This might be the best novel I've ever read, and it's not even a novel. Not only is this book an excellent cultural history of fin de siècle Vienna, modernist Paris, Jazz age New York, Weimar Berlin, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Golden Age Hollywood, and all the other great artistic epochs of the century: it is above all a Proustian series of portraits of the century's greatest composers done over time. The chapter on music in the Soviet Union, for example, focuses on Shostakovich as he fearfully tries to get on Stalin's good side, yet encodes his music with hints of resistance. 100 pages and 20 years later, with Stalin long since dead, we meet Shostakovich again, still composing, still reckoning with Stalin's ghost.
— Jimmy H.