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mh_books 's review for:
Do Not Say We Have Nothing
by Madeleine Thien
This book demands to be read slowly, perhaps best summarised by a single sentence in chapter 2.
“And even when I answered him in my impeccable Canadian accent, he continued with the slowness of the ages, until I, too, felt my pulse slow, and time became relative, as the physicists have proved it was, so perhaps Ai-Ming and I are still seated there, in a corner of the restaurant, waiting for our meal to come, for a sentence to end, for this intermission to run its course.”
The book is an epic story of China over 60 years from Mao's Cultural Revolution to the Student protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989 (which I barely remember as images of tanks on the news). The story revolves around three classical musicians and their families; Sparrow (Bird of Quiet), a composer, Kai a pianist and Zhuli a violinist. Music and its affects are therefore central to the thinking, behaviours and motives of the characters. I don’t know much about classical music but playing some of the mentioned pieces on Spotify while reading the book certainly helped my understanding here. Thien takes these passionate characters and pitches them against the constraints of communism, the Cultural Revolution and ultimately the rise and fall of the peoples hopes for change at Tiananmen Square. Every character is searching for (and sometimes loosing) their own identity amongst the chaos "I've been searching for myself but I didn't expect to find so many selves of mine.”
There are also intriguing mentions of the Chinese languages, the multiple meanings of its characters and how writing (even hateful writing) can be beautiful and tell you something of the author. The importance of writing can be found in protest signs, musical notation, the hand-copied Book of Records (an epic novel within this epic novel) and in self-criticisms (that citizens are forced to write).
Personally, this book has opened up an understanding to me of the Chinese women I worked with while studying for my PhD in the UK. They too had arrived there on international scholarships and I think finally I understand something of what they were trying to tell me. For this I thank Thien and of course them.
I will
be reading this book again and it is my favourite for the Man Booker prize - though I still have to read Hot Milk.
“And even when I answered him in my impeccable Canadian accent, he continued with the slowness of the ages, until I, too, felt my pulse slow, and time became relative, as the physicists have proved it was, so perhaps Ai-Ming and I are still seated there, in a corner of the restaurant, waiting for our meal to come, for a sentence to end, for this intermission to run its course.”
The book is an epic story of China over 60 years from Mao's Cultural Revolution to the Student protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989 (which I barely remember as images of tanks on the news). The story revolves around three classical musicians and their families; Sparrow (Bird of Quiet), a composer, Kai a pianist and Zhuli a violinist. Music and its affects are therefore central to the thinking, behaviours and motives of the characters. I don’t know much about classical music but playing some of the mentioned pieces on Spotify while reading the book certainly helped my understanding here. Thien takes these passionate characters and pitches them against the constraints of communism, the Cultural Revolution and ultimately the rise and fall of the peoples hopes for change at Tiananmen Square. Every character is searching for (and sometimes loosing) their own identity amongst the chaos "I've been searching for myself but I didn't expect to find so many selves of mine.”
There are also intriguing mentions of the Chinese languages, the multiple meanings of its characters and how writing (even hateful writing) can be beautiful and tell you something of the author. The importance of writing can be found in protest signs, musical notation, the hand-copied Book of Records (an epic novel within this epic novel) and in self-criticisms (that citizens are forced to write).
Personally, this book has opened up an understanding to me of the Chinese women I worked with while studying for my PhD in the UK. They too had arrived there on international scholarships and I think finally I understand something of what they were trying to tell me. For this I thank Thien and of course them.
I will
be reading this book again and it is my favourite for the Man Booker prize - though I still have to read Hot Milk.