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Summary
Summary
"In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old."
Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations--those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story. Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming's father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China's political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences.
With maturity and sophistication, humor and beauty, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of life inside China yet transcendent in its universality.
Author Notes
Madeline Thien, 26, is the Canadian born daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. She live in Vancouver, BC.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Thien's luminescent third novel (following Dogs at the Perimeter, which won the Frankfurt Book Fair's 2015 LiBeraturpreis), stories, music, and mathematics weave together to tell one family's tale within the unfolding of recent Chinese history. Beginning in 1989 in Hong Kong and Vancouver, this narrative snakes both forward and backward, describing how a pair of sisters survived land reform, re-education at the hands of the Communists, the coming of the Red Guard, the Cultural Revolution, and the protests at Tiananmen square. The story is partially told by the central character, mathematics professor Marie Jiang (Jiang Li-ling), as she discovers her late father's past as a pianist, which was left behind and concealed when he left China for Canada. Thien takes readers into the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where Marie's father studied with composer Sparrow and violinist Zhuli in the midst of the cultural upheaval in the 1960s. Filled with intrigue, shifting loyalties, broken families, and unbroken resistance, this novel is beautifully poetic and as carefully constructed as the Bach sonatas that make frequent appearance in the text. Thien's reach-though epic -does not extend beyond her capacity, resulting in a lovely fugue of a book that meditates on fascism, resistance, and personhood. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Thien's (Certainty, 2007) new novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, begins in a blur of confusion and death. The narrator called Ma-Li, Li-Ling, or Marie, depending on who's addressing her has lost her beloved father at the age of 10. The circumstances of his death are baffling; all she knows is that, after leaving his family in Vancouver to return to his native China, Jiang Kai has committed suicide for reasons she cannot glean from the barely understood, long-distance conversations her overworked, long-suffering mother has with friends and family back home. Then, just as mysteriously, a young woman named Ai-ming arrives from Beijing at the apartment she and her mother share. Ai-ming's presence has something to do with the fraught student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, and something to do with Li-ling's father, but Li-ling doesn't know much more than that. At first, the child resents the young woman's presence in her small home, but soon enough, Ai-ming wins her over with stories about her family and their close connection to Jiang Kai. And what stories they are! Here, the story opens up from a child's fragmentary understanding of her immediate and painful surroundings to an omniscient and riveting account of an extended family's joys and struggles under Chairman Mao. Along the way, we are introduced to indelible characters with invariably fantastic names Big Mother Knife, Sparrow, and Old West, to name a just few and fully realized, uniformly captivating story arcs. We are treated to engaging philosophical analyses of samizdat, both of words and of notation, and of how the music of Bach, Shostakovich, and other Western composers affects people living in a place where even ghosts are illegal. We also learn how the components of Chinese characters in different dialects enhance the meaning of the words they represent and imbue them with confusion and a kind of magic. Magic, too, is how Thien manages to bring these disparate elements together without making heavy weather of it. The novel is never not immersive, nor anything less than brilliant. All its words are necessary. The book is a bonanza for fans of Richard Powers.--Williamson, Eugenia Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HITLER: Ascent 1889-1939, by Volker Ullrich. Translated by Jefferson Chase. (Vintage, $22.) A new biography dispenses with myths of greatness and destiny that circulate about Hitler: In Ullrich's telling, he emerges as a mediocre, unremarkable man who seized on a moment of political rage to rise to power. This book, the first of two planned volumes, ends on the eve of Germany's invasion of Poland, setting off World War II and eventually leading to his downfall. PERFECT LITTLE WORLD, by Kevin Wilson. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Izzy, a teenager pregnant with her teacher's baby, agrees to join a utopian family experiment that resembles a commune. "It's a novel you keep reading for old-fashioned reasons," our reviewer, John Irving, said. "You also keep reading because you want to know what a good family is. Everyone wants to know that." TRUEVINE: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South, by Beth Macy. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $17.99.) George and Willie Muse, two albino African-American brothers, were exhibited in a circus for years during the 20 th century, a situation close to slavery. How they came to join the show is murky, but the core of Macy's reporting focuses on the boys' mother, Harriett, who doggedly sought to bring them home. HISTORY OF WOLVES, by Emily Fridlund. (Grove, $16.) In Fridlund's debut novel, northern Minnesota's austere landscape sets off a grim coming-of-age story. When a young mother and her son arrive in town, Linda, a teenage loner with a fractured home life, is drawn to them. She soon begins babysitting the child, Paul, and finds herself in an ambiguous family dynamic, made worse after his father returns from Hawaii; the moral choices Linda makes haunt her decades later, when she finally tells her story. AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY: A Love Story, by John Kaag. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) A chance encounter leads Kaag, a philosophy professor, to a library full of masterpieces (early editions of works by Kant, signed copies of Thoreau's writings), transforming his professional and personal trajectories. Our reviewer, Mark Greif, praised the memoir as "a spirited lover's quarrel with the individualism and solipsism in our national thought." DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING, by Madeleine Thien. (Norton, $16.95.) As a child, Marie, the central figure of Thien's novel, and her mother welcome into their home a woman fleeing China after the Tiananmen Square protests. The guest, AnLing, and Marie are linked by their fathers: The men used music to cope with the regime and to remain steadfast to each another during the Cultural Revolution.
Guardian Review
History is deftly woven into a moving story of the musicians who suffered during and after the Cultural Revolution in China The main concert hall of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, in what was once the city's French concession, is called He Luting Concert Hall. Today's visitors to the spacious, western-style building, opened in 2003, could be forgiven for missing the significance of the name. He Luting was a composer who was also director of the conservatory from 1949. As Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution gathered force, He Luting came under attack for his writings on Debussy. In 1968, after two years of violence and humiliation, he was dragged before television cameras by Red Guards to be threatened and physically abused. By this time, there had been a wave of suicides at the conservatory, as students turned on teachers and on each other. He Luting, however, refused to submit. Two weeks later, dragged back for a rerun, he shouted to his persecutors, live on television, "Shame on you for lying." He Luting's defiance was a moment of resistance in the savage history that features prominently in Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien's powerful third novel, along with the events two decades later surrounding the Tiananmen Square protests. History matters in China. For more than 60 years, the historical narrative has been manipulated or suppressed in the service of the shifting needs of the regime's politics. Writing the wrong sort of history -- one that deviates from the party line -- can still get you into trouble. Thien takes this history and weaves it into a vivid, magisterial novel that reaches back to China's civil war and up to the present day. At its heart are the interlocking fates of a set of characters who live for and by music, until their world is destroyed by the events the revolution unleashes. Her story begins in Vancouver, where the narrator, known by both her Chinese name Li-ling and her English name Marie, lives with her mother. Her father, she tells us, disappeared some years earlier, and in 1989, when Marie was 10, he killed himself in Hong Kong at the age of 39. That same year, a teenage relative appeared from China: Ai Ming, a young woman forced to flee following the brutal suppression of the student occupation of Tiananmen Square. Gradually, tracking back and forth across more than seven decades of history, Marie assembles the story of her father and his profound but troubled relationship with members of Ai Ming's family. The story is uncovered with difficulty -- Marie barely speaks or reads Chinese, and the events and characters are buried beneath layers of forgetting. It is pieced together from the fragments of a set of notebooks brought to Canada from China. The novel's characters have copied and recopied into these notebooks a story entitled "Historical Records", the origins of which remain obscure. The notebooks serve as both a narrative device and a metaphor for a history that can neither be remembered nor forgotten. The title of the manuscript is an allusion to China's most celebrated work of history, Sima Qian's Historical Records, completed in 91BCE but kept hidden for fear of the wrath of an emperor who had had its author castrated. The telling of history in China was always a dangerous occupation. As Ai Ming and Marie grow close, Marie discovers that her father, Jiang Kai, had been the only one of his family to survive the starvation that resulted from Mao's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 60s; that he was a talented concert pianist; and that he was friends with Ai Ming's father, Sparrow, a gifted composer and his teacher at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Marie learns, too, about the earlier generations of the family, including Ai Ming's great aunt and grandmother -- Swirl and Big Mother -- who, as teenage sisters in the 1940s, made a living as itinerant teahouse singers. When Swirl and her husband were sent to labour camps in the 50s, Big Mother brought up their daughter, Zhuli, who grows into a dedicated violinist. The lives of these earlier generations revolve around the Shanghai Conservatory, until the Cultural Revolution shatters everything. The music they love becomes cause for persecution, but continues to run through their heads as they try to hold on to meaning and to love, despite the chaos, grief, betrayal and violence. The fragile dreams of Thien's characters run in counterpoint to the disordered cruelty of Maoist politics, with Glenn Gould 's two recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations running through the novel like a soundtrack of suffering and redemption. This is a moving and extraordinary evocation of the 20th-century tragedy of China, and deserves to cement Thien's reputation as an important and compelling writer. - Isabel Hilton.
Kirkus Review
Shortlisted for this years Man Booker Prize, Thiens ambitious saga explores the upheavals in Chinese politics from 1949 to the present through several generations of friends, family, and lovers whose intersecting destinies are upturned by the sweep of events.In 1989, at the time of the Tiananmen Square uprising, Jiang Kai, a renowned concert pianist in China before he defected in the '70s, abandons his wife and 10-year-old daughter, Marie, in Vancouver to fly to Hong Kong, where he commits suicide. Soon afterward, Ai-ming, the 19-year-old daughter of Kais former teacher at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, who was killed by authorities during the uprising, flees China and arrives in Vancouver. The girls soon bond reading the Book of Records, a never-seeming-to-end series of notebooks left among Kais possessions and written in the handwriting of Ai-ming's father, Sparrow. The novel follows Marie as she unravels the mystery of her fathers death, his life as a musician in China, and his relationship with Sparrow. She is guided by the notebooks, which narrate a parallel, fairy-tale version of events. But the heart of the story lies with Kai and Sparrow and their attempts to define themselves inside the rapidly shifting political climate that turns against artists and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Fear and pragmatism drive ambitious 17-year-old pianist Kai, who watched his family starve to death as a child in the 1959 famine; joining the Red Guard allows him to pursue his music within limits. Kais teacher/friend/lover Sparrow, a composer of genius whose family is torn apart by party loyalties, wills himself into creative invisibility, choosing survival over art. Sparrows cousin, the violinist Zhuli, whom both men love, refuses to join or hide, and her idealism destroys her. Through these and a host of other sharply rendered characters, Thien (Certainty, 2007) dissects Chinas social and political history while raising universal questions about creativity, loyalty, and identity. Mythic yet realistic, panoramic yet intimate, intellectual yet romanticThien has written a concerto dauntingly complex and deeply haunting. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
On the 16th of December, 1990, Ma came home in a taxi with a new daughter who wore no coat, only a thick scarf, a woollen sweater, blue jeans and canvas shoes. I had never met a Chinese girl before, that is, one who, like my father, came from real mainland China. A pair of grey mittens dangled from a string around her neck and swayed in nervous rhythm against her legs. The fringed ends of her blue scarf fell one in front and one behind, like a scholar. The rain was falling hard, and she walked with her head down, holding a medium-sized suitcase that appeared to be empty. She was pale and her hair had the gleam of the sea. Casually I opened the door and widened my eyes as if I was not expecting visitors. "Girl," Ma said. "Take the suitcase. Hurry up." Ai-ming stepped inside and paused on the edge of the doormat. When I reached for the suitcase, my hand accidentally touched hers, but she didn't draw back. Instead, her other hand reached out and lightly covered mine. She gazed right at me, with such openness and curiosity that, out of shyness, I closed my eyes. "Ai-ming," Ma was saying. "Let me introduce you. This is my Girl." I pulled away and opened my eyes again. Ma, taking off her coat, glanced first at me and then at the room. The brown sofa with its three camel-coloured stripes had seen better days, but I had spruced it up with all the flowery pillows and stuffed animals from my bed. I had also turned on the television in order to give this room the appearance of liveliness. Ma nodded vigorously at me. "Girl, greet your aunt." "Really, it's okay if you call me Ai-ming. Please. I really, mmm, prefer it." To placate them both, I said, "Hello." Just as I suspected, the suitcase was very light. With my free hand, I moved to take Ai-ming's coat, remembering too late she didn't have one. My arm wavered in the air like a question mark. She reached out, grasped my hand and firmly shook it. She had a question in her eyes. Her hair, pinned back on one side, fell loosely on the other, so that she seemed forever in profile, about to turn towards me. Without letting go of my hand, she manoeuvred her shoes noiselessly off her feet, first one then the other. Pinpoints of rain glimmered on her scarf. Our lives had contracted to such a degree that I could not remember the last time a stranger had entered our home; Ai-ming's presence made everything unfamiliar, as if the walls were crowding a few inches nearer to see her. The previous night, we had, at last, tidied Ba's papers and notebooks, putting them into boxes and stacking the boxes under the kitchen table. Now I found the table's surface deceitfully bare. I freed my hand, saying I would put the suitcase in her bedroom. Ma showed her around the apartment. I retreated to the sofa and pretended to watch the Weather Channel, which predicted rain for the rest of the week, the rest of 1990, the rest of the century, and even the remainder of all time. Their two voices ran one after the other like cable cars, interrupted now and then by silence. The intensity in the apartment crept inside me, and I had the sensation that the floor was made of paper, that there were words written everywhere I couldn't read, and one unthinking gesture could crumple this whole place down. Excerpted from Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.