Musée des Confluences

By Musée des Confluences

I was so impressed with this museum in Lyon that I wanted to comment on it by writing up my notes to this museum guide. It’s one of two very good museums in Lyon that we visited, the other being the Lugdunum - Musée et Théâtres romains.

The Musée des Confluences is a fairly recent update of a traditional museum of natural history. It presents the story of life on earth, including the role of homo sapiens in the diversity of cultures and the chain of life. It takes a multidisciplinary approach to four themes, looking at the work through both a scientific and a symbolic perspective.

More concretely, each section of the museum presents themes such as the origin of life through diverse artistic works as well as through a display of scientific knowledge. The first gallery opens with contemporary creation-story artworks from Inuit and Australian Indigenous peoples alongside models of early hominids that might have existed 25,000 years ago. Similar juxtapositions happen throughout the museum. For me, this puts the scientific facts in the museum into a broad human context, and gives meaning to a history of life that in other exhibitions can be very abstract. (The Lugdunum museum did something similar with the Gallo-Roman history.) It also shows a philosophical approach that values distinct kinds of knowledge, including ways of expressing humans’ relationships with the world.

The Origins gallery illustrates mind-blowing diversity of life, and where humans fit into it (almost invisible). It shows the evolution of life from the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) to the domains of bacteria, archaea and eukarya (cellular organisms, where we fit) in response to the environment.

The Species gallery looks at aboriginal and European perspectives of how nature is connected and the impact of humans on the environment. It suggests that the human-animal boundary is just an idea that has existed in western thought for only about 300 years – and for many, it is breaking down again.

The Societies gallery looks at the social organization in religion, military objects, technologies. And the Eternities gallery looks at visions of the “beyond” through shamanism, funerary cultures and conceptions of death. These two galleries seemed a bit spotty and confused. It was as if the curators wanted to create a narrative from the variety of pieces in their collection rather than illustrating the narrative with their collection. Perhaps at this point, I was overloaded and didn’t see the connections they wanted to make, but reading the guide didn’t make it any more meaningful. More likely, the project of representing the meaning of human society and life in a few hundred objects and one hundred pages is too much to expect. Nevertheless, the galleries were a thoughtful exploration of some of the biggest themes in human thought, and worth more than an hour’s walk through.

The guide itself is an imaginative approach to representing the galleries. It’s bound into five sections, one for each gallery plus an introduction, with a fold-out cover wrapping around each section. It’s as if there were five separate booklets within one cover. Each one has many illustrations, with a minimum amount of text to highlight the ideas. I like the idea, but the binding makes the guide very stiff and it doesn't open well enough to comfortably view and think about the pages.

I also loved the building, a striking glass crystal enclosing the galleries and the related facilities on the point of land where the Saone and Rhone rivers converge. Rising on the escalator through the lobby up to the top of the building (and the excellent coffee shop) not only gives visitors a great view of the region, but it also creates a sense of openness and wonder that’s entirely appropriate for the museum.

The Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief

By Maurice Leblanc, 1907 (translation, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos) 

I picked this up while travelling in Porto, looking for something that would be engaging and not too demanding, in a compact portable format. It was perfect.

The stories are relatively short, but long enough to develop a complex plot and raise questions about the morality of thieves and gentlemen. The language in this original translation is in the dated formal style of the past century, like Conan Doyle, which fits the text.

Set in the bourgeois society of late 19^th century France, the stories involve clever mysteries like a Sherlock Holmes story, with the twist of being told from the point of view of the master criminal. Like Holmes, they frequently point to the ineptness of the police forces, but Leblanc adds the issues involving people of wealth, power and class. Leblanc makes a point of parody with “Holmlock Shears,” especially in the story “Holmlock Shears Arrives Too Late.”

What’s interesting in these stories is not so much the mystery, but the social circumstances they reveal. Lupin’s motivation seems to arise from the suggestion that he is the son of a mistreated woman and uses theft in order to humiliate the rich who caused his mother’s downfall. He often identifies with the working classes, while taking advantage of his privilege as a wealthy bourgeois. He enjoys showing up the patronizing police. And he shows a strong sense of justice in wanting to help or protect other bourgeois who have been robbed or threatened. While a sense of justice is featured in the Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, Holmes more often treats his cases as an intellectual puzzle, and, in my recollection, seems to have little awareness for London’s working class.

Arsène Lupin is a dedicated and principled vigilante, especially in defending the honour of women. Leblanc shows him as a human with a nervous heart in the presence of the woman he has fallen for, a curious twist of the psychology of the master thief. In one story, he gives back the items that he has stolen in order that the woman will not think he is a thief. Did Sherlock Holmes ever show affection toward women, aside perhaps from his landlady and the more modern stories that try to correct an evident misogyny?

Lupin toys with a complex moral balance. In one story, he sets a trap for a murderer, which results in Lupin keeping a gem that the murderer stole, executing a tricky moral trade to his benefit. He is a thief, but he steals from people who are worse than he is.

Lupin also uses a distinctive strategy to increase his fame and add to the embarrassment of his victims – he advertises! While Holmes has his Dr Watson, and there seems to be a knowledgeable narrator in Lupin’s stories, Lupin takes the initiative of buying newspaper notices to draw attention to his capers and his victims. Since he’s not looking for a clientele like Holmes, this can only be to show off his superiority and his accomplishments – and occasionally to misdirect attention. As a self-made man, he puts considerable time and effort into creating himself and building his public persona and fame. This desire for attention perhaps also comes from his sense of overcoming an unjust life and challenging the bourgeois morality that surrounds him.

It’s some time since I’ve read Conan Doyle and I certainly have not read all of his stories, so I hope I’m not mischaracterizing his hero. I enjoy reading the Holmes stories, but Leblanc’s “gentleman-thief” stories add some additional layers that make them a bit more satisfying. Overall, this was excellent holiday reading – engaging, convenient and thoughtful. 

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

By Walter Rodney, 1972

Although written in 1972 – and the language is somewhat dated – this book seems to hold up very well and still offers a compelling explanation of the relationship between underdeveloped countries and the capitalist countries.

Walter Rodney takes the view that Africa and, by extension, other colonized countries need a radical departure from the international capitalist system to develop in a way that meets their own needs and priorities. While heavily focussed on the economic side of development, he also emphasizes the destruction of the former African social systems, and the need to create new social structures to build a fulfilling egalitarian society.

Helpfully for me, Rodney begins with a historical overview of Africa before colonialism, highlighting the continent's transition from communalism to early class-based societies. He explores various regions, such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Nubia and Zimbabwe, and describes their varied societal structures and economic activities. In his description, Africa's pre-contact state was generally transitional, moving towards more advanced class-based societies.

In looking at the impact of European contact, Rodney shows a variety of uneven consequences on political, military and ideological spheres. He describes in detail the economic and social consequences of slave capturing and trading, and how it came to an end when the needs of modernized industry required compliant, not forced, workers.

The end of the slave trade, however, marked a shift in focus to the exploitation of Africa's resources and a new form of colonialism. Rodney argues that European economic growth and dominance relied heavily on resources extracted from Africa, perpetuating a cycle of exploitation.

The late 19^th century period of colonization facilitated the export of surplus profits to Europe, leading to the expropriation of African land and minerals. The colonial period saw the establishment, aided by African intermediaries, of monopolies, extractive practices and the integration of African economies into a global capitalist system for the benefit of Europe and North America.

Rodney identifies many impacts of colonialism, including the destruction of traditional states, the undermining of women's roles, ethnic divisions, monoculture and a limited and exploitative education system. He argues that colonial development hindered Africa's progress by preventing the formation of local industries and perpetuating dependency on Western markets. He also rejects the argument that Africa benefited by colonialization through development, pointing out that education, transportation, financial structures and other developments focused solely on creating conditions for profitable development by the colonizing countries. These systems inhibited the building of vigorous indigenous societies.

In the postscript, Rodney underscores the need for Africa's true development to focus on internal needs rather than conforming to the exploitative relationships of the international capitalist market. Rodney says that Africa needs to reject Western-centric approaches in order to address its own internal priorities for genuine progress. “[Exceptional leaders] were those who either completely rejected the worldview of capitalism, or at least stuck honestly to those idealistic tenets of bourgeois ideology, such as individual freedom – and, through experience, they could come to realize that the ideals remained myths in a society based on the exploitation of man by man.”

This book gave me a much clearer view of how international development works under capitalism, with plenty of concrete examples and statements of principles. While it is based in a particular history and a Marxist analysis, it seems to apply well to contemporary situations, including the colonialism of settlers in North America. The forms of (under)development available to Indigenous peoples here in Canada continue to benefit the colonizers and small numbers of leaders who are willing to continue under capitalist economic development. As in Africa, American Indigenous peoples need to identify their own priorities.

The Secret History

By Donna Tartt (1992)

I feel some ambivalence about this book. It’s similar in many ways to Tartt’s novel, The Goldfinch, which I mostly liked. Both are about the development of a young man following a traumatic event. Goldfinch’s Theo is a bit more likeable than History’s Richard, although both are rather passive participants in their life stories. The writing style is similar – in fact, some sections, like the ones when the protagonists fall into a dreamy, prolonged illness could almost be interchangeable. Both have a cast of colourful characters, although these are more fully drawn in Goldfinch. Perhaps what I’m feeling is just a sense that Tartt has grown as a writer in the 20-odd years between writing the two books.

Yet it seems to me that there is more to Goldfinch than to History. If Goldfinch is broadly about the ability of art and beauty to heal and guide, what is History about? A group of students work with a charismatic professor who tries to teach them about life by studying Greek philosophy and literature. They see themselves as an elite, in a different world from most of their contemporaries. Yet their Greek guidance leads them to a series of heinous acts, despair, emptiness and suicide. Their mentor turns out to be shallow and self-protective, and he abandons them without even pausing to say good bye. (This is not a total surprise as, for all that the students esteem him, there’s little evidence of his character in the story.) So the takeaway from the book seems to be that friendship, mentorship and an elite education in the classics doesn’t help young people dealing with their lives – not that their contemporaries at their university seem to be doing much better.

My dissatisfaction with The Secret History may arise from this nihilistic tone, which leaves little to enjoy at the end of the story. In fact, the most memorable part is the satire about Bunny’s middle-class parents and their ghastly work to put on a memorial service. Here, Richard’s picture of the utter incomprehension among the students as they are compelled take a role in the suburban lifestyle of Bunny’s family reminds me of mid-century stories like The Graduate. The older and younger generations simply can’t comprehend the values of each other, whether they are in the late 1950s in The Graduate or the late 1960s here.

What makes the story work is mystery: we know there will be a death, we’re not sure how it is going to happen or what the outcome will be. Richard is sympathetic as a narrator, so we root for him, although he seems to be a directionless follower, so I’m not sure why we do. The setting, a minor eastern college in the late 1960s, doesn’t have a lot of intrinsic interest.

Although the characters start out as interesting types, I found that most were very thinly drawn with little to distinguish them from each other and little depth. The rich kids, Francis and Henry, are practically interchangeable, and Camilla and Charles are only distinguished by their being twins. Only Bunny has much personality, and it is not a pleasant one. Perhaps this is because Richard, the narrator, doesn’t know them, but it feels more like Tartt not having drawn in their characters. And of course, Richard is, he tells us, a practiced liar who is justifying his role in the story. There are many deceptions and secrets throughout. This is part of Tartt’s trick in keeping readers engaged over 500 pages – while none of the characters is very sympathetic, Bunny’s character is so unpleasant that we come to empathize with the others who want to get rid of him. In fact, Bunny is so much more fully drawn that most readers can probably recognize someone in their lives that they would like to get rid of.

I’m not sure what keeps the story readable for over 500 pages, but I was intrigued enough to keep going. I think I was hoping for some resolution in the dynamic between the Greek philosophies and the contemporary situation. There’s no real resolution, so that may be the reason for my ambivalence. Tartt is an interesting writer whose style can make an interesting novel even if the storyline itself is not really compelling. 

The Fabric of Civilization

By Virginia Postrel (2021)

Postrel’s book is an interesting look at the impact of textiles on human history and civilization. It focuses on woven textiles, with brief mentions of knitting and felting. Postrel's approach is journalistic, reviewing academic historical articles while emphasizing stories that illuminate key issues. She personalizes the story editorial comments, such as, “In short, it’s complicated. Textiles tend to be.”

She traces the evolution of textiles through the adaptation of natural fibers –flax, wool, silk, and cotton – over centuries. Human selection refined these materials until the emergence of synthetic and bioengineered fibers, which are now displacing natural ones. It’s interesting to note that the labor-intensive process of spinning fibers took weeks of labour to produce enough cloth for a pair of trousers, years of work to provide sails for a navy.

One notable historical development is the highly organized silk spinning in northern Italy, creating the first textile factories two centuries before the industrial revolution. Despite this early industrialization, silk remained a luxury product, although Postrel says it created a basis for later mass production.

Postrel suggests that the fundamentals of arithmetic in Euclid come out of the basic operations of weaving, a key activity in ancient Greek society. Weaving patterns, when expressed in written form, become the basis for transmitting industrial design and standardized notation. Surprisingly, the weaving of microscopic fibers in the 1960s laid the foundation for early computer storage, an unexpected intersection of ancient crafts with modern technology.

Knitting eventually surpassed weaving as the most common textile form, with 16th-century knitting machines evolving into computer-programmable devices capable of producing intricate patterns, including three-dimensional shapes like shoe forms. This shift reflects the adaptability and evolution of textile techniques throughout history.

Dyeing of fibers evolved from pre-modern forms of chemistry, using natural materials in intricate processes. Examples include obtaining indigo blue from plants, Tyrian purple from sea snails, and red from common plants or cochineal imported from Aztec plantations. The trade with India in the 1600s introduced lightweight cotton with colorful prints, showcasing the global exchange of textile traditions.

The development of chemistry as a science from the 1850s onwards led to the demand for synthetic textile dyes and the inception of the chemical industry. Synthetic dyes replaced traditional dyes from colonial sources within 50 years. This shift transformed the textile industry and also influenced the development of pharmaceuticals and other synthetic materials.

Postrel also develops the idea that textiles required “social technologies” such as literacy, records, agreements, laws, practices and standards. These social technologies formed the basis of economic and legal institutions in China, Iceland, West Africa and northern Italy. Textile traders' bills of exchange, says Postrel, formed the foundation of credit, banking and currency.

She emphasizes that consumers, rather than producers, determine the meaning and value of textiles. They continuously evolve in form and meaning, as seen in the adaptation of traditional African and Guatemalan weaving techniques to contemporary styles.

The book concludes with the 1930s development of synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester, marking a revolutionary moment comparable to the impact of ceramics and metallics. This development reflects the ongoing transformative power of textiles throughout history, connecting ancient craftsmanship with modern technological advancements.

Although a bit programmatic, I found this book an interesting survey of historical developments related to everyday products that we use without thinking of how they came to us and how they affected contemporary society.

Brooklyn

By Colm Tóibín, 2015

This novel presents an unflattering picture of Ireland in the 1950s as a conservative backwater, which is contrasted with Brooklyn where life, if not perfect, at least has the possibility of growth and change.

Written in Tóibín’s usual understated, observational style, it shows the limited options open to a young woman in a small Irish town (apparently, the same town in which Tóibín spent his childhood). The only viable option for Eilis seems to be working part-time in the small shop where everyone knows her and the owner does not respect her until she gets married to one of the local boys. When she gets a chance to start a new life in a faraway country where she doesn’t know what to expect, she knows it’s the best option she’ll ever see.

Eilis seems to fall into the events of her life rather than to choose them, although she does have ideas of her own. She doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life married in the village, even if she doesn’t see a way out until her sister arranges for her to move to America. She doesn’t quite want to fall into married life in America either, although she does choose marriage in the end. Perhaps Tóibín is pointing to an ambivalence among Irish (and other) emigrants – they don’t really want to leave the comfort of the familiar, however limited that may be, but economic or political factors push them to make choices that shape their future. Many immigrants continue to feel that ambivalence throughout their lives, particularly when they are faced with discrimination in their new home. Tóibín doesn’t go into the anti-Irish prejudice that many found in the Americas, and probably that had diminished significantly in the 1950s. In fact, the life he shows for Eilis is almost idealized. She is welcomed by her Italian boyfriend and her American employers, pursues an education and finds new job opportunities. It seems remarkably free from challenges except for her homesickness. Tóibín does give a concrete picture of the lives in the immigrant community – the close living conditions, poverty, the struggle to fit into an unknown society and constant homesickness. But they have time for dances, picnics at the beach, the occasional luxury, and they have hope for their future.

In her relatively comfortable material conditions, the struggles Eilis faces are mainly psychological. Should she marry the nice guy who cares for her and offers her a secure home? Should she hold out for something undefined but different? Should she make her independent way for a while longer? For Eilis, and perhaps for many women in the 1950s, these might be difficult choices. And in the changing social mores of the 1950s, they were probably difficult questions for many women to feel comfortable with. Tóibín presents them without leaning to any side, although readers might see them with less ambivalence today. (Come on, Eilis, just make a decision and get on with it!) She grows to become more confident in her job and her classes, even while she can’t decide what she wants emotionally. But of course, the emotional choices are the hardest ones. The psychological portrait reminds me of Henry James’ psychological probing, but in a much more contemporary and working class setting. With all the psychological pondering, the actual events that take place in the story seem curiously underplayed and anticlimactic.

In the end, Eilis sees Ireland as conservative and unchanging. She views her sister’s grave in a treeless, dead cemetery. She still feels ambivalent about it, but her final choice seems inevitable. She will go where the sees that she can grow. And this seems to reflect Tóibín’s own choices – growing up and leaving the small Irish village of Eniscorthy, leaving the country and settling down in the USA. In interviews, he says that he still feels drawn to Ireland, but he could no longer live there.

When We Were Orphans

By Kazuo Ishiguro, 2000

Ironically, this is a radically different approach to being an orphan from the last book I read, John Irving’s The Cider House Rules. In Cider House, an orphan protagonist follows his principles, compromises but eventually makes it through to an honourable ending. In When We Were Orphans, the orphaned protagonist stumbles around deceiving himself and pursuing ambiguous goals until he finds that his life and ideas are fictions. Also, while Cider House was enjoyable to read, this book feels a bit like a bad dream that goes from one misery to a worse one.

The book of course is written with Ishiguro’s usual skill, delicately exploring how the protagonist, Christopher, imagines himself in one deception after another. In this, it’s like other Ishiguro books, with characters who either deceive themselves or are deceived. I felt more empathy for his other characters, though, even Klara who is not actually human. For Christopher, I felt from the beginning that he was living in a child-like make-believe world, and continues to do so as an adult. His fantasy is his way of coping with the traumas of his childhood, but I always felt that he should get a grip (or get some therapy) and join the real world. His self-importance is unattractive, perhaps made even more so by his telling readers repeatedly that he is known as a great detective, but does not say anything about any of his cases or his methods. His claim to be a great detective grows particularly questionable when he seems to live in a fantasy.

Initially, his imaginary world seems harmless. As a child, he plays at being a superhero or detective rescuing his missing father. Later, he says he has solved important cases as a young detective, and perhaps he has. When he is drawn into the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, his stories become a nightmare about international diplomacy and urban warfare with improbable coincidence, extraordinary heroism and criminal corruption. (Here, he’s the opposite of a James Bond heroic spy. He’s portrayed as a weak figure overwhelmed by the reality of violence and corruption. Is Ishiguro deliberately undercutting the false heroism of the Bond myth?) It’s hard to separate the reality in the novel from Christopher’s story telling, but he seems to abandon both his purported clients and those he seems to love in order to pursue his dream of saving his parents. How can he be so irresponsible when he claims to be so principled?

Christopher’s memories of his childhood seem to have little connection to the reality he later attempts to revisit. The physical places he returns to are not as he remembers them, and the situation is far worse. This is probably true of all of us to a degree. The past we remember is not the same as other people experienced it, and sometimes it’s demonstrably wrong. But I think this usually means that we colour things a bit better or worse than they might have been. I hope that our memories are not so destructively mistaken as Ishiguro portrays them here. But perhaps, viewing things less personally, they are: as nations and peoples, we do tell ourselves false stories about our history and relationships, and we use those to justify exploitation and military attacks on other nations. In part, this seems to be what is happening in Ukraine, the Balkan states, the Middle East, Africa. So from this perspective, misleading stories that lead to more violence and abuse could be a very relevant one. I didn’t get that from the novel while I was reading it, but thinking back, there are parallels with the self-serving myths of the colonial powers in China (and elsewhere) that cover up reality and justify continuing exploitation.

Toward the end of the novel, a character says, “…our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years in the shadows of vanished parents. There’s nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, but until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.” But Christopher doesn’t see through it until he is forced into a very sordid reality.

The Cider House Rules

 By John Irving

What a pleasure it was to read The Cider House Rules. I’m smiling as I look back on it.

The cider house rules, it turns out, are rules that are perfectly sensible in the abstract, but that have to be applied in a context where it may not be sensible to follow them – or at least, where people don’t follow them because they are too troublesome. This is the paradigm that shapes the key conflicts in the story – people who don’t want to do abortions but find that many women have a real need for an abortion. Surprisingly, for a story about abortion, orphans and repressed love, the story is great fun to read. It’s full of humour, delightful characters, imaginative situations and a plot that keeps moving and shifting so that although the overall story arc seems pre-ordained, a reader never knows what to expect.

The story’s protagonist, Homer Wells – like several of Dickens’ protagonists – seems quietly passive a lot of the time, letting things happen to him while others around him are driving the action of the plot. He’s attracted to Melony, who is charismatic in a negative way, but he lets her define their relationship initially. Even his ultimate fate is set up by others and after some resistance he finally decides to accept it. However, he does make the decisions that he has to at key points – to stand by his principles, and to re-evaluate them when he has to. Homer chooses to pursue his love even though it leads to unhappy compromises. It seems to me that this is how most of us get by, doing the best we can as long as we can, and adapting when we find that our thinking no longer matches our reality. Is this why the protagonist is named Homer? He’s adrift through his life, facing extraordinary challenges until he finally makes it home?

Dr Larch is another interesting character. A father figure to Homer, he is driven and rigidly committed to his objectives. He cares deeply for Homer, and recognizes that Homer will have to break away from him to make his own choices. But Dr Larch is a very thoughtful and kind man, both to the women that he provides medical services to and to the orphans in the St. Cloud’s home. His nightly reading of Dickens novels to the children, and his good-night to the boys – “Good night, you princes of Maine, you Kings of New England” – offers them a sense of pride and a future. His distressing early history sets a path for his life that is almost saintly in its selflessness and commitment, in spite of his addiction to mind-altering ether. So it’s appropriate that he lives in St. Cloud’s.

As I write this, I think that there’s a parallel to Greek drama as much as there is to Dickens’ novels. The characters struggle with morality and fate and with their own personal flaws. They have to made decisions where the choices are complex and the outcomes are unclear. They face the fundamental situations of human life: birth and death, love and longing, and ultimately the search for meaning. While telling the tale, Irving comments on their situation as a Greek chorus might. (His frequent asides about the lives and longings of orphans seem a bit questionable at times, while they show a compassionate way of thinking about people who face emotional and material challenges.) But of course Irving rolls out this story with humour and a lightness that has a very different tone from Greek drama.

I loved the big, complex plot line and Irving’s descriptions of rural Maine. I’m sure I’ll look back on the characters and the story with pleasure for some time. Although the debates around abortion will move on (I hope), Irving’s exploration of how the characters deal with life questions will remain relevant for the future.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing

By Madeleine Thien

Do Not Say We Have Nothing has such richness of language, theme and story that it’s hard to know where to begin. Connections between family and friends; music in one’s life and culture; stories and the recording of them; loss, grief and memory; the cost and the need of revolution – Madeleine Thien treats these with compassion, subtlety and ambiguity, but she leaves it for the reader to determine their significance.

Thien writes with emotional intensity that brings a reader into the character’s struggles, whether it’s in the nationalist war for the independence of China, a family victimized by politicized mobs in the “Cultural Revolution” or young people trying to correct the errors of the Communist Party at Tiananmen Square. In the context of these vast social movements, Thien also deals movingly with individuals trying to relate to each other as friends, family members and colleagues. And she explores the inner lives of her characters as they try to express themselves through stories, music, even mathematics.

For me, the themes about revolutionary change are among the most interesting, and unusual, in a novel. The great hardships of the war to free China from Japanese occupation, and then to install the Communist government, are the starting point of the novel’s histories. Music and stories help connect people and help them deal with the hardships. Skipping over the starvation of the “great leap forward,” the novel then takes up the “great proletarian cultural revolution.” We see this from the point of view of its victims, who are manipulated into destroying each other as political factions fight for control of the state. Here, revolution seems completely destructive down to the soul and psyche of those involved – much like the ultimate betrayal by Winston Smith in 1984. Music and stories are wiped out.

This gets reversed in the Tiananmen uprising, when we see the passion for change on the part of the students, and also of the residents of Beijing and throughout China. Again, this has extreme costs but Thien also brings the reader into the hopes and energies of those affected by the uprising, and shows the great creativity it unleashed in music and writing. (I found this section particularly fascinating, as it shows the involvement of ordinary people across China in supporting the students, something that I wasn’t aware of before. If it’s an accurate picture, it’s easy to see why the party bureaucracy repressed the Tiananmen revolt so viciously.)

This is where the title becomes clear – it seems to mean: Do not say we have nothing when we have our links to each other that keep us moving ahead, even when it seems we have nothing else.

Interweaving all of this makes for complex writing, so the book is a slow read. But Thien’s writing is so evocative, that I was happy to give it plenty of time. It’s both beautifully descriptive and allusive, so it’s worth a little contemplation to see what the writing reveals about the characters and the story. Like poetry, rushing through the text would miss its richness and meaning. Also, since it’s open to interpretation, I think every reader will take a different understanding of the story.

For example, the Book of Records is never explained, but it seems to represent both creativity and history, inspiring and connecting people, but repressed by the Party regime. Like the creativity of the musicians, its survival is the possibility of renewal in spite of censorship and repression.

Initially, I wasn’t sure I would like the book. But Thien’s storytelling is so engaging that she overcame my resistance, and I completely fell for the story.