Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Thien)

Do Not Say We Have Nothing 
Madeleine Thien, 2016
W.W. Norton & Company
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393609882


Summary
Winner, 2016 Giller Prize
Winner, 2016 Governor General's Literary Award
Shortlisted, 2016 Man Booker Prize

Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations—those who lived through Mao’s 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-Ming’s father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China’s 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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Where—Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—Simon Fraser University; University of British Columbia
• Awards—Giller Prize; Governor General's Literary Award
• Currently—lives in Montreal, Quebec


Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, to a Malaysian Chinese father and a Hong Kong Chinese mother, she studied contemporary dance at Simon Fraser University and literature at the University of British Columbia.

Thien's first book, Simple Recipes (2002), is a collection of short stories, of which Alice Monroe said, "I am astonished by the clarity and ease of the writing, and a kind of emotional purity."

Thien's first novel, Certainty (2007), has been translated into 16 languages. Her second novel, Dogs at the Perimeter (2012), about the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide, has been translated into 9 languages.

In 2008, Thien was invited to participate in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, as well as its 2010 State Department-funded study tour of the U.S. The tour involved eight international writers who were asked to explore the unresolved legacies of American history. Thien's essay, "The Grand Tour: In the Shadow of James Baldwin," concludes the 2015 program's essay collection, Fall and Rise, American Style: Eight International Writers Between Gettysburg and the Gulf. The study tour was also the subject of filmmaker Sahar Sarshar's documentary, Writing in Motion: A Nation Divided.

From 2010 to 2015, Thien was part of City University of Hong Kong's International Faculty in the MFA Program for Creative Writing. After Hong Kong's crackdown on freedom of speech, she wrote a controversial essay about the writing program's abrupt closure for the UK's Guardian newspaper.

In 2013, Thien became the Simon Fraser University Writer-in-Residence.

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. It was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In advance of its U.S. publication, it was longlisted (fiction list) for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence.

Thien is the common-law partner of novelist Rawi Hage.

Awards and recognition
2001 - Canadian Authors Association Award (most promising Canadian writer under 30)
2002 - City of Vancouver Book Award, VanCity Book Prize, Ethel Wilson Prize
2010 - Ovid Prize
2015 - Frankfort Book Fair's de:LiBeraturpreis
2016 - Governor General's Award, Scotiabank Giller Prize
(Author bio adaptd from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/07/2016.)

Book Reviews
[A] beautiful, sorrowful work. The book impresses in many senses: It stamps the memory with an afterimage; it successfully explores larger ideas about politics and art (the mind is never still while reading it); it has the satisfying, epic sweep of a 19th-century Russian novel, spanning three generations and lapping up against the shores of two continents…The background of Do Not Say We Have Nothing pulses with 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.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times


A powerfully expansive novel…Thien writes with the mastery of a conductor who is as in command of the symphony’s tempo as she is attuned to the nuances of each individual instrument.
Jiayang Fan - New York Times Book Review


[A] graceful, intricate novel whose humanity threads through it like a stirring melodic line.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal


A moving and extraordinary evocation of the 20th-century tragedy of China, and deserves to cement Thien’s reputation as an important and compelling writer.
Guardian (UK)


Extraordinary…It recalls the panoramic scale and domestic minutiae of the great 19th-century Russian writers…A highly suspenseful drama…as courageous and far-reaching as principled resistance itself.
Financial Times (UK)


A magnificent epic of Chinese history, richly detailed and beautifully written.
London Times


A deeply profound and moving tale where music, mathematics and family history are beautifully woven together in a poetic story…Full of wisdom and complexity, comedy and beauty, Thien has delivered a novel that is both hugely political and severe, but at the same time delicate and intimate, rooted in the tumultuous history of China.
Herald (UK)


Filled with intrigue, shifting loyalties, broken families, and unbroken resistance, this novel is beautifully poetic and as carefully constructed as the Bach sonatas that make frequent appearance in the text. Thien's reach—though epic [makes]...a lovely fugue of a book.
Publishers Weekly


[An] ambitious saga explores the upheavals in Chinese politics from 1949 to the present through several generations of friends, family, and lovers whose intersecting destinies are upturned by the sweep of events.... Mythic yet realistic, panoramic yet intimate...and deeply haunting.
Kirkus Reviews

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