![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Kai, Sparrow and Zhuli are all immensely talented musicians – it is music which holds them together, even though, as Kai is a Red Guard and Zhuli the daughter of a ‘counter-revolutionary’, the two are expected to be enemies. Thien achieves such clarity by underpinning the novel, both structurally and thematically, with music. 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. 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. From the very first sentence of Thien’s novel, the linguistic simplicity, even as it describes such emotional complexity, is shocking, refreshing. The first time to end his marriage and the second, when he took his own life’. The novel begins: ‘In a single year, my father left us twice. 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. ![]()
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