Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel

Mao Zedong’s late 1940s Land Reform Movement in China, which was meant to redistribute land to the peasantry and improve the well-being of the people, failed miserably. Over 36 million civilians starved to death, and the people were forced to hide their thoughts and beliefs, or risk torture and death. The post-Mao era continued the terror of the people and finally resulted in the protests and killings in Tiananmen Square. DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING is Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien’s epic, eloquent, and prizewinning novel--a pean to love, duality, memory, music, and the nature of stories and time. The fate of two families is depicted, and the merging of their stories is intricately bound together with their struggles.The classical musicians at the Shanghai Conservatory were forced to hide their thoughts and feelings, and they could not play music that had passion and individuality, unless it conformed to Mao’s view of tidy communism. If the musicians demonstrated their personal virtues, they were tortured, and their instruments destroyed. The cast of characters here hid the music they composed, and sang or hummed the notes quietly or silently. Their music was ripped from their lives, but not from their hearts, even as they were forced to work jobs that were in service to the communist government.Over 70 years of repression is covered in this novel, mostly 20th century but leading up to the re-opening of the Shanghai Conservatory in the early aughts. The duality of identity—the prescribed self and the true self—is the main theme, along with the beautiful music that the characters (many of them musicians) both created and listened to, with Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations (Bach) running throughout the novel, and a fictional Book of Records that the characters contributed to over the decades. It is non-linear, reminding the reader of the nature of time and the powerful, enduring nobility of music, as well as the confluence of politics and art. Duality is present everywhere in the novel, and the narrative thrusts us into two worlds at all times—the one authorized by the government, and the truth that we carry quietly inside.“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.” Thien does a remarkable, phenomenal job of balancing silence and music in the same thread, opposing forces that remain together.The opening lines are a pair in itself. “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.” The first pages introduce us to Jiang Li-ling (English name Marie Jiang) in Vancouver, where she lives with her mother in the early 1990s. A teenage relative, Ai-Ming, comes from China to live with them, as she was forced to flee the brutal attacks in Tiananmen Square. As the two girls grow closer, the family history is slowly uncovered. Marie learns that her father, Kai, was a concert pianist during the Cultural Reformation, and that Ai Ming’s father, Sparrow, was his instructor at the Shanghai Conservatory all those years ago. A set of notebooks called Historical Records serves as a motif and a frame for the story, and for a history that is both forgotten in a dense fog, and yet unforgettable, too. How these opposing concepts can be held together is actualized in the unfolding of the story. Lyrical, heartbreaking, tender, brutal, and staggering, this novel will stay with the reader for all time, like the Chinese history of its making.DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING won Canada’s top prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2016, and was short-listed for the Man Booker of the same year.

I was both drawn to and repelled by this book: Drawn in by the depictions of classical musicians, who truly do live within their music; and repelled by the horror of a whole nation being forced to live through the "cultural revolution" in China.I am a classical musician and a composer, and Ms Thein's descriptions of how Sparrow's music came to him were very much like what I have experienced with my own writing.I enjoyed the explanations of how Chinese characters make words. I enjoyed seeing the method of translating music into numbers. I identified with the musicians, all of whom, at least at one time or other, felt unworthy or not good enough to do justice to performing the music of great composers, and I have felt that pain too many times.At times I found this book confusing due to the story line skipping around to different dates and eras, and different characters speaking. Maybe I'm the only one who had to go back and review every night before I started reading the next new part of the story. I found the family chart in the front of the book helpful, and admit I had to go back and look at it almost every time I started a new chapter.This book was a lot of work for me to read, partly because of my own unfamiliarity with Chinese language and culture, and partly because it required concentration to stitch together the whole story from the disparate parts. It was worth the effort.

I adored this book, having read it for a shadow panel of Man Booker longlist nominees. While I loved it, it may not appeal to everyone. I will try to lay out why I loved it and then will end with my recommendations for what type of reader will enjoy this book. No spoilers.This perhaps was one of the most dense books from the 2016 Man Booker longlist. It took me quite a while to feel fully immersed in the book and it didn't grab hold of me immediately. Instead, my love for the novel grew slowly over the course of the book. The novel is quite complex and filled with so many characters that initially it is hard to follow. It's not that I wasn't enjoying it, it was just that it required some effort and concentration to figure out who was who and what was happening. However, my perseverance paid off because this was truly a dazzling and heart-wrenching story and one that is well worth the effort. Thien weaves in various narratives that ultimately presents readers with a multifaceted look at how revolution impacts the personal lives of multiple generations.Both plot and character development were complex and nuanced. Thien tackles historical events from China's civil war up to present day and fictionalizes how these events impacted a wide variety of characters. Throughout the narrative, love of music is front and center (and the books is structured in a similar way to a classical music score). The main families are musicians (Kai a pianist, Sparrow a composer, and Zhuli a violinist). Several key pieces of classical music (Bach's Goldberg Variations) serve as recurring motifs that highlight suffering and sacrifice. The writing is very strong and the book is original. Thien incorporates Chinese characters throughout, explaining the various meanings along with photographs and a variety of musical references.Once I moved past the initial parts of the novel I found it very compelling and hard to put down. I cried with the characters, astounded at the cruelty people suffered as family and friends turned against each other during the Chinese cultural revolution. I think this book will be a serious contender for the win. I would be astounded if this doesn't make the shortlist. A fantastic book and one that I highly recommend.Who will enjoy this book? I think this will appeal to those who love historical fiction and who are interested in Chinese history and politics. It is fairly dense and takes some concentration. If you like classical music, you'll probably appreciate this book much more. I recommend reading it while listening to the music referenced in the book. If you are the sort of reader who likes fast-paced, linear narratives you may struggle with this book.

Nice

A beautifully written and complex novel of small human lives in the face of history, remarkable for its capacity to capture intimate moments across a sweeping historical background of fifty years of revolution and counter-revolution. It's a novel layered with themes and stories that echo throughout the book, making it not so much a story as many stories intertwined.Strongly recommended for readers looking for a true, original novel by a writer of vision, whose language is at height of her ambition.

Fascinating story on 2 levels (China in Mao's time and Canada/USA more or less now). China and the atmosphere in Mao's time are so strange to me. The dialogs are strange, I often have the feeling I don't understand. But that doesn't matter, I read on. The language is strangely beautiful. It's all a bit wierd, but I guess that's how it was!!

Very well written. A lyrical description of the horrors of totalitarianism/extremism, making it clear that one should never opt for lack of liberty. If you are on the "right" side one day, you will easily be one the wrong one tomorrow.A beautiful and all consuming book.

Such devastating beauty in the elegant writing, the intermingling of literature and music, the simple poignancy of human connections.Such devastating tragedy in the violence of repression, the lost opportunities to create, the rupture of relationships.And the importance of memory, preserving both the beauty and the tragedy.One of the first things that struck me in reading Madeleine Thien’s “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” was the beautiful writing itself and more specifically her gift for evocative imagery:• Their incompatible love made her feel hollow, as if the world had turned out to be flat after all.• …it was as if the very air shrouded the buildings in paranoia.• …the elongated question mark of his body as he loped down the slippery walks…• He leaned toward the child like a comma in a line so that, momentarily, the child, confused, suspended his wailing…• The landscape passed in waves of green and yellow as if the country were an endless unharvested sea.It’s a gift of vision of both the outer eye and the inner eye. Thien draws into her descriptions concepts and pictures from totally different realms offering to us readers a deeper insight into the character and the scene.There is much beauty in how music and the written word are reflected as two tributaries of the same stream in this novel. They feed into each other becoming something new, and then part and move off on their own though richer now, only to reconnect in a different way later on: Wen the Dreamer’s “Book of Records,” Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” Sparrow’s unfinished “Symphony No. 3,” Prokofiev’s “Violin Concerto No. 1,” the poetry of Li Bai and Wang Wei inspiring Mahler to write his song symphony “Das Lied von der Erde” (The Song of the Earth), and Thien’s literary descriptions of music itself:• Yet Zhuli imagined that she could hear her father’s presence in the music just as clearly as if Wen the Dreamer’s name was written on the page.• But what was music? Every note could only be understood by its relation to those around it. Merged, they made new sounds, new colours, a new resonance or dissonance, a stability or rupture. Inside the pure tone of C was a ladder of rich overtones as well as the echoes of other Cs, like a man wearing many suits of clothing, or a grandmother carrying all her memories inside her.Thien beautifully sketches her characters with a fine brush that projects deeply intimate and yet tortured relationships within families including the narrator Li-ling and her mother, Sparrow and his daughter Ai-ming, Sparrow and his cousin Zhuli, Big Ma and her husband Ba Lute, Big Ma and her sister Swirl, and between lovers and would-be lovers especially Sparrow and Jiang Kai. Her writing is so deft that I was never aware of her developing these relationships. I was inside the story from the first page and living with the characters as they tentatively reached out to the other, faltered, fought, touched fingertips, tore up a loved-one’s manuscript, smiled at a sweet gesture and just as quickly averted their eyes.And then there is the multi-dimensional tragedy in “Do Not Say We Have Nothing”.I am a fan of historical fiction such as the novels of Hilary Mantel, Jane Urquhart, Viet Thanh Nguyen. I now add Thien to my list. Through the eyes and experiences of her characters, Thien has graphically and gut-wrenchingly recreated the repression, violence, and social upheaval of Mao Zedong’s attempt to reassert his authority over China’s Communist party through what came to be known as the Cultural Revolution from about 1966 to 1976. I am grateful to Thien for bringing alive a dramatic time in history that affected hundreds of millions of people and allowing me to experience it in the first person, so to speak, through her characters. And that experience is devastating with the forced relocations and separations from family, the shaming and torturing of citizens for what was maligned as “decadent” intellectual interests and artistic competence, the suppression of opportunities to create art, the unremitting attempts at brainwashing, the brutal suppression of dissent that Thien describes graphically in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.Sparrow’s inability to compose for such a long period of time during the Cultural Revolution is the most prominent example of the devastating loss that occurs when art that could have been, isn’t. It is not only that he was essentially forbidden to do compose. It was devastating because the repressive environment had silenced the music in his soul. Art was suppressed as well through the closing of the universities and the conservatories and the prohibition to perform works that had not been sanctioned. Sparrow reflects at one point on Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony:• This is a fragment, he thought, of something that once existed but that no longer grows here, like a corn field cut down…you could close a book and forget about it, knowing it would not lose its contents when you stopped reading, but music wasn’t the same, not for him, it was most alive when it was heard.The rupturing of relationships is portrayed by Thien in an under-stated style that ramps up the tension and the pathos to an intensity far greater than had she used a vociferous style. The secret long-term connection between Sparrow and Kai is heart-breakingly written:• “Sparrow, remember the classics that we memorized? The words are still true. ‘We have no ties of kinship or even provenance, but I am bound to him by ties of sentiment and I share his sorrows and misfortunes.’ We’ve waited our whole lives and now the country is finally opening up. I’ve been thinking…there are ways to begin again. We could leave.”• The possibilities before Sparrow, which should have given him joy, instead broke his heart. He was no longer the same person.Finally, Thien’s novel epitomizes the essentialness of memory and the active commitment to remembering. The “Book of Records,” with its dual literary and musical connotation, forms the core of this process of preserving memory. At the meta level, “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” serves the same function…and does so brilliantly.