Music in literature is having a big boom right now, exploring the life, creativity, and torments of musicians in fiction. Check out one of these recent novels to get your music fix on the page!
Yiyun Li’s latest novel (and Peak Pick!) Music Against the Night uses the true story of 18th century married musicians John and Adelaide Field to craft a twinned biographical adventure of prodigy, ambition, and the limits of genius. John Field grew up in Ireland, groomed by his father and grandfather to become the next Mozart, and was given every opportunity to excel on the pianoforte. Adelaide Percheron, nicknamed Percherette, was half a world away in French colonial India, also drawn to the pianoforte, but with far less access given her status as a woman, an orphan, and of mixed background. Though we know the two will meet in Moscow, the focus remains on their individual journeys towards music, success, and cementing their places in society.
Not one, but TWO current Peak Picks are literary fiction about pianists, with Barbara Kingsolver’s Partita rounding out the duet. A phone call from her past shocks Livia, once a prodigy at a music conservatory, now a middle-aged farmer’s wife and piano teacher. The phone call, from a socialist ex-boyfriend during her conservatory days, takes the story back in time. As the story moves between past and present timelines, it becomes clear that Livia’s secrets remain unresolved.
Peruvian novelist and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s final novel, I Give You My Silence, was published posthumously in English this year, after its 2023 publication in Spanish. Translated by Adrian Nathan West, it’s largely about Peruvian criollo music, focused on Toño Azpilcueta, a scholar of the music, who is struggling after losing his job. After attending a private performance of criollo guitarist Lalo Molfino then learning of Molfino’s death, Azpilcueta works to publish a book highlighting the musician and his genre.
For a darker portrayal of the mind of a musician, The Minimalist by Kailee Pedersen takes readers into one composer’s descent into madness. Just before the death of celebrated composer Ryder Wakefield, he asked his young protégée Mia to finish his work-in-progress. Mia attempts to do so, while reckoning with extreme trauma, questions of identity, and the sacrifice required to do right by Wakefield. Tense, disorienting, and haunting, this one is for fans of Black Swan and Tár.
Continuing with elements of horror, Ecuadorian author Mónica Ojeda’s Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun, translated from Spanish by Sarah Booker, “delivers an intense and remarkable polyphonic hymn to the consoling and destructive power of music.” (Publishers Weekly) Set at an experimental music festival at the base of an active volcano, the rotating narration of festival goers submit to the dark pulse of the music.
Little Wonder by Sophie Chen Keller is a more heartwarming portrayal of the devotion present in both a life dedicated to music and the parent-child relationship. Song, a food delivery worker in rural China, will do anything for her son River, a piano prodigy, including bringing him to Beijing for an opportunity to study with a renowned teacher. They travel there during the Lunar New Year and get separated in the crowds, taking them each on a unique journey.
If this post or these books have inspired you to pursue your own musical journey, we have Music Practice Rooms at the Central Library that you can reserve!
And keep an eye out for acclaimed novelist Percival Everett’s (James, Erasure) March 2027 release, Serious Music.
~posted by Jane S.