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    The Time of Our Singing
    The Time of Our Singing
    The Time of Our Singing
    Audiobook33 hours

    The Time of Our Singing

    Written by Richard Powers

    Narrated by Peter Jay Fernandez

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the Oprah's Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powers's 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 Black Philadelphian studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and—against all odds and their better judgment—they marry.

    They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped only in song. Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth grow up, however, during the civil rights era, coming of age in the violent 1960s, and living 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, devotes herself to community activism and repudiates the white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator of this generation-bridging tale, struggles to find himself and remain connected to them both.

    Richard Powers's 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.

    “The last novel where I rooted for every character, and the last to make me cry.”—Marlon James, Elle
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 9, 2018
    ISBN9781980017257
    The Time of Our Singing

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    Reviews for The Time of Our Singing

    4.5/5

    313 ratings17 reviews

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    • 5/5
      What makes this book great? Read it and find out. No, really. It fits our time exactly.
    • 5/5
      Along with Tony Hillerman's Navajo books, [THE TIME OF OUR SINGING]stands as another 'What race do you have to be to write a story?' - or, to sing...?
    • 5/5
      Writing a review for this book was difficult considering our current national climate. Is it fair to bring a child into this world, knowing full well his or her life will be an uphill, hurtful, and potentially lethal journey? With Roe V. Wade being overturned, this is a burning question for me. In The Time of Our Singing it is 1939 and David Strom, a German Jewish white man meets and falls in love with an African American young lady from Philadelphia. Should they have an interfaith relationship? Could they succeed in a biracial marriage? What hardships would their children have in a world consumed with the hate and segregation and World War II? Is it blind faith to assume their offspring will thrive beyond race with the help of music? So many questions that kept me reading all 600+ pages to the very end. Time of Our Singing also tells the story of David and Delia's children. Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth come of age during the early Civil Rights movement and the turmoil of racial unrest follows them through adulthood. Jonah and Joseph go the route of music and fame, while Ruth veers violently in the opposite direction. Over time, they cannot ignore their color or where they came from. Through music comes recognition and redemption.What I liked the most was the clever writing in that there are hints of a disaster: a photograph that has escaped being burned. What a black boy from Chicago doesn't know about deep south segregation. How hatred can burn like an inferno until it explodes in disaster.
    • 5/5
      One of the blurbs at the end of my edition says "The best black novel since Beloved has just been written, and the author is white". This more or less sums up my feelings about this book. I read the whole thing assuming that the author was black. I was, and am still, very enthusiastic about it. Through a series of back and forth between two generations, this book explores a variety of experiences of being an outsider in America, from the post-war years to the contemporary. The basic premise is to follow two brothers, born in the 60s from a former German Jewish physicist and an African-American woman, united by a common love – and practice – of music and the project to raise post-race children in a still heavily racist society. Now, I feel a bit embarrassed about this. Is what I read a good account of the kind of ostracism and discrimination black people faced and still face, or a white person's reconstruction of it which happens to fit my own representation of a situation I never experienced (I am a white person in Europe)? I actually looked up for instance of cultural appropriation criticism about this book, but did not find anything. This aside, it is an extremely rich book and a fantastic travel through these years, both for American society and the music world. It is also one of the very few books where I would have welcomed a companion. It should definitely have a playlist, to get a glimpse of the extraordinary musical universe which defines most of the protagonists. A more usual companion would also be useful, since the book very often alludes to people and events that are landmarks in US black history, but may be difficult to piece out for a European like me. Names I can look up on Wikipedia, but I was able to understand a mention to the Attica Prison riot only because I happen to have read Paul Auster's 1, 2, 3, 4. I am sure I missed many other events which have an influence on the story.
    • 5/5
      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 deity which doubts not only its own existence but ANY possible benefit as our creation as an homage.

      Each year around this time I begin to think of the novels I'd love to reread. I usually don't.
    • 4/5
      Classic Powers. This was the last of his I hadn't read, saw it on the shelf one night and decided it was time. The main mark against this novel is that it is just too long - there are almost no 700 page stories that wouldn't be stronger at 450. Much like the later Orfeo, the various technical musical interludes are completely lost on me and may as well be in Swedish. Unlike Orfeo, my musical ignorance didn't rise to the level of completely undermining the story. There is enough otherwise going on that I was enthralled. Given the events of the past few months in this country, I ache at how relevant this novel remains.
    • 4/5
      OK, dit is zonder twijfel groots, een boek dat de superlatieven verdient die hier op deze site al rijkelijk rondgestrooid zijn, want dit is een roman met heel wat vlees aan het been. Een mooie, op sommige momenten zelfs heel ontroerende familie-saga. Knap ingepast in een bepaald tijdskader (de VS tussen 1939 en 1993) en dus ook een Great American Novel, die me zelfs een beetje deed denken aan American Pastoral van Philip Roth (met ook een meisje dat de radicale weg op gaat). Vooral handelend over de rassenproblematiek, vanuit zwart en gekleurd standpunt; het lijkt me zelfs de beste Afro-Amerikaanse roman sinds Invisible Man van Ralph Ellison, en verrassend genoeg geschreven door een blanke. En er is zelfs een wetenschappelijk-filosofische lijn in het verhaal, met het thema van het relatieve van de tijd (gisteren is nu, maar ook morgen, en morgen was gisteren al; hetgeen ook weerspiegeld wordt in het voortdurend over en weer springen van het verhaal in de tijd). En dan is er nog de muziek, de muziek die alomtegenwoordig is, zelfs bij de minst onbeduidende personages in dit verhaal; voor minder muzikaal onderlegden zoals ik is het af en toe doorbijten want Powers gaat wel heel ver in de technicaliteit van de zang en muziek; en je hebt ook best wel wat notie van de muziekgeschiedenis nodig; maar als verbindend element werkt het wel en ik kan me inbeelden dat het voor echte melomanen dit boek wellicht voortdurend genieten is. Powers weeft al deze elementen tot een boeiend en vernuftig opgebouwd geheel, dat bijna tot aan het eind de aandacht gaande houdt (ondanks de soms heel gecondenseerde schrijfstijl) en regelmatig verrast, en ook niet belerend overkomt. Want dat vind ik mooi aan zijn benadering van dit verhaal: het is geen aanklacht voor of tegen mensen met een bepaalde huidskleur, of voor of tegen bepaalde soms radicale keuzes die mensen maken; integendeel bijna alle personages zijn zo subtiel getekend dat je niet anders kan dan begrip opbrengen voor hun handelingen en opinies. Zelfs voor de hyper egocentrische Jonah die zoveel aandacht naar zich toetrekt, en ogenschijnlijk de meest succesvolle van de Strom-familie lijkt te zijn, kan je niet anders dan sympathie koesteren, want uiteindelijk blijkt hij nog de meest tragische figuur van deze roman. Toch kan ik niet helemaal voor de volle vijf sterren gaan. Zeker naar het einde van de roman worden de verhaallijnen iets te kunstmatig, verschijnen een aantal figuren op het toneel (bijvoorbeeld nichtje Delia) die niet helemaal geloofwaardig overkomen, en wordt het praat-gehalte iets te hoog. Het lijkt een beetje alsof Power een uiterste krachtinspanning moet doen om zijn verhaal neer te leggen.Ook begon het voortdurend verwijzen naar “de relatieve tijd” af en toe op de zenuwen te werken. Deze spielereien zijn aardig en leveren af en toe mooie effecten op in de verhaallijn, maar het magisch-realistisch gehalte van het pseudo gefilosofeer was me soms wel iets te hoog.Maar niet kniezen: dit is en blijft een grote roman, die ik van harte aanbeveel! Ik plaats de volgende Powers alvast op mijn leeslijst.
    • 1/5
      1/3 through. Gave up. Tedious. Uninteresting.
    • 5/5
      One of my favorite novels. Great subtle twist near the end.
    • 5/5
      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 diminished as a black singer, Joseph, his accompanist and the narrator who sees himself as a lesser musician, and Ruth, a talented singer as a child who is darker than her brothers and abandons music for a life working to help black people with a husband tainted by his association with the Black Panthers. The family story is complex and is interwoven with the tragic history of racial struggles and conflicts in America, spiced by a liberal sprinkling of scientific ideas. Powers' control of these many strands is masterly, and the whole is very satisfying and surprisingly readable given the complexity of some of the ideas. I couldn't help thinking that the ending, for all its formal elegance, did not quite ring as true as much of what preceded it (I can't say more about that without spoiling). Maybe not quite the best book I have read this year, but it did come very close.
    • 5/5
      As a non native English reader i found the use of language very enjoyable. It was also an eye-opener for me that blacks still face so many difficulties in the US.
    • 5/5
      This book is already pretty good, and I imagine it would have been even better if I wasn't such an ignoramus when it comes to vocal music. Every part (and there are a lot) that was about various pieces, composers, styles, and performances went completely over my head. I looked up a fair number of the pieces mentioned, which was an enjoyable task, but come on, I'm tone deaf, that only went so far.I still found this to be a very intriguing, thoughtful, interesting read. It's a rambling, non-chronological family story, a Jewish émigré mathematician and a classically-trained African American vocalist raise three children. The bulk of the book looks at the experiences of the three - all music prodigies; the oldest becomes a vocal phenom, the youngest turns to social activism, and the middle child narrates this story. In a quick one sentence summary, it's about issues of belonging and not belonging based on race in the United States. I loved how ideas of math and science were threaded through the book - it sounds like that should be clunky, but it's really handled so well that it feels very natural to the world of the story. The hook at the end, where it all comes around together, had me saying (to myself) "Oh! Oh! OH!" on the subway during the morning commute. (To be honest, the book completely had me on this point ... and then kept on explaining it a little more, so it could have even ended a few pages sooner, IMHO.) There are a very aspects where I'm not really sure I was buying what was going on. The narrator, and most everyone else, seems very concerned about the happiness of the oldest brother ... but I never felt 100% certain what all the concern was about. The brother is an odd bird, but didn't seem to be needing anything in particular by way of attention or intervention. A lot of this is a novel about inaction -- there were plenty of times when I was thinking "but why don't you DO something about it?" but ultimately that didn't take away from the excellent writing and crafting of this book.
    • 5/5
      I'm afraid to review this book. I loved it so much, I don't want to recommend it to people I like because I'm afraid they might not love it as much and I'd think less of them for it. It took me three months to read this book. Not because I'm a slow reader but because I didn't want it to end. I was so thoroughly caught up in the characters and their story, I wanted them to stay part of my life as long as possible. I loved this book because the author really gets music and can write about what it does to you like no one I've ever read before. I don't want to say the words sing, because that's not really it. But the words make me hear the music. Good heavens. It's hard to explain. I also loved it because it's about race and prejudice and how far we sometimes think we've come, but how far we still have to go. Not in a preachy way, but in a "this is what life is like and this is what it could be" way. I totally suck at writing this review. I can't do it justice. Let me just say that I would definitely read this book again, and I now want to read everything else the author has ever written. It's really brilliant. And I didn't even mention the cool physics that run through the story! Just freaking brilliant. But if you don't love it, please don't tell me. I don't want to know.
    • 4/5
      A Nancy Pearl fave. The author brings intelligence and passionate interest in the sciences and humanities together in this story of a mixed race family during a time where life was impossible for mixed race people. It was worth reading, though a little lengthy. The book was about science, race, civil rights and relationships.
    • 5/5
      The Time of Our SingingRichard PowersFSG 2003This is only my second outing with Powers but it's left me wanting to go on a binge. The first book I read, 'The Gold Bug Variations', was entirely by happenstance. It was a gift from my librarything secret santa whose name I've forgotten but to whom I'm deeply grateful. In that novel he used one of the story elements, Bach's Goldberg Variations, to structure the entire novel. He does the same thing in this novel telling the story of three generations of Daleys' struggle to come to terms with family, race and identity, by twisting time, the specialist of physicist David Strom, into a labyrinth. The novel is narrated from the family's center, by Joseph, the middle child of the middle generation and ripples out in time from him. Joseph is the child t David Strom, a German Jew who has barely escaped Nazi Germany, and Delia Delaney, a child of the Black upper class. These two, bound together by music and hope for a colorless future, try to raise their children, Jonah, Joseph and Ruth, for that future by raising them beyond race by forcing them to take no identity but the one each chooses for him(her) self. Though the children don't see it, it's a powerful gift from their parents. Mankind has long recognized that to name a thing is to have power over it. Adam named creation and was given dominion over it, Calaph gifted Turnandot with his name and in doing so gave her the power of life and death over him, Rumpelstiltskin was vanquished by his name. Delia and David recognize what will take their children decades to see, that naming one's own self is the ultimate power. All three children, like their first and best teacher, their mother, are musically gifted, the eldest and perhaps the youngest, are prodigies. Jonah has the most success at carving out an identity for himself and is constantly revising and recreating that self. To be honest, he reminds me of Madonna, but with substantially more substance. Ruth, the youngest, seems more intent on vehemently denying that any part of her is white (technically she's more white than black) than on getting any true sense of self, going so far as to join the Black Panthers. Joseph, the narrator, defines himself as brother, to his siblings. The outside pressure on them is tremendous, from both family, Delia's family and Ruth herself, and friends and colleagues, to define themselves as Black and behave accordingly. (Though the novel is set in the post WWII era, I couldn't help but recall all the debate early in the Obama campaign about whether he was 'Black' enough or too 'Black' to be elected and wonder what Powers made of that debate). Added to this pressure is the need to reconcile themselves to the tremendous grief caused by the early death of their mother. Opposite the sibling triptych is their father David, a physicist who has been set adrift in time. My only major peeve with the novel is the fact that we don't get to see more of him. I'd trade David for 20 Ruths any day. His family (most of it) has been wiped out during the Holocaust and he himself has suffered tremendous prejudice both in Europe and the US, but we learn very little about it. Yet in spite of this he maintains a heartbreaking innocence and humanity, this is a man who still converses with his dead wife going so far as to pour coffee for her. David is the only truly color blind character, he sees only time twisting itself in knots, each person traveling through at his own speed. It is his obsession with sending messages down the strands that ties all themes of this dense and complex novel together. Powers manages all this gracefully while at the same time producing some truly moving prose (and some not so much, to be honest.) Definitely worth reading.
    • 5/5
      Few books manage to penetrate the soul, but this is one. It is hard to believe that anyone who reads Powers' evocation of a musical genius will emerge entirely unchanged. His ability to describe, engagingly and meaningfully, the almost spiritual qualities of a remarkable musical performance, is breath-taking. To be able to do so many times is remarkable. The back-drop to this account of a musical prodigy is the powerfully destructive force of race hatred in the States. Many books jostle for the title of Great American Novel; this one effortlessly makes the grade.
    • 5/5
      When you emerge on the other side of Richard Powers' operatic novel The Time of Our Singing, you'll be shaking from exhilaration or exasperation. Either way, you'll be exhausted. Make no mistake, Powers' novel about race and classical music is big—not only in its more than 600 word-dense pages, but also in the breadth and depth of the themes the author attempts to contain between the two covers. We could expect nothing less from Powers whose other novels tackled such unlikely subjects as molecular genetics (The Goldbug Variations), cognitive computers (Galatea 2.2), chemicals, capitalism and cancer (Gain) and a Beirut hostage whose story merges with that of computer programmers working on a virtual-reality chamber (Plowing the Dark). Powers is an intellectual grab-bag; and though at times he comes across as an evangelist for the pocket-protector set, The Time of Our Singing should gain him a larger audience. It's his most accessible work to date, comparable to Don DeLillo's multi-dimensioned Underworld. The Time of Our Singing follows four generations of the Strom family as it makes its way through the twentieth century. Delia, a young black woman studying classical music, and Joseph, a German Jewish refugee physicist, meet on the Washington Mall during Marian Anderson's prejudice-defying 1939 concert. Both are as enraptured by each other as they are the soprano's voice warbling from the Lincoln Memorial. Against the country's prevailing attitude and Delia's disgruntled parents, they fall in love and marry. Their three children—Jonah, Joseph and Ruth, each progressively darker in skin tone—grow up in a house whose patriarch spends his days trying to formulate a theory about relativity and "dual time" and whose matriarch schools them in song designed to liberate them from the shackles of this country's history. Delia and Joseph want to raise their children "beyond race" but unwittingly turn their entire family into an experiment which eventually fractures the safe world they've tried to construct. The youngest child, Ruth, joins the Black Panther during the turbulent '60s, while the two lighter-skinned boys find success in the white man's world of classical music. Jonah, whose tenor voice is "so pure, it could make heads of state repent," takes his talents to a music conservatory, then later to a career recording early music. Joseph, his accompanist, is swept along in the wake of his older brother. He narrates much of the novel, serving as our tour guide through the family's opera-worthy turbulence. His talents at the keyboard are just as good as Jonah's vocal chords, but he quietly smothers his ambition in favor of fostering his brother's career. It's sad and agonizing for the reader to witness Joseph's self-suppression, but it also serves as the novel's most dramatic focal point. The novel moves restlessly across history like a needle skipping back and forth across a scratched record, opening in 1961 as Jonah sings Dowland's "Time Stands Still." Throughout the book, moments are paused in the rush of history. Powers keeps circling back to key events in the family timeline as if the characters were caught in a kinked time warp. "Prophecy just remembers in advance what the past has long been saying," Joseph writes. "All we ever do is fulfill the beginning." Powers neatly (though not effortlessly) loops the novel backward in its final pages as we watch past and present merge. Midway through the odyssey, after Jonah's professional debut, the New York Times calls him "one of the finest Negro recitalists this country has ever produced," a review that rankles him with its backhanded racism. He turns down an offer by the Metropolitan Opera to play a part referred to only as "the Negro." Jonah wants to believe he's breaking barriers like his Black Panther sister, but 1960s America—at least the white cultured crust where he dwells—keeps shoving him back into its neatly-dimensioned race box. "I won't be the Caruso of black America. The Sidney Poitier of opera," he insists to Joseph. He wants to be "something other than hue-man." Such is the thorny racial thicket Powers navigates in The Time of Our Singing. The effort of cutting his way through the bramble is often too loud and obvious. The high points of civil rights history—Anderson's concert, Emmett Till's murder, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, the Watts riots, the L.A. riots, the Million Man March—are all there as if Powers was writing with a checklist beside the computer. And that's when he's not objectifying what's happening to his characters with coffee, cream, and salt and pepper shakers—a painfully clunky trick that stands out in writing that often vibrates, hums, sizzles and explodes like an out-of-control firework—like this paragraph describing Marian Anderson's concert in Washington D.C.: The crowd condenses. It's standing room only, flowing the length of the reflecting pool and down West Potomac Park. The floor of this church is grass. The columns of this nave are budding trees. The vault above, an Easter sky. The deeper Delia wades in toward the speck of grand piano, the stickpin corsage of microphones where her idol will stand, the thicker this celebration. The press of massed desire lifts and deposits her, helpless, a hundred yards upstream, facing the Tidal Basin. Schoolbook cherry trees swim up to fill her eyes, their blossoms mad. They wave the dazzle of their pollen bait and, in this snowstorm of petals, fuse with every Easter when they ever unfolded their promissory color. Powers is attempting something big here—a book that teems and buzzes like a crowd on the Washington Mall—and he's grasping at many different strands (race, family politics, music, the physics of time and space), trying to tie everything together between two covers. By its exhilarating, exasperating, exhausting conclusion, it's difficult to say whether Powers himself is able to reach a conclusion about race relations in America, but one thing's for certain: for more than 600 pages he sings beautiful harmony in voices that weave and thread like helixes of tone.