I didn't see eye to eye with this at all. In fact I'm having as much trouble reviewing it as I did reading it. First problem was the dense overwrought prose and its constant striving for profundity. Second problem, the leaden dialogue. Third problem, the relentless preponderance of telling over showing. Fourth problem, the scant half-baked female characters, fifth problem, the author relentlessly and self-indulgently showing off esoteric knowledge. A marriage between a black American woman and a...

The best contemporary fiction that I’ve read this year.

Written music is like nothing in the world—an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it’s almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section.I find it interesting that this tome remains so topical but then I recognize my naivety ----race will always already be at hand. Sorry for the metaphysical sleight of hand, but I suppose it is the human lot to go tribal, biology is likely to blame or bemused dei...

This is the second Powers book I have read, and it left me wanting to read more. Like Orfeo, this is a book which shines with a deep love and knowledge of music of all kinds. This one centres on a mixed race American family of musical geniuses. The central figures are Delia Daley, a singer from an upwardly mobile black family, her husband, the Jewish physicist David Strom who has fled Nazi Germany, and their children - Jonah, a talented classical singer who struggles to avoid being typecast and

The bird and the fish can fall in love. But where they gonna build their nest? The Time of Our Singing sings about the fortunes of a mixed American family from 1939 to the present day. A German-Jewish physicist marries a black singer and the uncommon couple gets three children. By making music and singing together, the family creates a world of its own in which race is an insignificant factor. Yet their family is inevitably marked by the prevailing racial inequality. Powers lashes his novel w

I had a hard time finishing this book, because the ending was so good that I couldn't stop crying. Not because it was sad, but because it was so unbelievably good, and because I'd never before read a long book with an ending that lived up to its heft.Seriously, it took me like half an hour to read the last few pages, because I kept flinging down the book and pacing around my apartment, sobbing hysterically.Don't get me wrong, this book is not perfect, and it definitely falters in places. However...

Every once in a while you'll get into one of those conversations with an acquaintance who thinks he or she is smarter than you in which you list a string of books you've read recently and authors you particularly enjoy. Invariably Michael Chabon's last name (shay-bawn) is mispronounced in these conversations.If you want to win the next conversation like this you have, I highly recommend delving quickly and deeply into the urvruh of Richard Powers, who, despite never fully penetrating the upper e...

 Musical ImmersionI have participated in classical music as an amateur my entire life, and worked professionally in the field for four decades; they are different experiences. Up to now, the novel that most completely captured both the love-affair of the amateur and the exacting discipline of the performer has been An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, set in the world of chamber music. But this 2003 novel by Richard Powers eclipses even that beacon. Beginning with the astounding competition win by...

With a first opera version of this book coming up, in the 'Munt/Monnaie' Opera House in Brussels, September 2021, I'm re-editing my review of the great novel. This is undoubtedly a great work of art, a book that deserves all the superlatives that have been scattered here abundantly on this site, because this is a novel with a lot of meat on the bone. First of all it is a beautiful, at times even quite touching family saga (after 600 pages the Strom family members have become rather good acquaint...

This is a marvelous novel. It is a family saga that blends history, identity issues, music, and physics (specifically the physics of time). It is a novel for the ages. Written in 2003, it remains timely and relevant, incredibly relevant.The story is mostly told by Joseph Strom, second son of David Strom, a Jewish-German émigré who teaches physics at Columbia, and Delia Daily, a classically-trained, black singer, who met at the Marian Anderson concert on the Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1939. Davi...

Phew! I finally completed it! :)'The Time of Our Singing' tells the story of the two sons of Delia and David Strom. Delia and David might have been your everyday 1950s couple, had Delia not been an aspiring African American singer from Philadelphia's middle class, and David a white Jewish engineer who had just lost his family in the Holocaust.The author has juxtaposed many of the Stroms' milestones with the broader American milestones of the 20th century especially with regards to Black-White re...

Important Service Announcement:I read the first 100 or something pags of this yesterday and decided not to continue. *does not panic**breathes*Yes, I can start a book and not finish it! It hasn't happened very often, in fact, I can't remember that it ever happened, but I'm convinced I can do it. It also helps that this is my mothers book, so I can give it back to her and not be tempted.Why don't I finish it?Well, it's a very very long book. And in the first 100 pages, the important ones where al...

More to say on this later after some more thought, hopefully. For now: it's totally consumed me. I read the last 100 pages or so until 3 in the morning despite being dead tired. Having just read Powers's The Echo Maker, I'd say this one seems to me more whole and absorbed me more fully, or the other way around. Like a vast timeless poem, it has me not knowing where to begin putting to words what it has done so well in its themes of race, music, and time. I do feel like it achieved the timelessne...