Do Not Say We Have Nothing in Around the World

Oct 04, 2016 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read2016, around-the-world, location-canada, reviewcopy, booker-winners-and-listed, location-china

I started this book as a review copy eBook, and finished it with the print from the library (which I think we got from the UK based on the cover art.)

This book is complex and I really enjoyed it. I suspected it could win the Man Booker Prize based solely on its description, and I was not disappointed. I am a sucker for music discussed in fiction, so the central theme of music really did the trick for me. I discovered only later that many of the characters and events surrounding the conservatory I started this book as a review copy eBook, and finished it with the print from the library (which I think we got from the UK based on the cover art.)

This book is complex and I really enjoyed it. I suspected it could win the Man Booker Prize based solely on its description, and I was not disappointed. I am a sucker for music discussed in fiction, so the central theme of music really did the trick for me. I discovered only later that many of the characters and events surrounding the conservatory were real events that actually happened! This article from The Guardian delves into some of those details. I was dithering between four and five stars but discovering the depth of research pushed it easily into five stars.

"How had he never noticed, Sparrow thought tipsily, just how deeply music could lie?"

The form of the novel itself seems to be somewhat musical, repeating themes, circling back around to previous events or movements, ending where we begin. It's a symphony. An opera. Something like that. This allows the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, aka "the June 4th incident," to be the climax of the work. The narrative moves between generations, but also between various locations in China and two eras in Canada.

The rural parts of the novel, the small Chinese communities with specific characters, and everyone trying to survive, reminded me of the novels of Mo Yan (recent winner of the Nobel Prize.) I just kept thinking of the spring onions in one of his novels, the last sustaining growing thing. But when it comes to Tiananmen Square, I don't know if I've ever felt such a connection to the growing disillusionment experienced by the Chinese people, and what led to that day.

"The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last."

Another thread running through the novel is this book of records, a book left by the narrator's father, and the various ways that this carries the details of the stories is best left to the discovery of the reader. I liked the tangent this spun off into and how it came back together in the end.

"We were not unalike, my father and I; we wanted to keep a record. We imagined there were truths waiting for us - about ourselves and those we loved, about the times we lived in- within our reach, if only we had the eyes to see them."

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Jul 21, 2016 Friederike Knabe rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: canadian-lit, asia, loved-it

Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say we Have Nothing has totally captivated me from beginning to end and even now, more than a couple of weeks later, many of the novel's characters have stayed with me, their conversations and reflections are influencing my own. It is impossible for me to capture the many facets of this deeply moving and multi-layered, expansive canvas of a novel. Madeleine Thien's exquisitely conceived and beautifully written work is set against the background of six decades in Chinese Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say we Have Nothing has totally captivated me from beginning to end and even now, more than a couple of weeks later, many of the novel's characters have stayed with me, their conversations and reflections are influencing my own. It is impossible for me to capture the many facets of this deeply moving and multi-layered, expansive canvas of a novel. Madeleine Thien's exquisitely conceived and beautifully written work is set against the background of six decades in Chinese history, from Mao's Cultural Revolution to the aftermath of Tiananmen Square drama. The author brings this politically and societally defining period vividly to life by her finely crafted protagonists and their very individual experiences and perspectives on the realities around them. By seamlessly weaving fact and fiction into one authentic and deeply affecting narrative, Thien creates what she defines as an alternative memory of history, one that concentrates on the lives of three generations of two families, a group of individuals, intimately connected through bonds of family and friendship... and their music.

Yes, music weaves through the novel as one of several guiding motives. Teachers and students at the Shanghai Conservatory find themselves drawn to classical (European) music, especially Bach. His music not only guides them in their learning, it enables expressions of emotions where words are inadequate or fail. The other major theme revolves around memory and record: how to preserve and keep alive the memory of those who are no longer with us, to record their experiences, beliefs and actions. Marie or Ma-li, the first person narrator, sums it up beautifully:

I wish to describe lives that no longer have a physical counterpart in this world; or perhaps, more accurately, lives that might continue if only I had the eyes to see them. Even now, certain memories are only growing clearer.

The novel opens with Marie living with her mother in Vancouver, Canada. She is ten when her father, Jiang Kai, leaves wife and child behind and within the year the news reaches them of his suicide in Hong Kong. Through a young Chinese woman, Ai-ming, seeking refuge at their home, Marie receives first hints of her father's life before she was born and the people he loved and was deeply connected to, among them, Ai-ming's father, Sparrow.

Marie moves in and out of the narrative flow of the novel while continuously acting as the essential bridge between past and present. Ai-ming had given her a set of notebooks that reach far back in time but also seem to be reflecting the present... As Marie's voice fades into the background whenever the story moves back in time, we nonetheless sense her ongoing search for answers about her father, his life in China and his suicide.

Three young musicians are central to the story: Jiang Kai, the successful pianist, Zhuli, the gifted violonist and, most importantly, Sparrow, the sensitive, highly respected composer. They are professional and personal friends, their relationships growing more complex with time. Sparrow, whose life we follow most closely, has the most to give and the most to lose throughout these difficult and challenging times. Since early childhood his parents had instilled in him a deep and unconditional love for music: Without a musician, all life would be loneliness... Sparrow himself believed that music was survival and could fill an empty stomach and chase the war away. Music was within him and he could not imagine how to live without it...

There would be so much to say about the content and the wide range of well drawn characters who enrich the novel. Suffice to add that some are based on real life individuals, others could be or even may be. Madeleine Thien's language is at times stark and spare, at others very lyrical and emotive. She has added very informative end notes to her book. They are not needed to follow the narrative, however they provide worthwhile additions enhancing our understanding.

Finally, a last word on my special fascination with Madeleine Thien's way of integrating music into the story and by the pieces of music she chose for her protagonists to play, to listen to and to discuss. At times, I stopped reading, found the piece of music that was played, e.g. Bach's Goldberg Variations (piano) or his Concerto for two violins, and listened while imagining the scene in the Conservatory of Shanghai or in somebody's modest room playing on a simple gramophone...
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Apr 10, 2017 Claire rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, around-the-world-2017, baileys-prize-longlist, historical-fiction, canadian-literature

Tomorrow begins from another dawn,
when we will be fast asleep.
Remember what I say: not everything will pass.

I like the saying "this too shall pass", it's a way of being in the difficult moment, of realising that it will be replaced by something else, it represents a sliver of hope, a reminder of gratitude, that thoughts are not reality, they can be changed. So this quote that "not everything will pass" evokes a kind of heartfelt stab for me, for it pierces that hope and reminds us that some thi

Tomorrow begins from another dawn,
when we will be fast asleep.
Remember what I say: not everything will pass.

I like the saying "this too shall pass", it's a way of being in the difficult moment, of realising that it will be replaced by something else, it represents a sliver of hope, a reminder of gratitude, that thoughts are not reality, they can be changed. So this quote that "not everything will pass" evokes a kind of heartfelt stab for me, for it pierces that hope and reminds us that some things stay, that they are not seeds of hope, they are reminders of a sadness that endures.

'Do Not Say We Have Nothing' felt to me like a novel of ancestral DNA and how living through Chairman Mao's and the subsequent communist regime imprinted its effect onto people behaviours forcing them to change, it left its trace in their DNA which was passed on to subsequent generations, who despite living far from where those events took place, continue to live with a feeling they can't explain, but which affects the way they live, or half-live, as something crucial to living a fulfilled life is missing.

The novel is presented through two time narratives, in Canada today Marie lives alone with her mother, her father Ba, died in Hong Kong far from them both in circumstances they don't understand, a kind of double abandonment.

We will come to understand that mystery as the daughter of one of her father's friends Ai-Ming comes to stay with them and recognises the calligraphy of her father in a box of books under the kitchen table, the first encounter we have with a manuscript called 'The Book of Records' a narrative by an unknown author, one that has been added to and copied and left as a message for various characters who became lost over the years.

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.

We are taken back to China to the home of Ai Ming's father who is referred to as Sparrow, a composer at the music conservatory, one of his students Kai and his young cousin Zhuli, whose parents are the first to come under the harsh judgement of Mao's philosophy, because they were landlords, denounced, beaten, thrown from their homes, accused and sent to labour camps for unsubstantiated crimes. The young daughter is deposited with her Aunt and Uncle miles away in the city, under the protection of her Uncle who works for the regime.

The story follows these three musicians who are passionate about music (which will become the wrong kind of music) and to survive they must suppress their desires, their passion and compromise, the three of them each make different choices, that will affect those around them. The narrative around the musicians and some of the characters closely mirrors actual events that occurred in the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, the main concert hall now renamed He Luting Concert Hall, after the Director who "in 1968, after two years of violence and humiliation, was dragged before television cameras by Red Guards to be threatened and physically abused"

This is a tragic novel whose characters spirits are oppressed by a philosophical regime, which mutates into something equally oppressive after the death of Chairman Mao, for a while the younger generation without the memory of the era their parents generation suffered under (and somewhat judging of their inability to challenge the circumstances forced upon them), appear to revolt against the lack of freedom to choose their paths, until they too are brutally crushed in the events of Tianamen Square in 1989, ensuring the new generation understand the power and reach of an authoritarian regime, that no-one is immune to.

This is a must read novel if you wish to reflect on how recent Chinese history affects the present generations, how regimes affect generations of their populations and how even though subsequent generations may not have experienced the past, they continue to feel its effect in their lives today. ...more

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Jun 23, 2018 Kris Fernandez-Everett rated it really liked it · review of another edition

3.5/5. A complicated, intricate novel that asked an awful lot of its reader in order to stay engaged. Some of the deeper digressions into music were arcane and, to me, just a bit too precious, but musicians may have a deeper appreciation. The descriptions about Tiananmen Square in 1989 were, by turns, dreamlike and brutal, which I suppose would have been what the situation was like in real life had I been there and not just a teenager watching it on television. I didn’t enjoy this novel as much ...more

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Aug 16, 2016 toria (vikz writes) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

#amreading

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Mar 27, 2018 Hesper rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, china-taiwan, queer, in-between

For a variety of reasons, I've struggled with writing this review for months (I finished it in March; it's now December), so in the interest of keeping my resolution of writing at least a blurb about everything I read this year, I'll stick to some basic points.

It's a complex multigenerational epic about a Chinese family who immigrated to Canada, where the fallout of the past ends up mapping the paths of their present. The action moves fluidly back and forth between time periods, gradually hittin ...more

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