Yiyun Li won the Pulitzer Prize for THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW, a memoir about her younger son’s suicide only a few years after her older son’s suicide. She herself tried to take her own life twice in 2012. As more attention is being paid to mental health issues, it makes sense that her books are helping readers around the world deal with some fairly heavy topics. 

Li’s latest work is MUSIC AGAINST THE NIGHT, a novel that is being called a historical epic, yet the most intimate experiences of the characters’ lives simply jump off the backdrop of the Romantic era. In Dublin in the late 1700s, a child prodigy fashions himself as the next Mozart. Ten years later, in French India, an orphan girl discovers that she is a gifted pianist.

Based on real-life musicians John Field and Adelaide Percheron, the story spans across Russia, France, Ireland and India in pursuit of how a revolution of the times, in the arts and in society, affects the lives and livelihoods of these two masters. Their ambition and success, coupled with their friendship and love, loom over excessive loss, the quandary of their legacies, and the unstoppable process of time and change.

"MUSIC AGAINST THE NIGHT is a powerful testament to the prolonged history of hope and creation and the sense that, regardless of change, humanity continues to shape and flower great designs of good for generations to come."

Li is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, but her writing is anything but academic. Like Disneyland's end-of-the-night fireworks, her characters splash across the page and elicit the most visceral reactions from readers. It is a joy to dive deeply into the rich tapestry she has woven here, and every word about these musicians evokes the same response we would enjoy if music was released every time we turned a page. Her work is musical and compelling to the point that it will be hard to wrest yourself out of her elegant prose.

John and Adelaide fulfill not just the most lofty ambitions of artists but the most base ones as well. How will they be remembered when they are no longer writing music or treading this earth? They question the ideas of family and societal standards as the world around them spins into newness at every turn: “There was no point in questioning the logic of the grown-ups, so keen to punish anyone who wanted to work things out for herself. They spoke without thinking, and repeated themselves through mere habit, as men smoked cigarettes or women chewed betel nuts. Always Adelaide felt compelled to think, but once she did her thinking, there was little that was wise for her to say aloud. Then she would be scolded as a shy or moody child.” 

Striving for autonomy from the world at large and those who try to control them personally makes MUSIC AGAINST THE NIGHT feel like a book written about young people today. 

“The road from hope to fantasy to disappointment and despair is a well-traveled one.” As the story of John and Adelaide moves smoothly between their separate childhoods and their conjoined adulthoods, Li never strays from the realities of the world during this time of great flux and transition. Surely, she must have been considering our current turmoil when she chose the Romantic era to examine, so it is a very modern tale of age-old issues. Sometimes we can take great comfort in experiencing the tumult of another time while making us believe that there is a day beyond this era that will present better times. 

MUSIC AGAINST THE NIGHT is a powerful testament to the prolonged history of hope and creation and the sense that, regardless of change, humanity continues to shape and flower great designs of good for generations to come.