Keeping time is a natural theme for the novel, and Li bends it to her will, often flashing forward to reveal events in her characters’ futures ... We are acutely aware throughout the novel of the gulf between what these characters desire and what tragedies, major and minor, await them. That absence of chronological suspense keeps us firmly rooted in the moment ... Picks up directly from Li’s nonfiction, as if she were passing herself a baton — still carrying these themes, still rigorously thinking them through. We are lucky to be the beneficiaries of her process. I left this novel — her ninth work of fiction — keenly aware that I’d been in the presence of a world-class artist.
Wonderful and bewitching ... Li is in complete command of her complicated, probing narrative here ... It’s the kind of sui generis novel that doesn’t come around that often, just like the virtuosos whose young lives it explores.
With elegant symmetry and a cool, genteel prose style, Ms. Li tracks these parallel stories, exploring the duo’s worldly educations and the ruthless sacrifices to love and friendship they make in pursuit of their ambitions ... The novel is so doctrinaire about its pessimism that it mostly neglects the characters’ music. The moments are rare—and therefore gratefully encountered—when John and Adelaide are permitted to take pleasure in the 'pure joy' of their playing.
Well-crafted yet somewhat static ... A rich evocation of the Romantic Era, but its unsatisfying conclusion feels like a symphony without its final movement.
A story of tireless ambition told in the wake of implacable effacement. Its tragedy is foretold, but its pathos is no less moving, its verve no less astonishing ... The symphonic nature of this novel — the elaborate movements that eventually resolve — is rapturous ... Even Li’s digressions — which are legion — never feel digressive ... It’s that rare literary experience that puts us in the position of some ironical god powerful enough to hear these notes but too weak to do anything but sigh.
A masterful exploration of the tolls of ambition and expectations on gifted children and adults ... Ever rigorous and diligent, Li creates vivid cradle-to-grave portraits of her two protagonists ... [A] virtuoso writer.
Readers of Li will already know that she soars far above the well-meant strivings of lesser writers, occupying a luminous realm of her own. She has the craft that makes craft invisible, and the art that makes art itself her obsessive subject. In Music Against the Night the art is music, as perceived through the lives, and the real and hoped-for afterlives, of two musicians ... Music Against the Night is about the relationship between life and art; about what it means to sacrifice a life to art; and about what exactly is sacrificed, when such a sacrifice is made ... Li’s narration is unapologetically omniscient, but she has no use for pastiche ... Superb.
A rich world of music publishers and piano makers, prodigies and rivals, but the throughline of her beautiful, masterful novel is a poignant thread of mourning and loss.
Fascinating ... Sharp and thoughtfully rendered, Li’s novel reckons with the costs of artistic greatness on the families who make sacrifices to accommodate genius and the artists who fear being forgotten. It’s a remarkable achievement.
