Figures of the past find new life in Yiyun Li’s saga following two musicians as they mature, study, travel, love, grieve, and, above all, chase their ambitions.
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.
