Acclaimed writer Yiyun Li returns to the show to talk about her new novel, Music Against the Night, with co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell. Li explains how she first became interested in fictionalizing the lives of married musicians John Field and Adelaide Percheron and reflects on the limits, challenges, and opportunities of conducting historical research for fiction. She discusses the role grandparents play in her characters’ lives and how older mentors can shape an artist’s personal and professional growth. She also shares how she chose to structure two wide-ranging life stories within one novel, and how her characters illustrate disparities in opportunity among equally talented peers. Li considers how her characters define failure and success, and how these definitions affect John and Adelaide, neither of whom achieve fame. She reads from Music Against the Night.
To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, Emily Farris, and Sydney Perkins.
Yiyun Li
Music Against the Night • Encountering the Past in “Music Against the Night” | The New Yorker • Things in Nature Merely Grow • The Book of Goose • Wednesday’s Child • Must I Go • Where Reasons End • Kinder Than Solitude • Gold Boy, Emerald Girl • The Vagrants • A Thousand Years of Good Prayers • Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
Others
A Life and Times: Fryderyk Chopin | Dr Alan Walker • A Confession and Other Religious Writings | Leo Tolstoy • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 5, Episode 42: Yiyun Li on Complicated Friendships Real and Imagined
EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH YIYUN LI
V. V. Ganeshananthan: [Regarding] research that you’ve done, John Field is a real person. So is Adelaide Percheron, also known as Percherette. So, what brought these historical characters to your attention? I know you mentioned Tolstoy. When did you realize that these were the people you wanted to write about?
Yiyun Li : I just did sort of a long reflection on that process. So I did meet John Field in Tolstoy’s autobiography, and John Field was Tolstoy’s mother’s music master. And when I was reading the biography, I did not know John Field. It’s very odd when you read a Russian novel, a Russian book, and all of a sudden, you run into an Anglicized name: John Field. I have never known John Field. The Irish are familiar with John Field, but outside Ireland, I think John Field is not a known name. So I did a little research, read a very slim biography, half of which was just musical scores. And I think what interested me was that Percherette, in the biography, only appeared a few times. Maybe no more than five passages. So Percherette, she’s the wife. She’s an important artist, but she was barely mentioned in the biography. So I thought Percherette would, for sure, make a good novel. And so the fact that I thought Percherette and John would make a good novel together—that’s where it started. And clearly one novel is not long enough to put everything in, so we just said, “Well, three novels. Why not?”
Whitney Terrell: So you’ve decided that. That’s a settled deal? Have you already started on the others?
YL: Yes, I’m halfway through the second novel, and, because as you said, in this novel we did see them in their marriage briefly. We did see them die both of their deaths. But most of the novel is about their childhood and youths. So, it’s a very traditional form. A three-book form: childhood (even Tolstoy’s childhood), youth, adulthood. So, I just borrowed that form and thought I would do three novels around childhood/youth, adulthood, death.
WT: I was going to ask you: This novel is mostly about their youths running parallel to each other before they meet. So you’re just thinking about it as a larger work?
YL: Yes, their actual marriage and their artistic pursuit. I think that’s important for me. This book is just their upbringing, and they’re growing up to become musicians, and they have to be real musicians.
WT: There’s a lot more information about John Field than Adelaide. So, how did you find out information about her?
YL: There’s no information to be found about her. It’s all in my head.
WT: Oh, that’s the best.
YL: It’s all made up about this person. It’s very funny. In John Field’s biography, I said there were only five mentions of her. There was one funny mention saying ‘she is a flirtatious young woman.’ So the contemporary of John Field said, ‘Now if you set a top hat over a stick, that’s enough for this young woman to start flirting.’
And I just thought, that’s a very good description of a young woman. But for me, it’s just because there was nothing about her anywhere. We did not know anything about her. Just to think about the trajectory of her life coming from Pondicherry, even just as a young woman traveling from Pondicherry all the way to Moscow. That’s an epic novel.
Percherette’s contemporaries are the characters in Jane Austen’s novels, and those girls just live in their home and sometimes go to the nextdoor neighbor’s home. Once in a while, they travel to Bath or London. Now that’s the contemporary world they are sharing. So I just thought Pesharet is epic in that way—that she’s living this life that’s entirely foreign to most women her age. And I think that’s enough for a novel.
VVG: So when you’re thinking about doing the research—and correct me if I’m wrong here—[you’ve talked about] research and the ways in which you seek to limit it, because you don’t want it to [in a sense] take over. Sometimes, because it’s time-consuming. I’ve had a student quote this back to me from you. They say, “Yiyun Li says!” And well, it’s so interesting to hear you say, ‘You know, if you want to write three novels about the piano, you have to take piano.” And this book is so infused with the careful knowledge of someone who has set their fingers to the keyboard—the favoring of the fourth finger or what have you. So, you chose to take piano for three years, but you presumably did not undertake an epic journey from Pondicherry to Moscow. Where do you draw the line?
YL: That’s a very good question and Sugi, I must correct. I think your students may have quoted me wrong.
VVG: [Gasps audibly.] Are you listening, children?
YL: I’m fairly certain I was quoting Edward P. Jones. Because I remember Edward P. Jones, when he talked about researching for The Known World, he said he checked out all these books from the library, but he did not read a single book because he realized everything was in his brain. He said, “If you write one thing wrong about this county, everybody will come to say you got the history wrong.” And he said, “Why not just make up a county myself?” So I think I might have just quoted Edward P. Jones.
WT: I’ve heard him say that.
YL: Yes, I do a lot of research, but learning to play piano is a big investment in research. And reading, as you said, where do I draw the line? Even if I go to Pondicherry today, I would not have seen Pondicherry in Percherette’s time.
WT: Sure.
YL: Even if I travel there, I’m not traveling by boat, right? And now we fly. So I think it’s helpful that I read a lot of writings done by her contemporaries. I would read an English woman’s travelogue from England all the way to India, like around the Cape in 1800 or 1801, so exactly the same time. And then you get to see the things through the locals’ eyes or through the times. When I do research, I rarely read contemporaries’ writing about the past because those are digested information and summarized, and I usually just go for books nobody reads. I have gone through many books nobody has ever heard of. For instance, the musician knew a little music, and his biggest bragging point was he had tuned more bells in his church than anybody else. So you just read those people and see what music meant for people at that time. So that’s my research. Always just read old books. I must—I must!—correct the record because I’ve done so much research.
Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Emily Farris. Photograph of Yiyun Li by Hannah Yoon.