Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel Hardcover – Illustrated, October 11, 2016

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.

“Do Not Say We Have Nothing” was chosen as a summer read for my book club and I am so glad I gave it a read!My favorite part about the novel is how the past and present are intertwined. Thien does a fantastic job revealing events to the reader that are chronologically out of order. To link the past to the present, Thien introduces a multitude of characters and writes from each of their perspectives. Many of these characters end up interacting with one another, creating interrelation.I also enjoyed the novel’s historical elements and look into Chinese culture. One of the timelines within “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” takes place during the Cultural Revolution in China. I did not know much about this sociopolitical movement prior to reading Thien’s work. Throughout my time spent with the text, I learned much about Zedong’s cruelty and the millions of lives that were lost. With each chapter I read, I did more and more research and I appreciate the novel for pushing me to do so. In addition to learning more about historical events such as the Cultural Revolution, I was exposed to Chinese culture. Thien introduces to the reader to Chinese characters in the very first chapter. It was fascinating to learn how the meaning of certain characters change when they are combined with others.Though there were many parts of this novel I enjoyed, it took me a while to get into it. At times, the book put me into a reading slump. I think one of the reasons I had a hard time getting into this book can be attributed to the fact that there were too many characters and I didn’t connect with them. Their stories felt secondary to some of the musical and historical elements which were overwhelming in and of themselves. Music is tied to many of the characters and many composers and pieces were mentioned that I was not familiar with. Because so many references were made, I eventually gave up doing research because I just wanted to finish the story.That being said, I am grateful to have been introduced to Thien’s work! Her writing is both spectacular and complex.

The complex narrative layers that thread their way with cryptic unpredictability in this novel through Mao's Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square massacre carry with them the stories of many sad, unfulfilled lives. Sparrow's comment late on in the text that "I've been searching for myself, but I didn't expect to find so many selves of mine" bears testament to that sadness in one sense, whilst recognising the way Mao Zedong's decade- long madness in the 1960's "removed the wholeness of those left behind, and the truth they once knew vanished, unrecorded, unreal, like sound dissipating." The simile is apt, as Thien uses it to gauge the texture of history through cyclical periods of revolutionary brutality, but it is also important as a pointer to the musical underpinning that scores and streams its way through the various storylines. Glenn Gould's recordings of Bach's 'Goldberg Variations' reprise constantly, with Beethoven, Fauré and Prokofiev counterpointing the sick, destructive minds of the Gang of Four and Madame Mao. People die, people grieve and move on, each new self more attenuated than the last. The relationship between Kai and Sparrow is bravely and tenderly conceived and represents the most moving of all the novel's relationships, the more so after Kai's suicide following Sparrow's murder in the 1989 atrocity. The non-linear chronology of the narrative creates a bleakness to every journey and a sense, in the end, of weariness in the reader, which must be the worst indictment of all of the fatuous malevolence of Mao's madness. Under his rule, we are told, 36 million people died.

Do not waste your time unless your are willing to read 460 pages of unenjoyable, unclear sentences.You know there is a group of novelists who write awkward sentences , difficult to follow, and connect. Madeleine Thien is one of them.I sometimes think such sentences are product of a conscious effort.This amount of amount of annoyance and disengagement of the reader can not be achieved otherwise.Other annoying feature of the novel is it is just not clear who is the narrator.And you have no other choice than keep referring to family tree Wikipedia page to get who is who in the novel.You may begin with big excitement of going thorough a story in China from cultural revolution to Tiananmen Square.But, that mission is impossible.

Brilliantly realised, this blends the contemporary with the historical to create a family saga which examines the impact and aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I thought this was well-researched, intelligent, moving but not sentimental, dramatic without lapsing into melodrama. I found that the opening sections required patience and, for me, the story really took off when the central character Marie visits Hong Kong and the parallel narrative set in China’s past moves to the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution. As well as revisiting history and its impact on individual lives, the narrative raises issues that relate to China now, as well as the future of Hong Kong. I'd previously read non-fiction accounts of this period of Chinese history, notably Frank Dikotter’s work, and I found that Thien’s take on history greatly enhanced my understanding of the human cost of Mao’s policies. Thien’s main characters are musicians and the novel contains detailed references to Glenn Gould’s work, on the recommendation of another reader, I listened to Gould alongside reading the novel which enhanced my reading experience.

This is a complex book that uses classical music as a reference point for expression and individual freedom to contrast with the evolution of Chinese communism. It deals with quite well-known events and I'm not convinced it gave me new insight into these or Chinese culture although parts are very well written. Structurally it is also needlessly complicated.

The light touch of this novel allows it to approach the horrors of twentieth-century Chinese history, from the Great Leap Forward to Tiananmen Square, with a frankness that is at times breathtaking. It gets as close to tragedy as you could imagine without ever becoming prurient and without editorializing. Borrowing some musical structure from the Goldberg Variations composition that fascinates several of the major characters, it circles and doubles back and forward in time to elaborate on themes of loyalty, courage, self-expression, and sacrifice as they play out across four generations of two families, complete with a pair of star-crossed lovers so subtly drawn they seem always to be slipping away. Sometimes a work easier to admire than to enjoy, and occasionally bogged down in the sheer number of characters and volume of biographical detail, especially for the older generations, it's at its most compelling when detailing the doomed Cultural Revolution days of the three conservatory musicians Sparrow, Jiang Kai, and Zhuli.