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The Time of Our Singing, by Richard Powers
PDF Download The Time of Our Singing, by Richard Powers
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A magnificent, multifaceted novel about a supremely gifted -- and divided -- family, set against the backdrop of postwar America
On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson's epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish émigré scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Philadelphia Negro studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and--against all odds and better judgment--they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped in song. But their three children must survive America's brutal here and now. Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth grow up during the Civil Rights era, come of age in the violent 1960s, and live out adulthood in the racially retrenched late century. Jonah, the eldest, "whose voice could make heads of state repent," follows a life in his parents' beloved classical music. Ruth, the youngest, chooses a militant activism and repudiates the white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator of this generational tale, struggles to remain connected to them both.
The Time of Our Singing is a story of self-invention, allegiance, race, cultural ownership, the compromised power of music, and the tangled loops of time that rewrite all belonging.
- Sales Rank: #333874 in Books
- Published on: 2003-01-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.88" w x 6.50" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 640 pages
Amazon.com 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
From Publishers Weekly
Powers (Plowing the Dark, etc.) has generated considerable excitement as a novelist of ideas, but as a creator of characters, he is on shakier ground. Here he confronts his weaknesses head-on, crafting a hefty family saga that attempts to probe generational conflicts, sibling rivalries and racial identity. The book follows the mixed-race Strom family through much of the 20th century, from 1939 when German-Jewish physicist David Strom meets Delia Daley, a black, classically trained singer from Philadelphia through the 1990s. The couple marries and has three children: eldest son Jonah, a charismatic, egotistical singing prodigy; Joseph, his self-sacrificing accompanist; and Ruth, the rebel of the family, who becomes a militant black activist. There are two separate strands to the story: one is a third-person chronicle of David and Delia's relationship through the 1940s; the other, narrated by Joseph, is about the brothers' education in the nearly all-white world of classical music and their experience of the civil rights movement as the rest of the country grudgingly catches up to the Stroms' radical experiment. Powers's premise is intriguing, and the plot's architecture is impressive, informed by the notion, from physics, of space-time wrinkles and time curves. Missing, however, are the pulse-quickening vintage-Powers moments in which his discussions of technology and science open up profound existential quandaries. Most of the book is taken up with a prolonged, overdetermined and off-key examination of family relationships and identity struggles. Narrator Joseph is supposed to be eclipsed by his brother, but Powers overshoots the mark: for half the book, Joseph is little more than a pair of eyes and ears. Powers's depiction of how public events filter into individual consciousness can also be surprisingly unimaginative; Joseph periodically runs down a list of current events, using stale, iconic imagery ("our hatless boy president plays touch football on the White House lawn"). Powers deserves credit for taking a risk, but his own experiment reveals his startling tone deafness to the subtle inflections of human experience.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Delia Daley met David Strom on Easter Sunday in Washington, DC, in 1939 at a concert by Marion Anderson held outside the Lincoln Memorial after the DAR refused to let her perform indoors. And so the talented black woman from Philadelphia and the German Jewish refugee physicist and teacher from Columbia University fall in love and create a universe that parallels the history of time, music, and civil rights. Powers (Plowing the Dark) moves between present and past, with sections of the novel, not really chapters, alternating between the third person and a first-person account narrated by the Stroms' middle child and younger son, Joseph. While Delia is refused a prestigious musical education because of her race, Einstein himself suggests that the couple's elder son, Jonah, take singing lessons to further his obvious talent. Meanwhile, daughter Ruth questions her mixed heritage, and her actions mirror the growth of black militancy throughout the country as civil rights takes hold. The title of this book pervades each page, with the structure of time and the discipline of singing woven throughout. The language is dense, often difficult; this reviewer, who takes singing lessons, found the descriptions of technique mesmerizing but elusive. Did I mention physics? Powers's work is undoubtedly complex, but his stories are compelling, lyrical, and timeless. Readers who invest the time in this lengthy novel will be rewarded. Recommended for all literary fiction collections.
--Bette-Lee Fox, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
50 of 54 people found the following review helpful.
Too long for a good song
By MartinP
This book was enthusiastically recommended to me by a friend, and the reviews I read of it made me even more eager to read it. Now, having finished it, I find myself rather disappointed, yet somewhat hesitant to give an opinion. The writing itself is of such quality and, often, sheer beauty, and the scope of its themes is so monumental, that I cannot help but admire the writer for his audacity and skill. Of course, likes and dislikes are always matters of taste, but this eventual "dislike" had me wondering if the fault was with this particular reader rather than the novel. Still, the book left me, if not exactly bored, strangely exasperated. It seems to be one of those novels where the story does not evolve naturally from the characters, but where the characters are elaborate mechanisms for dispensing philosophical and political ideas. A suspicion Powers tries to repel by cramming his pages with picturesque and quaint individual detail, and by rehashing the central motives (race, time, music) in a way that verges on the obsessive - bloating this book to a daunting 630 pages in the process.
The Time of Our Singing tells the story of a black woman and a jewish man who decide to marry after meeting at a musical event-slash-antidiscrimination rally. Their mixed marriage is the bane of her parents, and of the central characters in the novel, the two sons and the daughter issueing from their bond. One of the sons grows into a singer of world class stature, while the other is tossed to and fro between the claims made on him by his brother as a fellow-musician, and by his sister as a fellow black person. After the tragic death of the mother, their scientist father is incapable of keeping his family on track, as he drifts off into an esoteric world of physics centring on the idea that time is directionless and that everything is present at the same time - a metaphor Powers takes just one step too far towards the end of the book. The singer brother eventually ditches his solocareer to join an early music group in Belgium, while the sister becomes a pro-black activist. The insurmountable problem of race is at the core of it all, and is elaborately dished out in the stories of no less than 4 generations. Add to that lots (lots!) of talk about music, and uncommon levels of musical accomplishment in so many characters as to defy believability; - and put all that against the backdrop of half a century of racial confusion in the US. Then, maybe, you may understand something of my feeling that this book is trying to deal with a few Big Themes too many for its own good.
Things are not helped by the very obvious desire of Powers to be profound and moving, an aim in which he is defeated by the way he lays it on way too thick. Sorry as I am to say it, page 630 came as somewhat of a relief, and his characters left me quite unmoved, even if his writing itself at times didn't.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
This is The Great American Novel
By Chris Rohmann
This is The Great American Novel, period. The only book I've bought multiple copies of, to give away. It's everything our poor dear country is about -- a masterpiece.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
This is why I LOVE reading, because of writers like Richard Powers.
By Yoli46
Brilliant. One of the best books I've ever read in my life.
I wanted to underline every passage, every sentence.
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