“Don't Say We Have Nothing” is a novel by Canadian writer Madeleine Tien, the story of a Chinese family amid 40 years of war, repression and persecution. The book won Canada's most prestigious literary award, the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and has been translated into 18 languages. BookJack talks about how Tien's novel comprehends Chinese historical trauma and what contemporary Russian writers should learn from it.
"Do Not Say We Have Nothing" won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2016 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and an Edward Stanford Prize; and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize 2017. The novel was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2016 and longlisted for a Carnegie Medal.
The novel by the Canadian writer of Chinese-Malay origin Madeleine Thien literally begs for comparison with something oriental: either a lacquer box concealing many different compartments, or an openwork ball cut from a single piece of bone so skillfully that several more rotate inside it. smaller spheres, nested one inside the other. Quite European in terms of style and character, “Don't Say We Have Nothing” yet demonstrates an amazing - and distinctly non-European - harmony of whole and part, tiny detail and complex multi-piece composition.
In the first - the simplest and crudest - approximation, Tien's novel can be described as a family history against the background of more than forty years of Chinese history - from the revolution and civil war to the tragedy in Tiananmen Square. However, with this version of interpretation, too many significant details are left overboard: the narrative "frame" is the fate of the main character, a young woman mathematician who lives in Canada today and is restoring the history of her family bit by bit; and the narrative-structuring story of the mystery book; and several intricately intertwined love lines; and, most importantly, music generously pouring from every page.
In 1989, with the ten-year-old Lilin-Mari (emigrant parents gave her two names at birth - Chinese and European), events occur that break her whole life into "before" and "after". Lilin's father, formerly a talented pianist Jiang Kai, leaves his wife and daughter to go to Hong Kong and there - without any explanation - commit suicide by throwing himself out of the window. A few months later, young Ai-Ming, a refugee student who had illegally left China after the events in Tiananmen Square, and the daughter of the composer Sparrow, an elder friend of Lilin's late father, appear in their empty house with her mother. Together, the girls will find in Jiang Kai's papers a handwritten notebook - a fragment of a large novel telling about the adventures of brave lovers - the young man Da Wei and the girl on May Fourth - during the revolutionary turmoil. The proportions of the notebook are not without reason reminiscent of a small door: the text enclosed in it, which in their family is called the "Book of Notes", together with the oral stories of Ai-Ming, becomes for Lilin a portal to the past - exciting, unforgettable and eternally elusive.
Lilin learns that this notebook is one of many presented to her great-aunt Ai-Ming, a beautiful singer named Curl, her future husband, the young poet Wen the Dreamer. Taking care of Curl, Wen every week sent the girl one of the notebooks he found at the second-hand dealer's and rewritten with his own hand, and their love was born from impeccable hieroglyphs on yellowish paper. However, the family of Wen and Zavitok was not prepared for happiness: he is a descendant of landowners, and in the terrible years of the Cultural Revolution, the spouses are sent to labor re-education camps, and their daughter, little Zhu Li, ends up in the house of her aunt, sister Zvitok and his own grandmother Ai-Min.
Zhu Li is a talented violinist, and since childhood she has a friendship with her older cousin, a young but already distinctly brilliant composer Sparrow, the very one who is destined to become Ai-Ming's father in the future. And then, in their welded tandem, a third appears - a desperate and desperate young student Sparrow, pianist Jiang Kai, a talented guy from the village, the only one in his family who survived the terrible famine of 1959 and is ready to do anything to avoid the fate of his relatives - humble and dumb peasants. Within this trinity of musicians - two gifted young men and one very young daring girl - a complex and fragile system of relationships arises, which - along with all European music in China - will be washed away by another wave of party repression.
Acquiring many colorful details, unwinding in several chronological directions at once, absorbing dozens of inserted short stories (each is a novel in miniature) and freely expanding to make room for more and more new characters, Madeleine Thien's story, however, at no moment doesn't get chaotic. The organizing beginning for him is the very "Book of Notes", with which the heroine's immersion into the past begins. Repeatedly rewritten by different people in different - mostly tragic - circumstances, for the reader it serves as a plot engine (who is the author of this mysterious book, and is it by chance that the heroes constantly meet recognizable details in its text?), And for the characters themselves it turns into a system of codes and secret signs, understandable only to the initiated.
So, remembering his comrades who perished in the labor camp, Wen the Dreamer decides to fill the fictional world of the novel with their true names and deeds, so that "they will continue to live there, as dangerous as revolutionaries and disembodied as ghosts." The end-to-end metaphor of the book as an endlessly lasting past, into which each subsequent scribe-reader brings something new, holds the text of the novel together better than the most rigid plot frame, allowing one to see one big one behind the overgrowth of disparate stories - global, full-blooded, dramatic and at the same time chamber-touching. Like a classic miniature, Madeleine Thien's novel "works" on two levels at once - micro and macro, looking equally good whether with a narrow focus or from a bird's eye view.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution is comparable in scale of its absurd brutality to the Stalinist era in Russia (and significantly exceeds it in terms of the number of victims) and in the same way needs to be comprehended and articulated. In this sense, the Russian reader will undoubtedly see in Madeleine Thien's novel Don't Say We Have Nothing, many parallels with the latest Russian literature, which is energetically working on our historical trauma. However, the approach proposed by Thien is radically different from everything that we can observe in Russia.
Plunging into times not just dark, but impenetrably black, she, nevertheless, as if manages to bypass the phases of denial, bargaining and anger, immediately moving on to acceptance and mourning. As a result, Tien's novel looks neither polemical, nor revelatory, nor even hysterically tragic. The musicality that permeates the narrative (it is no coincidence that most of the characters are somehow connected with music) harmonizes and softens the horror of what is described, and the wounds inflicted on China literally in front of the reader's eyes - no, they do not disappear, but are mercifully dragged on by the veil of understanding and forgiveness. By rejecting pathos, denunciations and direct emotional pressure, Madeleine Tien achieves a paradoxical effect: through her optics, the Chinese historical trauma looks both overwhelmingly horrible and comfortingly healing.
This article was sponsored by Sonja Ortman
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