Summary: Good Afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Madeleine Thien, Author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing, her third novel published this month by Norton and currently shortlisted for the Man Booker Award. Madeline was born in Vancouver. Her story collection is Simple Recipes, and she has also written Certainty and Dogs at the Perimeter. Since 2010 she has been part of the international faculty at the MFA program at City University of Hong Kong. So. Do Not Say we Have Nothing. First and usually somewhat daunting to me, there is a family tree. Which sometimes elicits a bit of a shudder. But this family tree is seamless and informative from the outset. A few flipping back and forths and you have a pretty good idea of the cast of characters. In brief summary: There is Big Mother Knife, a boisterous and matriarchal leader of a frequently fractured and torn asunder family. Her husband Ba Lute is equally boisterous and full of strength but in at least superficially, different ways. Swirl, Big Mama’s sister is a lovely woman, whose life is torn apart, as are many in the book and millions in real life by Mao’s cultural revolution. Her husband is Wen the Dreamer, who brings love, romance and the Book of Records, an unfinished series of notebooks around which much of the novel flows. Swirl’s previous life before Wen, is tragic in many ways. Big Mama and Ba Lute have three kids, Da Shan and Flying Bear, both again boisterous and good at heart. Their third son forms a part of one of the two groupings in the book. This is Sparrow an accomplished composer. His cousin Zhuli is a virtuoso violinist whose true heart is her music and she doesn’t waver from that. And his best friend is Jiang Kai, another gifted musician, a pianist whose path is somewhat different. Sparrow’s daughter Ai-Ming and Jiang Kai’s daughter Marie, together work to piece together the past and try to make sense of tragedy, heroism and a society torn asunder by the efforts of one man and the cult of his personality, that led to a conflagration of epic proportions. Maybe that is a mouthful, but it all slides together and forms, through the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a seamless whole that as we do our work creates a picture of a world that is gone but must be remembered.
