Title: The Music Makers
Author: James D Snyder
Publisher: Pharos Books
Pages: 264
My GoodReads Rating: 
Greta
lives with daughter, Heidi, a librarian and violinist, and son, Max, a car
mechanic and musician who aspires to make it big in the West and is working on
a way to escape. Greta invites Leo Strus, the janitor at the school where she
teaches, and a musician, to join them in playing folk songs to entertain people
on street corners on Sundays. They are the music makers.
When
winter sets in, the Music Makers need an indoors venue, and are led to a trade
union hall, which is ‘wired’. At first, they only sing folk songs and feel-good
music, but then Max, in a fit of passion, sings Wind of Change by The
Scorpions. This brings them to the attention of the Stasi and the KGB.
The
story is set in 1989 in East Germany.
WHAT I
LIKED:
Greta
is writing a book that the Stasi and ruling party would approve of, but it is
also a lesson in sarcasm. I particularly liked the excerpts, which are
bolstered with true examples from history.
The
writing of the larger book by the author combines the best of non-fiction into
the fictional telling of the characters’ lives. The very real developments on
the historical front are juxtaposed against the lives of ordinary people. We
learn how the playing of the music served to remind Germans about another time
before the War, how the demonstrators continued to protest safely.
We see
how slowly the desire for freedom begins to spread. I enjoyed the history
lesson about East Germany’s rejection of Western ideology and its fascination
for Western technology.
When
Max sings Wind of Change, presenting the lyrics, I had to stop reading and
listen to the song once again, after ages.
I
liked Max’s quote: …we may not be able to knock down or dig under the
wall, but we can make sound travel over it.
WHAT I
DID NOT LIKE: Nothing.
WHAT
DID NOT WORK FOR ME:
The
story employed different forms. It began as a letter, then became an interview
with the characters, excerpts from a book that one of the characters is
writing, and bits of historical accounts.
In the
letter, Greta Braun writes to her sister, Christa, who lives in the country
with her husband, Bruno, with a business idea. The business idea and the
characters Christa and Bruno were incidental to the story, and so the form
seemed forced as a means of bringing us readers up to speed. A kind of
story-so-far. Greta uses the letter to tell her sister, and us, about the
routine surveillance in the police state, the rhythms of life, the loss of
ownership to the state in a Communist society etc.
In
Chapter 2, the form changes to a character interview, with the author
conducting full interviews with five important characters, who we haven’t met
so far, although we know a little about two of them, Max and Heidi, Greta’s
kids. The other three characters, Gerhard Koln, Stasi officer, Vladimin
Pushkin, KGB officer, and Leo Strus, a janitor and musician, are totally new to
us.
It’s
not a commonly used technique. Authors do this generally outside the pages of
the book. Involving readers in this exercise drops the barrier between us. So
we end up getting a lot of the background information in one huge dump, but it
seems different because of the format.
In
Chapter 3, the action moves forward from April in Chapter 1 to May Day that
year, and the form changes to non-fiction writing. In between, there is another
form: Excerpts from Greta’s book, Lessons in Leadership.
There
was a mistake in the numbering. Lesson 7 was numbered 6 by mistake. Another
issue that I had with the writing was the change of tense from one paragraph to
another.
ALL
SAID AND DONE:
I was
quite young when history was being made, and I enjoyed this read.
(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)
