In 1939 at Marion Anderson's great protest concert in Washington, a German-Jewish emigre physicist and a young black contralto are brought together by concern over a lost child. They eventually marry and have three children, bringing them up in a hot-house atmosphere of music and maths, hoping to raise them to have no awareness of race as an issue in their lives. All three are 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. Powers brilliantly and devastatingly delineates the tragedy of race in America, as it unfolds from the Civil Rights movement to Rodney King and Louis Farrakhan, through the lives and choices of one family, caught on the cusp of identities. This is a hugely ambitious - and brilliantly achieved - novel, as brilliantly clever as Powers' previous novels, but also deeply political and deeply moving.
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Review:
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
About the Author:
Richard Powers is a recipient of a MacArthur award (commonly referred to as 'genius grants'). Galatea 2.2 was nominated for the US National Book Crities' Circle Award.
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- PublisherWilliam Heinemann Ltd.
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 043401060X
- ISBN 13 9780434010608
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
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Rating