What happens when two gifted musicians who are wrong for each other get married? In the first volume of what is being billed as the Nocturne trilogy, Yiyun Li presents one such couple by exploring the formative years of the Irish composer John Field (1782-1837) and the French pianist Adelaide Percheron (1790-1869). These musicians would later marry and have, according to history, a spectacularly unhappy union. This fine work explores their early individual experiences and, one assumes, sets up the tragedy of the marriage to come.
Li's surprising trip into Romantic-era storytelling shifts perspectives throughout. She starts with Field, born in Dublin, a prodigy who heard from everyone that he was destined to become the next Mozart. The story follows Field through his musical and emotional maturation, including his initial successful concerts and eventual passage to London. Percheron, meanwhile, was born in French India and orphaned at age three; her mother died shortly after childbirth, and her father was subsequently killed during the Siege of Pondicherry. Being an ambitious woman of her time is hard enough, but also working against her is her Pondicherry birth. The denizens of Paris look down upon her when she travels there in 1804 to pursue her passion for the pianoforte.
Li--a Pulitzer Prize winner for Things in Nature Merely Grow, her gut-wrenchingly poetic memoir about the suicides of her two teenage sons--relies more heavily on backstory and research in this novel than her other works. Nonetheless, readers fascinated by stories of musicians' early years and the forces that shape them will appreciate the music she makes with this delicate and heartfelt work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer