First, Swirl and her husband Wen the Dreamer are sent to a re-education camp as punishment for hiding valuable heirlooms and books in their home. The past timeline is divided into three parts, containing three sets of interrelated characters. With Ai-ming’s assistance, Marie deciphers her deceased father’s notebooks, which contain a series of stories called “The Book of Records.” Through these stories, she pieces together her and Ai-ming’s shared family histories and how events set into motion decades ago culminated in her present. In the present timeline, 10-year-old Marie Jiang and her mother take Ai-ming, a Chinese refugee, into their home in Vancouver, Canada. The narrative frequently shifts between the past and the present. Madeleine Thien’s “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” is a novel obsessed with the past and its malleability in the hands of the present, as it navigates the history of two families over the course of three generations, from the Chinese Civil War in the 1940s to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. “You could close a book and forget about it, knowing it would not lose its content when you stopped reading,” Sparrow muses, upon hearing Beethoven for the first time in nearly a decade, “but music wasn’t the same…it was most alive when it was heard.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |