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A Life's Music

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A Life's Music
A Life’s Music

Taking a deeper look at a passage, pages 5-6, out of Andreï Makine’s book A Life’s Music, you get a real sense of his style and the appropriateness of its title. Makine shows his skills as a writer in this book, you read so much music in the book and when read out loud it is literally music to your ears. The book almost flows as you read it and so makes it a joy to read. He uses a lot of literary devices to give you this sense of music and flow; onomatopoeia, metaphor, smiles and adjectives.

In this passage, pages 5-6, Makine uses a vast amount of onomatopoeic words such as; ‘crunch’, ‘crackles’, ‘hisses’, ‘wail’, ‘whimperings’. He has them in the whole passage, as well as the book. Because of this Makine gives the book a sense of music, by this I mean that the book not only has onomatopoeic words and also reads like music, when read out loud, but also feels like music when read. Makine is so clever, he manages to make the book into music and thanks to this, you are completely and utterly engrosses into the book, once you have started reading it, you’ll not stop. Another show of his cleverness is his opening line of the book “I have just woken up, having dreamed of music.” (P.5 L.1)
Makine introduces us to the first chapter of his book with stating that he (unnamed character) has dreamed of music and from then on in the book is filled and consists of music. It is a very clever way of starting the book, the first line of the book and we are lead in with music and what a strange sentence, dreaming of music, one does not usually dream of music. Within the first two sentences you can depict the style of the book, music.

The music in this passage is not very a happy one, in fact it is rather depressing and rough; “Snore call out to one another(.)”, “The wail of an infant(.)”, “An ocean swell of sighs(.)” and “The wind wips(.)”. All of these quotations give you an image of a rather miserable place, not somewhere you would want to be. Makine uses

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