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The son of a concert pianist, he described his novels as polyphonic symphonies, works that mixed various tones and styles — fable, essay, autobiographical reflection — to explore the nature of identity or mortality.

Its sensibility was shaped by a CD Mattingly grew up with that featured the Tahitian Choir: “this glorious, polyphonic, joyous sound,” he said, “that’s moving around itself and congealing and drifting apart.”

If you listen to the scene in its original language, it's a polyphonic effect.

The walls of the shelter, like those of the Gothic cathedral before it, reverberated with polyphonic music from a world beyond pain: not sacred, not quite, but certainly exalted.

But we also read on captivated by the novel’s beautiful prose and polyphonic voices, and marveling at both its epic scope and rare intimacy.