FREE TIME OF OUR SINGING PDF Richard Powers | 640 pages | 05 Feb 2004 | Vintage Publishing | 9780099453833 | English | London, United Kingdom Face the music | Books | The Guardian There is no other contemporary American writer quite like Richard Powers. He is, as Sir Cliff Richard once said of Elvis, "a phenomena". The Time of Our Singing is his eighth novel since the boy-genius published Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance inand, just into his mids, he is a long way from "dropping the Time of Our Singing, as they say. Powers is the best example of an American novelist who straddles CP Snow's "two cultures": a Time of Our Singing musician who began a degree in physics and then switched to literature, who programmed computers while writing his first novel, Powers is at home in the arts and the sciences, and takes the divide between them both as the subject matter and the structural principle of his fiction. His work exemplifies Samuel Johnson's famous description of metaphysical poetry: "heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together". Take the jaw-dropping intellectual daring of The Gold Bug Variations Here Powers weaves together the four-note motif of Bach's Goldberg Variations, the four nucleotides don't ask described in the structure of DNA, and the tetragrammaton, the four-letter Hebrew word for God. He then folds these themes into three separate narratives which touch only obliquely, linked mainly by the characters' love of the Bach piece. Oh yes, and as an ambient background, there is the ghostly presence of Edgar Allan Poe's tale of the power of decoding and interpretation, "The Gold-Bug". It is this kind of complexity that gets Powers his reputation for writing on the higher frequencies, where only the literary equivalent of a hound dog can hear him. In one sense Powers's novels are like Beethoven symphonies; admirers much prefer the odd-numbered ones. What, then, of this, the eighth novel? It seems at first a very different kind of book from its predecessors. Like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, it takes the form of a family saga. With his interest in isolated, atomised individuals and his attempts to Time of Our Singing together seemingly incompatible disciplines, Powers has probably got EM Forster's humanist cry from Howards End, "only connect", hanging over his writing desk. But the phrase has an added poignancy in the new work, for Powers, a writer who knows no fear, takes on what Time of Our Singing Du Bois called America's "problem of the 20th century - the colour line". Powers's story addresses Time of Our Singing tone and shade in the arguments over race in the postwar US. The plot concerns a family essentially brought into being by racism. Inthe Daughters of the American Revolution refused the outstanding black contralto Marian Anderson use of the premier concert venue in Washington DC. As a result, she gave a free open-air concert to 75, people on the steps of the Lincoln memorial. At the concert, Powers's characters David Strom, an exiled German Jewish mathematician and expert on quantum time, and Delia Daley, a talented African American singer, meet. They later marry, an illegal act in half the states of the union inand have three prodigiously talented children: Jonah, who will become a leading classical singer, possessed of a voice that "could make David and Delia make a brave but finally doomed attempt to bring up their children "beyond race". As David, the scientist, puts it: "There is no such thing as race. Race is only real if you freeze time. David and Delia school their children at home, and there are long and sometimes frankly mawkish accounts of familial and musical harmony as they all sing together around the piano. The young mixed-race family, however, is welcome neither in the white nor black districts of 40s New York City. But almost worse Time of Our Singing the racism is the effect of their mixed-race status. As the young Jonah asks: "Mama And Da's some kind of Jewish guy. What exactly Time of Our Singing that make me, Joey and Root? After winning their first important music competition, light-skinned Jonah and Joey are asked: "What exactly are you boys? Powers, in an act of narrative brio, develops an isomorphic relationship between the content and structure of the book by making the most of notions of hybridity or "mixedness". Jonah, too, has his greatest triumph in Time of Our Singing "hybrid" Tippett opera A Child of Our Time, and of course hybridity informs both the politics and the art of Time of Our Singing novel itself. Powers argues for a celebration of multicultural mixing in a book that itself mixes the novel of ideas with the family saga, for it is from David Strom's concept of time as looping back on itself that the book takes its narrative technique. The story is told in short episodes that move Time of Our Singing and forth across five decades, so that we return again and again Time of Our Singing the same events. The novel begins with the competition triumph of Jonah and Joey, but when we return hundreds of pages later to this same Time of Our Singing, it is enriched by the new context in which it is placed. The novel also resists simple linearity by the resonant use of a number of recurring themes. For example, we may guess early on that Time of Our Singing and clock time are being yoked together, but the reader realises with a jolt that notions of frequency and wavelength shape the text, too, because they bring together music, time and, as light waves get their identity from frequency, issues of colour, too. It is a sign of how good Powers can be that this is not his best work. The female characters are by and large a little stereotyped and Time of Our Singing is no Elmore Leonard when it comes to dialogue. But there is barely a page where the reader is not brought up by a startling image or a carefully worked idea. You would have to go back to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus to find the experience of playing and listening to music so beautifully caught in words. Others may give us more complex characters, but it is rare to find a novel as intellectually and emotionally engaging as this. Face the music. Peter Dempsey. Topics Books Fiction Music books reviews Reuse this content. The Time of Our Singing - Wikipedia The most accessible, and powerful fiction yet from a major American writer who, against all odds, just keeps getting better. The power of music in its relation to a racially divided family and culture is dramatized with unprecedented Time of Our Singing in this panoramic novel: the eighth from the protean author of, most recently, Plowing the Dark And, as a grace note of sorts, Powers demonstrates that he knows as much about musical technique, theory, and history as he seems to know about almost everything else. The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, Time of Our Singing Mothersand now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D. Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far. Time of Our Singing, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress. A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building Time of Our Singing a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old Time of Our Singing followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies A basic statement of the Time of Our Singing of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political Time of Our Singing. Already have an account? Log in. Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials. Sign Up. Pub Date: Jan. No Comments Yet. More by Richard Powers. New York Times Bestseller. IndieBound Bestseller. Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.