Literature – The Book-Butterfly

Yiyun Li: Music Against the Night | Things in Nature Merely Grow

By the time my students get to the middle of their grade one book in piano, they will already know what a nocturne is; a night song, an expressive piece that often evokes the close of day. By the time they get to grade two, they will be introduced to Chopin, the composer who ensured a place for the nocturne in every classical pianist’s fingertips.

Music Against the Night tells the story of a prodigy touted to be the next Mozart by his family, the 18th century Irish virtuoso, John Field, who first conjured the nocturne, but who endures as a mere footnote on a Chopin biography. It is also about Adelaide Percheron, another prodigy in French India, who would fight her way to Europe where she would cross paths with John Field, and whose extraordinary life would provide the story with an ingenious feminist streak, but who would have sadly remained a footnote of a footnote, if not for this book.

This reader is mindblown by Field’s milieu, which Yiyun Li reanimates so masterfully! Encounters with Beethoven, Haydn, Czerny, Clementi, and Clara Wieck-Schumann (who was trained in the John Field Method), pepper the novel. Yiyun Li recalls a passage from War and Peace where Countess Rostova requests a musician to, “Play me my favorite nocturnes by Master John Field.” Possibly Tolstoy’s personal tribute to Field, his mother’s music teacher.

In a clever trick with the novel’s non-linear form, John and Adelaide are apart for almost the entire book, and it ends with their meeting. The author, known for her stoic clarity, rejects melodrama and writes life’s tragedies with straightforward language. But I realized that one should not be deceived; it is only at the last sentence where everything will come rushing at you, leaving you with a sustained ache that lasts as long as the strains of a nocturne on your heart.

It takes one as acquainted with darkness as Yiyun Li to perceive through the music that, oftentimes, nocturnes were invoked by their composers as music not necessarily about the night, but against the night, against the abyss. Because as she and her characters very well understand, there is music, and outside of that, silent darkness.

Although I would argue that this book is a work of sophisticated polyphony as it explores intricate themes such as the pressures that come with being a prodigy, the commodification of music that seems to be discordant with artistry, the lure of fame and the lust for recognition, and the personal sacrifices one must make to pursue a career in music, it is still a nocturne in the way the purity of its melodic lines float above everything else, and it is very much a nocturne in the sense that Yiyun Li wrote this as her personal music against the abyss.

To paraphrase a line from the book: What is art for, if not to count, mark, and endure time?

In Music Against the Night, Clementi tells John Field, “But we must pay attention to the biographies of great musicians. Why is that, John?” To which the young John answered, “That’s how I can understand their music.”

To fully grasp a musical opus, classical musicians are often required to do a research on the piece and the composer before a performance. I have carried on this habit from music to literature.

Grateful to a dear friend for lending me her copy of Things in Nature Merely Grow that profoundly informed my understanding of why Yiyun Li had to write about nocturnes, and about the fraught lives of John Field and Adelaide Percheron. I’ve stayed away from Yiyun Li’s work fearing that she would write about the kind of sadness that would suck me in. Little did I know that she insists on life! Believes that, “Life is still to be lived, inside tragedies, outside tragedies, and despite tragedies.” This book transcends description. A review won’t do it justice, and I highly recommend it as a companion read to Music Against the Night.

Barbara Kingsolver: Partita

A Bach Partita is an essential part of a pianist’s repertoire. It is often the first requirement for a classical pianist’s solo recital or audition. But partitas are not what pianists would instinctively pull out from their bag of tricks when asked to play for an audience unfamiliar with classical music. Although extremely demanding, set against a piece composed in the 20th century or Romantic period, a partita would appear underwhelming to the untrained ear. But these partitas, these pieces of understated elegance, these pieces that instill restraint and timelessness, actually contain the foundations of pianistic education; from voicing, to phrasing, to breathing, to relishing counterpoints instead of fighting them, to ascertaining one’s balance, to finding one’s way and eventually arriving at the warm embrace, the sought-after resolution… in short, the Bach partitas teach one about life.

And that is perhaps why, out of all the piano compositions that were meaningful to Livia Bohusz in the story, Kingsolver chose to call the book “Partita”.

As a small-town pianist, there was so much to relate to about the seeming out-of-placeness of classical music in such a setting and in such a life. As someone who was scarred the most by someone whom I once thought was perfect for me, there was even more to resonate with. As someone whose greatest fears involve injuring one’s hands, I wondered for most of the novel if I would ever recover from it.

Surprised by the details presented in the book that, more often than not, only pianists are privy to, I was amazed by the profound level of research that Kingsolver devoted to Partita. Only to find out that she studied classical piano on a scholarship before changing her major to biology. Now I’m even more amazed that it was her lived experience with music that made this story so real and so tangible.

Partita is not only about art: It asks for whom art is and what art is for. Partita is not only about life: It asks whether we allow its difficulties to derail us from seeking that hopeful resolution. Partita is, thankfully, not saccharine about love: It only reveals that perfection and idealism have nothing to do with it. Above all, Partita is about hope: Something we all need these days.

Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo

Placed slightly above the complete hardbound series of The Hardy Boys, Dumas used to sit on my older brother’s part of the shelf in the room we shared as children. (Why I turned out to be the more adventurous adult is the mystery.)

But now, Dumas has found me. And maybe it’s better this way. Rather than finding an impressionable child decades ago, who probably would have reenacted getting inside a sack pretending to be a corpse to escape Château d’If, he has found a more discerning adult who delights in its treasure trove of literary references.

Its initial chapters inspired a new reading project of tallying the books I’ll subsequently encounter that allude or refer to A Thousand and One Nights or The Odyssey (between Scheherazade, mother threader of stories in the East, and Penelope, mother un-threader of storytelling in the West).

This one is blatantly steeped in the influence of the former, but as I read on, I realized that the influence of the latter and the Greek tragedies is more subtle, but just as ubiquitous! (Spoiler: There is a Medea hiding in Heloise Villefort!)

This book, and reading classics in general, reminds me of a beautiful passage from a favorite Rushdie essay: “I go back to the old stories many times, I drink at those ancient unpolluted wells, in part because when one is deeply affected by the contemporary, when a good deal of one’s thinking has to do with puzzling out how to fashion into coherent work one’s vision of contemporary life… it helps to be reminded of what has endured, of what claims to being called eternal, to sit and learn at the feet of what persists.”

Dumas frequented those wells and gave us more than a thousand and one pages of pure entertainment. Sure, there were elements of the story that I did not readily accept, but to paraphrase Rushdie regarding these wonder tales: Their power endures because these stories are entirely truthful about human nature.

July, July!

The silliest criticism I’ve heard of Nolan’s The Odyssey is of the movie being anti-war. Every war story is anti-war, if you’re mentally sound.

From the latest Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction to the last book I finished, four out of six books that I read in July tell of the senselessness of war:

Although famed for being penned as a single unbroken sentence, Angel Down was not the first novel I read written in this manner. Before Kraus, there was Krasznahorkai and Énard’s Zone. There is a rhythm and informality in Kraus’s prose that makes it accessible; it was the bloodbath that I found too graphic, but it drives the point — the pointlessness and the obscenity of war. (Hot take: I would personally crown Énard the winner in this category.)

Paradiso 17 probably alludes to Canto 17 of Dante’s Paradiso as it focuses on the life of an exile. A Palestinian exile who asks, “Why do we need this war? Did I ever leave the war behind?” For exiles, it seems that one is only forced to leave the home, but never the war.

A Life’s Music is an elegy for wartime Russia and the musicians forced to abandon their careers under Soviet artistic repression. Makine writes beautiful prose, you could feel the cold and hear the music. I do wish he’d turn this novella into a novel. That Rachmaninoff scene remains vivid.

“What’s the point of saving books when you can’t even save lives?” Ahmad Muaddamani initially asks in The Book Collectors. Believing in “a revolution that was meant to build, not destroy,” Ahmad and a band of rebels against the Assad regime eventually realize how reading could keep them alive, thus assembling from the ruins Syria’s underground library in Daraya.

And while the author of Even Ducks Get Liver Cancer acknowledges that death is the one true outcome for all of us, he suggests we live and laugh; and by writing this book, I guess he suggests we read, too. He is so much wiser than he lets on in his essays, but I’m glad Dr. Will Liangco is not modest about being funny. Speaking of humor…

After a couple of decades, I’ve found that the best way for me to approach The Handmaid’s Tale is to disregard those who hail or criticize it as ideology canon and look at it as a missive written by a mischievous grand-aunt. Yes, it analyzes power and cautions about totalitarian states, but the humor in this book is something we don’t talk about enough! Also, don’t Offred’s flashbacks function as a double-edged sword that asks whether we really know what to do with freedom? However one views this novel, I can only imagine the mischievous grand-aunt rubbing her palms together, secretly thanking institutions that have banned it, knowing full well that they have only ensured its survival.

Anti-war or anti-totalitarianism, Atwood knows: “Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard.”

June in Books

My favorite Rodin masterpiece is not The Thinker. It is a lesser-known work called The Cathedral, which looks nothing at all like a cathedral. It’s a sculpture of two expressive right hands lightly grazing at the fingertips, in anticipation of a universe of possibility. I love it for its elegance, for its nuance, for what it suggests; and for the thought that the sculptor understood that a place of worship is not confined to temples made with hands, but that he also had humor enough to convey the message with hands.

Claudia Piñeiro’s Cathedrals delivers the same message but not in the way Rodin does. She does it with mystery, disquiet, brutality, and revolting revelations, while indicting the hypocrisies of society’s sacred institutions. She is an author not everyone can stomach, but one does not have to consistently agree with, or relate to, her characters to recognize that Piñeiro is a force in literature.

Cathedrals was my last book for June. In contrast, Lyse Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul was my first.

What does Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and Ivo Andric’s Bridge on the Drina have in common with Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul? All have immortalized an architectural edifice as the main character to tell the story of a people.

Sandwiched between these two books that touch on what humans build and destroy: O Caledonia, a pasalubong from a friend’s trip to Scotland, a parable about what happens to a girl when she is pressured to fit in and forced to become someone other than herself; two books with the same title — Good People — that speak less of good people and perhaps more about the judgments we cast on those different from us; and East of Eden, a book one cannot really move on from, because it’s a book you carry with you for eternity.

Piñeiro has a character whose cathedral is built with books. I can’t say I’ve built a cathedral with my books, but at this point, it sure looks like I have built a life with them.

John Steinbeck: East of Eden

“Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.”

Steinbeck creates a magnificent image of a reading Samuel, but leaves a reader with little choice but to be a Tom. Is it even possible to read such a novel without being a Tom? We are all of us Tom in the face of a Steinbeck.

East of Eden is all over my face, my hands, and it has rendered me incapable of expressing the immensity of feeling and thought. It’s been over twenty-four hours since I turned the last page, and the sharp wit is still on my mind. My heart still aches, not from the tragedy that I expected, but because of its penetrating wisdom.

A reader may fool themselves into thinking that they are far removed from the dark experiences that the characters endure. But as the wisest man in the book says, “No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true of us.”

Steinbeck knew what he was up to. He knew that Lee, especially Lee and his dream of a bookstore, Samuel and his wonderful contentiousness, naive Adam, imperfect Cal, and fragile Aron would be etched on our souls by weaving them in one achingly beautiful story that is true for all of us: a story about the longing to be accepted and loved, fear of rejection, the weighty responsibility that comes with being a person, the internal struggle of doing what’s right and the consciousness of a choice no matter how difficult, finding the comfort in being reminded that we do not have to be perfect, we just have to be good.

Take away the philosophizing and this story thrusts upon us the epiphany that being good is almost never about the self, but how one lives for others. And when one attains goodness, that goodness endures in the lives of others. “Maybe that’s what immortality is.”

May Days, May Days!

Rain has come to portend the end of summer in my part of the world, and the skies are mirroring our dispiriting political climate.

Cheering myself up by looking back at some of this month’s colorful days and satisfying literary adventures — it was, after all, a month when Mei Mei the Bunny hopped into Harana Music Studio’s library! So here they are, in the words of John Ruskin, “To scatter perfumes in the path of June.”

The Artist, Lucy Steeds 05/10/2026

When I read with my toes digging into white sand, piña colada within reach until the sunset turned into “a riot of color,” as Lucy Steeds would write, I was happy to momentarily leave behind war-torn milieus, ambiguous plots, dystopias, or sentences that needed multiple re-readings to be deciphered.

Part mystery, part lure to Provence, mainly art lesson on light and color, part romance, part statement on the discrimination of women in art and women’s contribution to the art world, part anti-war declaration, and a reflection on our Odysseys and our Ithacas, The Artist was the perfect beach read for me a week ago.

If you’re wondering what qualifies as a “beach read,” it’s pretty much the same thing as a “beach body”; it’s the one that you carry with you to the beach… this one simply had the bonus of being informative and entertaining while being, at least by the end of the book, gentle on the mind and heart.

For the Sun After Long Nights | Defiance

The two books I read in succession for the first week of May.

Defiance is the first book I’ve read about Syria that was written and published after the fall of the Assad regime. Striking not only for its incredibly human and candid account, but also for the fact that it is written by someone whose father led Bassel al-Assad’s security team, and whose American boyfriend’s public execution at the hands of the Islamic State the world witnessed.

For the Sun After Long Nights is the first book I’ve read about Iran that veers away from the 1979 Iranian Revolution and focuses on the Woman, Life, Freedom movement (ignited by the death of Mahsa Amini, who was detained and beaten for not wearing her hijab according to the imposed religious dress code, and who died in state custody in 2022). In this collaboration between two Iranian journalists, chapters alternate between the points of view of Fatemeh Jamalpour, who joined and covered the protests in Iran, and Nilo Tabrizy, who reported from overseas on the violence and injustices committed by the Iranian government.

The books are remarkable works of journalism written by young women, but this is not the only similarity they share. Read full entry here.

She Who Remains, Rene Karabash 05/13/2026

In the lands of the Kanun, the Kanun is law. The Kanun is above all else. The Kanun is not fictional; the Kanun is ancient, and it is real.

And perhaps this book was written not as a historical record of a disappearing traditional customary law, but as a poetic missive to tell us that the whole concept of the Kanun is not limited to the Balkans, that the Kanun still exists in more subtle ways in modern societies, that women still have to “man up” to survive and afford certain rights, that women are still often collateral damage to men’s laws.

The Correspondent, Virginia Evans 05/15/2026

Can one simply read this epistolary novel and not be compelled to write to a friend afterwards?

On the other hand, it does not escape me that the message it carries is not exactly about letter-writing, but about communication. We often pride ourselves on our voice and how we brandish our opinions whenever we can, as Sybil does, but the story asks us to examine the injustice we do by shirking from communication at crucial moments. This book essentially asks us to ponder the legacy of communication that we leave behind in this life.

“I believe one ought to be precious with communication. Remember: Words, especially those written, are immortal .”

Middlemarch, George Eliot 05/28/2026

A more mature reader will often return to the classics with a reformed insight that the classics are not necessarily meant to be venerated but to be re-examined. Such a reader would trudge through old-fashioned language and time-consuming lengths to defy modern man’s preference for instant gratification and to seek resonance in the historical, intellectual, and emotional bulk. More often than not, the willing seeker finds — and finds more than they set out to find.

To read Middlemarch in a 21st century small town in the Philippines, and be transported to an early 19th century English rural community and notice the same players in society, espy similar outlooks that should be outdated by now but which still exist, and observe national political ferment trickling into daily lives to color preconceptions about other people, makes one marvel at the timelessness of George Eliot’s, or Mary Ann Evans’s, masterpiece. Read full entry here.

Canticles for Dark Lovers, Wilfrido D. Nolledo 05/31/2026

Art, I once told someone, is like someone ripping their heart off their chest and saying, “Behold, my heart.”

It is terrifying. The artist suffers in the process. It is terrifying because the artist knows that some will look away and find the act too violent. It is terrifying because the artist never knows beforehand if someone will ever get it. But no matter how terrifying it is, an artist rips their heart out anyway because they cannot help it. Nolledo could not help it. Behold, his heart.

George Eliot: Middlemarch

The cracked spine of an old paperback that I’ve given away testifies to the struggle I had with this classic over two decades ago. Virginia Woolf thankfully absolves the young reader by deeming the novel “magnificent… which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

Indeed, a younger reader would, perhaps, only register who marries whom and mistake that for the plot and find it wanting. Middlemarch is, to this older reader, a rich study in, and of, character: “Character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.”

It is also a look into the inherent goodness in people: “I must observe that goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy…”

And while it is consistent about how character and goodness can be bettered, it serves as an admonition of how it can be lost.

Middlemarch, above all, exhibits that it is character and goodness that is at stake in daily living, and it is what should be constantly guarded and cultivated. Most of the characters in the novel fail miserably as humans, but as Lydgate says in earnest, “What I want, Rosy, is to do worthy the writing,” or in Ladislaw’s religion, “To love what is good and beautiful when I see it.”

Literature has been accused of being the most solitary of arts, and a thick tome like this can be rather demanding in 21st century fast-paced living. Grateful to my friend, Vera, for buddy-reading this with me and making 837 pages fun, enriching, less solitary, and totally worth it. As Dorothea puts it, “What do we live for if not to make life less difficult to each other?” True in reading, true in life.

Defiance | For the Sun After Long Nights

The two books I read in succession for the first week of May.

Defiance is the first book I’ve read that was written and published after the fall of the Assad regime. Striking not only for its incredibly human and candid account, but also for the fact that it is written by someone whose father led Bassel al-Assad’s security team, and whose American boyfriend’s public execution at the hands of the Islamic State the world witnessed.

For the Sun After Long Nights is the first book I’ve read about Iran that veers away from the 1979 Revolution and focuses on the Woman, Life, Freedom movement (ignited by the death of Mahsa Amini, who was detained and beaten for not wearing her hijab according to the imposed religious dress code, and who died in state custody in 2022). In this collaboration between two Iranian journalists, chapters alternate between the points of view of Fatemeh Jamalpour, who joined and covered the protests in Iran, and Nilo Tabrizy, who reported from overseas on the violence and injustices committed by the Iranian government.

The books are remarkable works of journalism written by young women, but this is not the only similarity they share:

Both shed light on the ethnic minorities of their respective countries, and reveal how these communities on the fringes of society are prone to abuse from the government because they do not get media exposure. Both books also emphasize how economic sanctions seldom achieve their goals and only affect those who do not have foreign bank accounts;

Both countries have had uprisings that were hijacked by Islamists, teaching their people tough lessons on revolutions that not everyone participating share the same idea of a nation’s future, but on the other hand, through a movement like Woman, Life, Freedom — the largest and most widespread uprising in Iran since the 1979 Revolution — learn that it is possible for everyone to come together for the same cause to shake up a regime and give it reason to be fearful of its demise.

The women in both books undergo rude awakenings to how oppression, especially towards women, trickles down from governments to communities and family units.

Most of all, the accounts are written because their writers believe in the power of documentation despite brutal consequences, and cling to the hope that documenting a government’s injustices is the first step towards ending it.

This made me ponder on our own country. This is what our journalists did during the Martial Law era when they defied censorship. But what did we do with those records? How easily we dismissed them during the last presidential election! Have we learned our lesson yet?

Heather Rose: The Museum of Modern Love

“Art did not stop, that’s what Marina had said. Art did not get to five o’clock and say, ‘That’s it, the day is done, go think about TV or making dinner.’ It wasn’t like that. It was there all the time: when you were chopping vegetables, talking with a friend, reading a newspaper, listening to music, having a party. It was always there offering suggestions, wanting you to go write or draw, sing or play. Wanting you to imagine big things, to connect with an audience, to use energy, to find energy. It wasn’t ready when you were, it didn’t come when you wanted it or leave when you were done. It took its time.” — Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

For most of us who are not au courant with the Modern Art scene, Marina Abramović probably entered our consciousness with the same video clip.

That video in which we were given a background of her twelve-year relationship with fellow artist, Ulay, and how they exhibited the most dramatic break-up in 1988 by standing 5,955 kilometers apart, each from one end of the Great Wall of China, and walking to each other — for ninety days, exposed to wind, rain, and sun, even through disintegrating parts of the Wall in Mongolia’s Gobi desert — for one last embrace…

…Only for Ulay to show up unannounced at her 2010 MoMA retrospective where The Artist is Present entailed Abramović gazing into the eyes of each stranger who sat in front of her while sharing a moment of silent connection. We held our collective breath when she opened her eyes and found herself face to face with the former lover she had not seen for twenty-two years, we wept quietly as she did, and all we could do was collect ourselves when Ulay stood and walked away when his turn was over, replaced by the next stranger, leaving us with a host of questions whilst being deeply affected by the emotionally-charged encounter.

Given the title, I expected this book to focus on that renowned relationship. Heather Rose is original and evades predictability, however. It is, instead, a uniquely structured novel built around imagined characters who attend as audience or participate and sit still with Abramović throughout the 75-day run of The Artist is Present in New York.

The book begins with a wise and omniscient narrator who retreats when bringing the characters to the forefront, but immediately becomes captivating whenever it speaks beautifully about art. With another clever creative decision, Heather Rose leaves us guessing about the enigmatic narrator’s identity until the end.

One of the main characters, Arky Levin, is a pianist and film composer, married to Lydia Fiorentino, an architect. (Ironically, this reading pianist found herself identifying with the self-sufficient woman in the architect while having little sympathy for the indecisive pianist who seems to be more committed to his work than their relationship.) We are also introduced to recently widowed Jane, an art teacher; Healayas Breen, art critic and journalist; and Brittika, a graduate student writing a thesis on Abramović — all realistic and flawed people who, while struggling with individual grief or internal conflict, find themselves drawn to Abramović’s art and roused by the deep introspection induced by the artistic experience.

It is ultimately a novel about art and connection for which the author found a fresh and imaginative way of expressing. The title is clearly a play on Love and Art, cunningly asking, what’s the point of art if we don’t realize their interchangeability?