1 review for Do Not Say We Have Nothing
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Do Not Say We Have Nothing
by Madeleine Thien
Description:
Winner of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize 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 generationsthose who lived through Maos 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-Mings father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during Chinas 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.
About The Author
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist.
She was educated at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. In 2001 Madeleine was awarded the Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Award for most promising writer under age 30.
Thien’s first book, Simple Recipes (2001), a collection of short stories, received the City of Vancouver Book Award, the VanCity Book Prize and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her novel, Certainty, has been published internationally. It won the Amazon.com / Books in Canada First Novel Award and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize.
Skryf Review
Good Read
A very powerful story, beginning with the cultural revolution and it’s effects on one family, followed through to the next generation. A family that is in love with music, Sparrow the composer, young Zhuli, a musician, Kai a closer friend also a composer/musician, all at the Shanghai composer, all will be caught up in its destruction with horrifying results. Starvation, separation, the camps, people turning on people, brutality, it is all here. Following one family lets us thoroughly get to know and identify with them. Through it all are chapters of a book of records, codes hidden inside, the unifying thread throughout the story. Marie, a young woman who will years later try to put everything together. The book finishes with Tiananmen Square, the same family line and what happens there and to them.
Hard to believe that was less than fifty years ago. An amazingly centered story, based on true events, a terrible look inside Mao’s China. It is hard to read this without being seriously effected oneself. Well written and well told, a hard to read story but so many suffered, so many died, the world needs to acknowledge their suffering, starting with one reader at a time.