, 1992 . Jonah is hit in the temple by a stone in the street battles, goes deaf in one ear, fails to see a doctor and dies the following day.
reception
"This book has almost eight hundred pages, and no page is too many," assures the SZ . The novel provides “the panorama of a social condition that no sociology, no cultural theory, no philosophy can produce”, a panorama that draws an arc between the historical images of the lynchings of the American South up to the beginning of the 21st century with the bloody riots in the slums of Los Angeles. In contrast, there is the contrasting world of music, which "has seldom been described so closely in literature as in this novel."
The Frankfurter Rundschau also praises the “brilliant achievement” of Richard Powers, “one of the most powerful storytellers of his time”, almost hymnically .
Ulrich Greiner ( Die Zeit ), on the other hand, complains that Despite all its narrative virtuosity , The Sound of Time leaves the reader untouched. Powers' art remains "cold perfection" without any inner necessity. In the course of history, the reader becomes more and more “tired”. Greiner's final verdict is as categorical as it is devastating: The novel moves on the "highest conceivable level of indifference".
The FAZ also certifies that the author, especially when it comes to the description of the music, a prose of “precious, moving passages”. Overall, however, the novel would have looked a little more sensual and a little less learned. Reading would never be boring, but the "perhaps too daunting" task, the allegory of the incompatibility of black and white, art and politics, is too dispassionate for Richard Power.
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung believes that the sound of the times has turned out to be too disproportionate. Although Powers only tell stories in the traditional style, he spreads an enormous amount of musical knowledge that is worth reading on its own. However, the novel lacks the finishing touches, especially since its figure constellation is a bit clumsy and mechanically composed.
References
- ↑ Among others by Arno Widmann , [1]
- ↑ Thomas Steinfeld, Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 21, 2004
- ↑ Ulrich Sonnenschein, Frankfurter Rundschau , June 5, 2004
- ^ Die Zeit , June 17, 2004
- ^ Felicitas von Lovenberg, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 5, 2004
- ↑ Michael Schmitt, Neue Zürcher Zeitung , June 8, 2004