I did not connect with this story or the characters. I really wanted to but it wasn’t meant to be. I tried putting the book down and picking it back up a few weeks later but no. I do appreciate the chance to read it

What a remarkable book!
The history of China's Civil War is revealed through a cast of characters beginning with Marie and Ai-Ming, the children of the previous generation that experienced the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. The girls are trying to unravel the mystery of their parent' lives. Marie is the daughter of Kai, a renown pianist, while Ai-Ming is the daughter of Sparrow, a talented composer. Their fathers , along with a young violin prodigy, Zhuli, are swept up togetehr in the horrific events of the Revolution.
Thien brilliantly evokes the utter lack of control the Chinese had over their own lives during this time. The utter devastation of the country and its citizens is so well-done that it is hard to shake off the mood created.

History, politics, love and music

Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel by Madeleine Thien (W. W. Norton, $26.95).

Shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel is the story of a family through 20th century China.

Thien moves fluidly through the last half of the century, touching on the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, and Tiananmen Square, while telling a love story wrapped in music. The daughters of Jiang Kai, a concert pianist, and the composer known as Sparrow, unravel the story of their families by reading notebooks named The Book of Records. The novel itself is a counterpoint to the Bach sonatas that are mentioned throughout, providing a soundtrack for several lifetimes of resistance, resilience, and art in the face of destruction.

i find it impossible not to admire this book deeply, because it does magnificent things, and though i found myself struggling through it (but how can one not?), i also found myself vibrating (positively vibrating) at the scope of it, and the depth, and the tremendous commitment to history and the love of humanity of its author, who very justly ended up winning the Man Booker Prize.

one of the lovely things of this strangely titled book is its attempt to put music into language. i remember two other books that do this, thomas mann's 1947 tour de force Doctor Faustus and, very recently, kim echlin's Under The Visible Life. i read Doctor Faustus when i was a teenager and frankly understood very little, but the little i did understand included that it is about the value and meaning of classical music. kim echlin's Under the Visible Life is about jazz and i'm more at home with jazz. so this book, the thien book, brought me back to feelings i had while reading thomas mann, in my teens, except this time i understood better.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing covers a large span of chinese history, from the second sino-japanese war, to the cultural revolution, to the tiananmen square protests and, finally, to today's openness. one of the lengthiest historical periods discussed in the book is the dismantling of the shanghai conservatory of music, a great loss to the country, in which talented performers and composers were purged in various ways -- through exile, forced re-training in manual work, lynchings, executions, and suicides. there are two absolutely luminous characters here: sparrow, a brilliant composer, and his cousin zhuli, a brilliant violinist. kai, in love with zhuli and with sparrow (but everyone is a bit in love with sparrow, in spite or because of his strangeness, monomania, and talent), is more tortured, more aware that his life is at stake and that maybe music counts less. there are many themes in just this section: what music is and does (all of these characters are in love with particular composers and particular compositions, and they revisit them over and over), the passion of youth, the brave solidarity of those who will risk life and livelihood to support what is right, and the inevitable attack of all totalitarian regimes against creative souls.

music appears here both as lovely and passionate and absolutely absorbing, and as extremely subversive, even though the composers are often centuries dead.

there is not a novel about totalitarian regimes that is not about the utter capriciousness of party dictates and orthodoxies, which change from one year to the next, according to who is in charge, what is in favor, and what butterfly is batting its diaphanous wings in africa. the change of the winds' direction is enough to drive one crazy. the brutality of the punishments is enough to drive one crazy. the harshness of the lives these people lead is enough to drive one crazy. the constant redefinition of the concept of purity is enough to drive one crazy. one reads a book like this and thinks, if i had lived then i would not have made it. and one is right.

alongside this -- the music, the arbitrariness and brutality of power, the heinousness of a paternalistic government that brings you low and kills you "for your own good" -- there is in Do Not Say We Have Nothing a whole lot of inspiration in the form of endurance, familial love, and the power story-telling has to keep the soul alive. a thread that runs through the great length of this book is The Book of Records, a much copied and passed around manuscript that tells the story of.... well who knows really? except as the story goes on we do learn, but telling you now would be an unforgivable spoiler. story-telling is always magical when it appears in books as a tool of survival, because, you see, books are story-telling too, story-telling in action, and you are being told story even as you read about story-telling, and this story is keeping both you and the writer alive for another week or two, and maybe for a whole lot longer.

no dictatorship will ever kill stories, because stories can be whispered in the dead of night, dashed onto scraps of paper, or painstakingly copied in samizdats that are miracles just in virtue of the labor of love put into their creation and recreation. prisoners go to great length to create writing implements in captivity. writers are the first to be attacked when a dictatorship takes root.

and here is another thing dictatorships can't kill. dictatorships can't kill love, much as they try, much as they create heartbreak. in brutal dictatorships, love and heartbreak are even more conjoined than they are in the rest of human life and culture, but love achieves a transcendent quality that maybe we, the free ones, are denied (i am not envious; i do just fine without the added heartbreak). the love that makes this book absolutely fantastic is the love between swirl and wen the dreamer, and, above all, the tender tender love between sparrow and kai, two boys who do as much touching and holding and sleeping snuggled up against each other as any boy has ever dared who has not gone even to first base, and whose homosexuality is very much in the background, almost a shadow, so that you have to ask yourself over and over -- am i making this up?

so, yeah, i did not quite enjoy all the immense pain of this book, but i don't think i was meant to, and i admire the heck out of what thien achieves here.

many thanks to netgalley and to knopf canada for an early copy of this book.