In her own words, here is Johanna Skibsrud's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Quartet for the End of Time.
Quartet for the End of Time: A strange and beautiful work
Quartet is a strange, deeply compassionate, and beautiful work...
Like The Sentimentalists, Quartet explores the limits of moral freedom and the mutability of human perceptions. But its characters are less important in themselves than as notes in an all-encompassing, eternal music, and its great breadth of vision signifies an artistic leap.
Refusing To Condescend: Johanna Skibsrud and ‘Difficult’ Literature BY MARTHA SCHABAS
John Banville said a few years ago that he thinks the novel as a form has become something tired and childish. I hope he’s since read Johanna Skibsrud. One of the most exciting qualities in her writing is that equally, in form and content, it refuses to condescend. It is intellectually satisfying in a way that feels as riveting as coming across bits of staggeringly articulate theory—you’re amazed that such elusive phenomena and slippery feeling has been expressed so actively and totally.
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Book Review by Imogen Robinson (justaplatform.com): Quartet for the End of Time
Johanna Skibsrud’s second novel, Quartet for the End Of Time, can be described as nothing less than monumental in the sheer breadth of events and subject matter it strives to cover. And if the reader is prepared to put in some work to keep track of the seemingly timeless interwoven, jarring and juxtaposing lives it covers then it will, at the end of the time it takes the reader to complete it, leave nothing less than a lasting impression.
Toronto Quarterly: Quartet for the End of Time (an interview)
Johanna Skibsrud – I would say that the novel is a meditation on history and responsibility. I didn’t write it to get any particular message across—more the opposite. I wrote it for the same reason that I write anything. Because life is one great big puzzle.