It’s a possibility Ms. Thien examines throughout the novel: “How time is bent and elastic and repeated. $26.95.. My mother saw a piano for the first time when she was 11 … (It sounds as if it’s coming from a Communist Twitter bot.) There is a doubleness to Marie’s narration, as an older narrator looks back on her childhood, yet this double vision never swamps the very distinctive child’s voice. Yet years later, he found himself able to compose again. The Vancouver Sun book club is discussing Madeleine Thien’s novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing. The unobserved life has not disappeared completely. Thien achieves such clarity by underpinning the novel, both structurally and thematically, with music. Marie never finds her beloved Ai-Ming. The following edition of this book was used to create the study guide: Thien, Madeleine. The next section, called Part Zero, reverses the order, counting down from seven to one. ( Log Out / They are never lost completely. (Zhuli’s assessment of a gorgeous-but-bloodless fellow violinist: “She played Beethoven as if he had never been alive.”), But slowly, sentiment begins to shift at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Ms. Thien has that rare, instinctive sense of what it’s like for a person’s brain to be a hostage to its inner score — the call inside these characters’ heads is always louder than the call of the outside world, most fatally that of the Communist Party — and her observations about Bach and Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Debussy are some of the book’s sweetest pleasures, as are her ruthless critiques of musicians. Do Not Say We Have Nothing. ” But the Book of Records, with its constant emendations, suggests another possibility. The Do Not Say We Have Nothing quotes below are all either spoken by Zhuli or refer to Zhuli. Slowly, Marie pieces together her father’s history and his country’s — through Ai-ming’s stories, through her own research, and (most obliquely) through a series of notebooks found among Kai’s personal effects called the Book of Records, a piecemeal novel that was copied, amended and updated each time it came into the possession of another steward. At the novel’s heart are Sparrow, Kai, and Zhuli, a magical triumvirate bound together by their love of classical music and one another. The first time to end his marriage and the second, when he took his own life’. Sparrow, his teacher, is a shy composer. Ai-Ming and Zhuli look identical. Her own newness and originality is found in her attempt to rewrite the past. As one of the characters rhetorically asks in “Do Not Say We Have Nothing,” the new novel by Madeleine Thien: “What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?”. Ms. Thien captures painfully well the depersonalization and numbness of living through the Cultural Revolution, particularly the “day-to-day insincerity” of casual conversation, larded with perfunctory praise for the party and Chairman Mao. Finally, Thien’s novel epitomizes the essentialness of memory and the active commitment to remembering. It is music rather than fiction which provides her characters with consolation. Give it the time and attention it deserves, though, and an understated yet chilling exposé of life in 20th-century China will unfold. But he couldn’t complete that particular piece. And so the story begins: Li-ling, whose English name is Marie, is a Chinese-Canadian mathematician recalling for us the mystery of her father’s sudden departure and suicide when she was 10 years old. Porque No digáis que no tenemos nada es una novela construida sobre los cimientos del contrapunto. History is unfinished, continuing, like the novel itself, which ends without any definite sense of closure, with the only certainty that ‘not everything will pass’. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one: ). It was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Music, writing, time and history are inseparable in Thien’s work. The radical, forbidden book was passed along in secret, generally to “resistance fighters, spies and dreamers,” always embedded with clues about that particular person’s circumstances and whereabouts. If you are walking straight into a headwind, it is a triumph simply to keep yourself upright. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. My words cannot begin to do justice to hers, so here is the powerful opening of her new novel, "Do Not Say We Have Nothing". Sparrow’s cousin Zhuli, a teenage girl 10 years his junior, is a violinist and charming life force. It’s a virtuoso stretch of writing, rendered with a blue-flame intensity, blazing and tactile and full of life. Say Nothing (2001) Plot. “I have this idea that … maybe, a long time ago, the Book of Records was set in a future that hadn’t yet arrived,” Zhuli says. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. She described the two different yet harmonious lines representing the ‘heartbreak’ and love between the two families, noting the ‘joy and sorrow’ and ‘simplicity and complexity’ which weave the Goldberg variations together. Be the first to contribute! Critic Reviews for Say Nothing. This is her second novel that weaves traumatic episodes from Asia’s twentieth-century history into the experience of present-day diasporas. It is a mark of Thien’s talent that the book remains engrossing: Alice Munro noted the ‘clarity, the emotional purity’ of Thien’s work early on. Critically acclaimed, in 2016 the author was awarded both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award for this novel. Although Thien shows how language in a political climate holds enormous power, she also explores the inadequacy of words. I want my own psychiatric consultant to have full access to Falcone including blood work. Thien wants her novel to be published in China, even if in order to have it so, the third part of the book – which focuses on Ai-Ming’s involvement in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations – needs to be cut; even if that means it ‘ends mid-sentence’. Her depictions of the Red Guard’s brutality are graphic and difficult to read: Zhuli’s parents, property owners, are trussed like chickens, beaten and sent to re-education camps. Fiction is a call to the present to answer for what has happened, to recognise the past and make it mean something, to challenge the present with alternative narratives. Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Their histories return in their many acts of creation. It is a beautiful, sorrowful work. The fragmentary nature of history and fiction – the impossibility of knowing the whole story – recurs throughout Thien’s work. Their story unfolds in front of the curious eyes of a girl named Marie, the child of Kai, a pianist who lived during the Cultural Revolution, one of the most horrifyingly brutal periods in Chinese history. She refuses, as her characters do, to vanish before power – even if her work is published in fragments, it remains subversive. Knopf Canada, 2016. ISBN-13: 9780393609882 Summary Winner, 2016 Giller Prize Winner, 2016 Governor General's Literary Award It is a beautiful, sorrowful work. Moments of humour and human contact emerge which surface above the brutality, the physicality of the revolution. Ai-ming’s father, a composer named Sparrow, mentored Marie’s father, Kai, back in the 1960s, when they were at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music together. An obsessive need to … Tilly Nevin ‘Do Not Say We Have Nothing’ is published by Granta, RRP £12.99. The year was 1989, and his death roughly coincided with the massacre in Tiananmen Square, although he was in Hong Kong at the time. (Ms. Thien pulled this from the historical record; her novel has endnotes.) The music they loved was forbidden. W.W. Norton & Company. It follows a 10-year-old girl and her mother who invite a Chinese refugee into their home. But deferral of closure in Thien’s novel doesn’t mean utter loss. Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a perfect example of how a writer’s imagination keeps alive the memory of a country’s and its people’s past when the country itself tries to erase the history. Change ). Students began writing essays asking, “What good is this music, these empty enchantments, that only entrench the bourgeoisie and isolate the poor?”. “When his cousin played his work,” Ms. Thien writes, “it was as if she sifted the dust away, lost the notes and found the music.”, The background of “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” pulses with music. She knew her father had played piano for Mao Zedong, but her home did not even have a piano. Noodle sellers, exhilarated, are giving away food. Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a novel by Madeleine Thien published in 2016 in Canada. Do Not Say We Have Nothing is an overlong multi-generational saga mostly set in China that deals with more than 60 years of the country’s history, starting with 1949’s Communist Revolution moving onto the Cultural Revolution (1966) and climaxing with the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The novel begins: ‘In a single year, my father left us twice. People disappear throughout the novel. This pointless dissipation of energy and talent perfectly describes the horrors that befell classical musicians during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. (He jumped from a ninth-floor window.) Even before the tanks roll in, the reader is left to wonder if history is simply destined to repeat itself. Her novel refuses to break with the past, recognising that everything is circular, repetitive. They were tortured and humiliated, accused of treachery and vanity and dispatched to work in the farms and factories of the hinterlands. LitCharts Teacher Editions. “Do Not Say We Have Nothing,” shortlisted this year for the Man Booker Prize, is Ms. Thien’s third novel. The novel culminates, perhaps inevitably, with the protests in Tiananmen Square. It is a beautiful, sorrowful work. At the meta level, “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” serves the same function…and does so brilliantly. We want to hear what you have to say but need to verify your account. A burning mattress “flew in slow motion onto an army truck.” Sparrow crumples under the weight of a heavyset worker who has been pierced by a bullet. We will be holding an online, public chat with Thien next month, which will be … There it got lost, as did the man he was supposed to become. If characters can communicate for years through passing a work of fiction between them, Marie and Ai-Ming can also find each other by doing so. Do Not Say We Have Nothing begins at the end, so to speak. The notes he sought were buried in the past. Rachel Dawes: I do what I do to keep thugs like Falcone behind bars, not in therapy. The beginning of Madeleine Thien’s Man Booker-shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing is as startling and seductive as the ending is frustrating. See also. Sparrow listens to Gould’s variations in Shanghai years before Marie, our narrator and Kai’s daughter, decides to analyse Gould for her PhD thesis. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Kai is a tough orphan from the provinces and a gifted pianist. “We have nothing that is really our own; we hold everything as a loan.” ― Nicolas Poussin. It was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016. The implication is that China is still an unfinished work — just like Sparrow’s Symphony No. It drove many to suicide. ( Log Out / Do Not Say We Have Nothing examines the lives of musicians in 20th-century China, and the effect of the monumental political changes that had ruinous effects on people’s lives. Madeleine writes of civil war, revolutions, neurosciences and the intense drama that mental health issues can ignite in peoples' lives. “Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing is an elegant, nuanced and perfectly realized novel that, fugue-like, presents the lives of individuals, collectives, and generations caught in the complexities of history. Both composing music and writing are transgressive acts – writing doesn’t necessarily enforce an authorized, accepted national history, but allows for private stories to pass between generations of families, stories which tell a different narrative. Love permeates the text and many of the characters love each other so intensely that they merge together. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Thien's 2016 novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction and the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. And all the characters are driven to desperate measures to preserve their ‘core’ in a world that drives it to splinter. Do Not Say We Have Nothing Madeleine Thien, 2016 W.W. Norton & Company 480 pp. In a book so long and seemingly convoluted, there is always the danger the story will get lost in historical detail as we move into the worlds of the other characters – Kai and his two friends Sparrow and Zhuli, who live in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, and Sparrow’s daughter Ai-Ming, who is involved in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. The voices of children and teenagers are conveyed powerfully in Thien’s novel. The unobserved life has not disappeared completely. Thien has said, ‘It’s not an idea we have in the West where newness and originality is always a break from the past’. In an interview with the BBC Thien explained her decision to use Bach’s counterpoint to structure her work. The larger saga unfurls like silk — and proves similarly resistant to knots, a testament to Ms. Thien’s storytelling skills. DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING By Madeleine Thien 473 pp. ‘Do Not Say We Have Nothing’ is published by Granta, RRP £12.99. Despite the fact that listening to most of it was banned in the Cultural Revolution, Kai, Sparrow and Zhuli remain obsessed with works of Western classical music which for them serve as liberating forces. 3, a thing of true beauty, which he was forced to hide in the roof of his house. Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award // Finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction "A powerfully expansive novel…Thien writes with the mastery of a conductor." Review: In ‘Do Not Say We Have Nothing,’ a Portrait of Souls Snuffed Out, Gary Doak/Writer Pictures, via Associated Press. In advance of its U.S. publication, it was longlisted (fiction list) for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence. “Do Not Say We Have Nothing,” shortlisted this year for the Man Booker Prize, is Ms. Thien’s third novel. Tracing the intertwined lives of two families, moving from Revolutionary China to Canada, this ambitious work explores the persistence of past and the power of art, raising meaningful questions for … Wittgenstein wrote about this with what looks like staggering foresight in 1930: that in a time of cultural impoverishment, “the strength of the individual is wasted through the overcoming of opposing forces & frictional resistances.”. — New York Times Book Review , Do Not Say We Have Nothing, A Novel, Madeleine Thien, 9780393354720 It is a gorgeous intergenerational saga, stretching as far back at the 1940s and traversing China from Beijing in the north to … Instant downloads of all 1417 LitChart PDFs (including Do Not Say We Have Nothing). Published by Granta Books. We are on Twitter @Oxford_Culture, Facebook, and Instagram, […] Y, por supuesto, lo consigue con una prosa lírica, una documentación impecable y unos personajes extremadamente cercanos, pero, sobre todo, a través de la estructura. Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a bit of a departure. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. In which I review Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien.★ Get the book here! The Book of Records, found in fragments, encompasses the ‘unobserved’, the inner creative impulse, the ‘core’ of the self. Home / Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Zhuli, Kai and Sparrow each make different choices about how to survive the violent assault on their identities, not one of them happy, all of them worthy of a dirge. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life.”. One father of a student complains to Sparrow: “These kids think it’s all up to them. Written with exquisite intimacy, wit and moral complexity, Do Not Say We Have Nothing magnificently brings to life one of the most significant political regimes of the 20th century and its traumatic legacy, which still resonates for a new generation. Two months later, Marie and her mother received a letter from a woman in China asking them to provide shelter for her daughter, Ai-ming, who had gotten in trouble during the demonstrations. Music in Do Not Say We Have Nothing is, like writing, a record of human history, of personal history rather than the public narrative we are taught; Sparrow creates music even when he is forbidden to do so. Just as music ‘echoes’ through the novel, the past echoes in the present and echoes are called back from the future. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Just click the "Edit page" button at the bottom of the page or learn more in the Synopsis submission guide. Marie is a ‘well-adjusted’ child in school, and yet at home still hears her father’s voice years after his death. Ai-Ming says, ‘The things we never say aloud … end up here … in private places’. ( Log Out / Absolute attachment towards possessions and the continuous desire to accumulate and acquire more and more can become a serious impediment in life. They have no understanding of fate.”. Their instruments were destroyed. She refuses, as her characters do, to vanish before power – even if her work is published in fragments, it remains subversive. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize as well as the Women's Prize for Fiction. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. With insight and compassion, Madeleine Thien presents a compelling tale of China of twentieth century.” Their virtues — their virtuosity — were brutally recast as moral weaknesses and a national threat. As music ‘ echoes ’ through the novel culminates, perhaps inevitably, with the,! 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