Madeleine Thein’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing should help stimulate our memory and provide an understanding into what life is like under tyrannical regimes, past and present, in any part of the world.

It is a Book of Records. A piece of virtuosic music. Hidden within this fictional world are true names and true deeds. Sparrow and his cousin Zhuli (for whom Prokofiev, Bach, and Old Bei occupied the space that the Party, the nation, and Chairman Mao occupied for others), Swirl, Wen the Dreamer, Big Mother , Ba Lute..."They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionists but as intangible as ghosts."

The novel begins with Marie Jiang recalling her father Jiang Kai, a pianist, who commits suicide at Hong Kong in 1989 when he was only 39 years old. He defects from China in 1978. Alive when the demonstrations began in Tiananmen Square in April 1989, he disappears from his wife and daughter in Vancouver and on June 4 the military crushes protests in Tiananmen Square. In October the family comes to know about Jiang Kai’s death.

Ai Ming, a fugitive who seeks shelter in Marie Jiang’s house for a brief period, is the daughter of Sparrow, a great composer and musician and Jiang Kai’s teacher at the Shangai Conservatory of Music.

Music lovers, the two men love each other. Sparrow gives up his talent to protect his daughter and work in factories making wooden crates, then wire and then radios for 20 years... He dies during the Tiananmen massacre. The official record would, however, say he died of "A Stroke." "At Home."

The lives of this two families intertwine and forks as the novelist, through them, takes us through the history of the country--the 1949 civil war to the year 2016...

"Tiananmen Square, that place that Chinese architects once imagined as the zero point, the location that determines all others."

It's over the sweat and blood of ordinary people and poor jawans and the political spectacle played out over the dead- photo-ops and lies, authoritarian regimes sustain themselves. So it calls for conscientiousness from our part to `new dawns' which are otherwise prone to let us down.

From, Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

“Like thousands of other surviving counter-revolutionaries, she would be informed, after years of prison labor, that she had never been a criminal. Would she weep?Would she feel joy?...”

“The camp was the very end of the earth. I am no counter-revolutionary and neither were those exiled with me. In my heart, I believe that it is this age and our leaders who one day will have to account for their crimes.”

-----------------------

“My father stood in front of me, naked / in the hospital’s basement
He spoke to me / his voice muffled by cotton
Listen to me Claudia / listen to me
And all I could think of was to say / Cover yourself, Daddy / You’ll tell me all another time.”

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/09/poetry

Is it too much to expect of our so-called reviewers and critics to first comprehend (at least try to) a book for themselves before writing about it? This question arises because a couple of `reviews’ on J.M.Coetzee’s two works-The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, which I came across in some magazines recently was all about the reviewers’ flaunting of their ignorance and the consequent desperation than anything about the work.  If a work is incomprehensible why write at all about it in the first place? Perhaps to show-off, I have read the book but the author is at fault for not producing a work which is easily understandable or palatable to the reader?

Anyhow, it’s alright being not able to comprehend a work. Coetzee himself makes an admission in The Good Story (his discourses –exchanges being the precise word used in the book--with Arabella Kurtz) when the discussion comes to Sebald’s Austerlitz, he says that despite his admiration for the book, he have struggled with it in the past and still struggle with it. 

So coming back to the Jesus `reviews' or blathers, the problem seems to lie in approaching a work with the anticipation that it will be malleable; it would bend easily to a supine reader's whims...

Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel warns that like all of the culture, the novel is more and more in the hands of the mass media which “distribute throughout the world the same simplifications and stereotypes easily acceptable by the greatest number, by everyone, by all mankind.” 

The termites of reduction at work?

This Brain Pickings link on Jeanette Winterson's essay "Art Objects" (today's find on twitter) is of utmost relevance in this context.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/27/jeanette-winterson-art-objects/

Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel: "Every novel says to the reader: ”Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and lock it off.

“For Musil," Italo Calvino recalls in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, "knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude-or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality –while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos. Everything he knows or thinks he deposits in an encyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands…”

“the art of the novel relies on our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory states,” says Orhan Pamuk in The Naïve And the Sentimental Novelist.

J.M.Coetzee makes a similar point as he concludes his exchanges with consultant clinical psychologist Arabella Kurtz (The Good Story, Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy). This is the second 'intellectual engagement' between them. The first titled ‘Nevertheless, my sympathies are with the Karamazov’s’ was published in the journal Salmagundi.

“As a genre," Coetzee says, "the novel seems to have a constitutional stake in the claim that things are not as they seem to be, that our seeming lives are not real lives. And psychoanalysis, I would say, has a comparable stake.”

Instead of following a ‘linear train of thought’ Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz-- starting with `a well-shaped story versus telling the true story,' poetic and pragmatic truths, memories (procedural and episodic), consciousness, remorse et al--  pursue lines of thinking without always knowing where they will lead in the hope that they may here and there ‘open a new or unusual perspective on the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and on the psychotherapeutic project in its wider social forms.'

Here's an illuminating observation Arabella Kurtz makes: “You write about an objective or a transcendent truth, a truth outside or above the realm of human understanding. I am working on the basis of a subjective and an intersubjective truth, a truth to experience, which is what I believe to be at issue when one is trying to help a patient who is suffering. People come for psychotherapy because they feel dreadful and are in subjective distress, not because they do not know if God exists or how to read the weather...”

This is one of the books I'm presently re-reading.

“My father had once said that music was full of silences…”

--Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing. 

The silences Madeleine Thien refers here is what, I feel, adds elegiac and ethereal qualities to the writings of O.V.Vijayan or the films of G.Aravindan...

The same shines through like a gauzy light in this terse Yehuda Amichai poem reproduced below.

Forgetting Someone

Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light
in the backyard so it stays lit all the day

But then it is the light that makes you remember.

“No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy- that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man’s life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analyzed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.”

--E.M.Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Salim Bachi. A fantasist from Albert Camus' land.

Being conscious of the insufficiency of my readings, the discovery lately of the Algeria-born Salim Bachi who writes in French reminds of the vast literary treasures, especially in foreign languages, (for various reasons imperceptible to English literary scene) which await to be unearthed and explored.
If it was the mention in Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed that I came to read Patrick Chamoiseau, I stumbled upon Salim Bachi while browsing at a bookshop in the city during a modest Sunday evening outing with family yesterday. (Besides Bachi I bought Eduardo Berti’s Agua. Berti is an Argentine writer and Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing).

Salim Bachi is the author of The Silence of Mohammed and Dog of Ulysses. But the novel of his that was available in the outlet was The New Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor (Translated by Sue Rose/ Pushkin Press). Halfway through the work, I'm convinced he's one of those authors not to be missed at any cost.
In Sinbad he resurrects Sinbad, the fictional sailor, to narrate the experience of waves of North African immigration into Europe.

Here're a couple of excerpts from the work:

”Our world illuminated by Nothing, was a Cave whose walls showed terrible images that had men mimicking actions they didn’t understand, while governed by urges they concealed under the guise of reason…”

“Had he fallen asleep yesterday after Ben M’Hidi (a prominent leader during the Algerian war of independence) had been arrested, or the day before yesterday after Emir Abdelkader (Algerian religious and military leader) had been captured?Had he gone into exile in Damascus to spend the rest of his days with the wise old man,amid prayers in Umayyad mosque (one of the largest and oldest mosque in the world)? Perhaps he had died in Bolivia, trapped in the jungle, abandoned on the revolutionary path? (Che Guevara?) Or, going back even earlier, was he washing Jugurtha’s (King of Numidia, Algeria) feet, kissing Jesus’s feet, accompanying the Prophet on his hegira? He might be Jewish, Roman or Berber; he might have walked with the Arabs alongside their caravans; crossed the Atlantic on a slave ship; perished in the silver mines of Mexico…One question, though, kept pestering him like a persistent mosquito: why had he woken up here? And where had the six other sleepers gone?”

Story and Plot

“ ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: ‘The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.’ This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. ..If it is in a story we say:’And then?’ If it in a plot we ask: ‘Why?’ That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave-men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be kept awake by ‘And then-and then-‘ they can only supply curiosity. But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.”

--E.M.Forster, Aspects of the Novel.

“The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: ‘Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.”

--E.M.Forster, Aspects of the Novel.

John Stuart Mill who gave us the idea of the free and sovereign individual had, in the aftermath of a crisis of faith discovered in the poetry of Wordsworth and Goethe, and in the philosophy of Coleridge, Saint Simon and Comte, a fusion of thought and feeling, an appreciation of the ‘many- sidedness’ of human nature and society, that went far to fill the vacuum created by utilitarianism.

(In turn he lost the sense of community provided by the utilitarians,”the assurance of a common purpose shared with others of like mind.”)

Utilitarianism: Greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Mill’s crisis was caused by this fateful question:

‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’

The answer was an irrepressible ‘No!’ The end had ceased to charm! The feeling there is nothing left to live for.

Gertrude Himmelfarb in the introduction to On Liberty says that what depressed Mill even more than the sense of vocation was the absence in him of any natural and spontaneous feeling, any poetic and artistic sensibility. “He was convinced that the exclusive cultivation of the ‘habit of analysis’ had destroyed in him all capacity for emotion.”

Coming to his treatise Mill predicted the crises largest democracies will go through caused by the rise of popular governments, which he saw as the pre-condition of a new and more formidable despotism, for he comprehensively explains that ‘society is itself the tyrant.’  He hits the bull’s- eye when he says that the society imposes a new despotism of custom. “It dictates,”he says,” its will by means of public opinion; it presumes to tell men what to think and read, how to dress and behave; it sets itself up as the judge of right and wrong, propriety and impropriety; it discourages spontaneity and originality, personal impulses and desires, strong character and unconventional ideas; it is fatal, in short, to individuality. And all of this, Mill predicted, was bound to get worse as the public more and more felt its power and acted upon it.”

From Anthony Doerr’s About Grace.

“The human brain, he wrote, is seventy-five percent water. Our cells are little more than sacs in which to carry water. When we die it spills from us into the ground and air and into the stomachs of animals and is contained again in something else. The properties of liquid water are this: it holds its temperature longer than air; it is adhering and elastic; it is perpetually in moton. These are the tenets of hydrology; these are the things one should know if one is to know oneself.”

"Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared."

"These were facts, bounded by inviolable laws: water was elastic and adhesive, it held its temperature longer than air, it was perpetually in motion."

“To live in the tropics is to always be reminded (I find a hornet in my rice, a minnow in my shaving water) of the impossibility of ownership. The street in front of me belongs more to whatever is tunneling up those hundred or so little mounds of red dirt than to any of us. The beams of this apartment belong to houseflies; the window corners to spiders; the ceiling to house geckos and roaches. We are all just tenants here. Even the one thing we believe is ours – the time we’re given on earth – does that belong to us?.”

What is personal (private realm) stays personal in Anthony Doerr's first novel About Grace, the story of an hydrologist and his perilous dreams... Later on in the novel he stops dreaming, even if he does, it is not the kind of frightening dreams relating to deaths particularly of his dear ones.

The writer as not only a witness of catastrophes; someone who grapples with the puzzle of human condition, but as someone who tries to reconstruct an image of the past so that it would allow us to imagine a future.

The contemporary author in the words of Carlos Fonseca Suarez must also, to some extent, "make whole what has been wrecked," unlike Walter Benjamin's "angel of history" contemplating how the past has been reduced to a giant pile of debris by the catastrophic passage of time.

"The twenty-first century author must reconstruct, out of the ruins of the twentieth century, an image of the past that would allow us to imagine a future." Fonseca sees in the self-exile of Alexander Grothendieck a new way of bearing witness. The only adequate testimonial way of  interacting with a century that had been marked by a constant repetition of man-made catastrophes.”

Carlos Fonseca Suarez/ Alexander Grothendieck/Chuck Close/  Mexican painter Dr. Atl

http://bombmagazine.org/article/5694106/carlos-fonseca

Alexander Grothendieck 

He burned many of his papers and retreated to the French Pyrenees, where for more than 20 years he lived the life of a recluse, rarely speaking to people, refusing to indulge visitors or mathematical tourists, and reportedly subject to periods of religious mania and apocalypticism.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/25/alexander-grothendieck

In a letter to Welsh mathematician Ronnie Brown, Mr. Grothendieck wrote about why mathematics was important: It allows people to do difficult things — and it creates the tools by which difficult things can be made simple.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/alexander-grothendieck-mathematical-genius-who-went-into-self-exile-dies-at-86/2014/11/15/1e65f69a-6cf2-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html

Alejandra Pizarnik:  A rare anthology of poems trying to figure out psychic wounds, predicaments and helplessness of the living…?

This Buenos Aires' bequest to literary world, one gathers, madly worked with elements from the inner shadows. Her works, like surreal puzzles penned out from pitch-black darkness?

“Redemption is a theme that concerns me. We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.”

--Stanley Kunitz in the Paris Review interview.

In the same interview he says Bob Dylan ( Robert Allen Zimmerman) couldn’t have existed if Dylan Thomas (Remember Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night?) hadn’t existed before him.
Do Not Go Gentle... was a call to the poet's father to fight death. It explores the personal experience of grief and death. Dylan Thomas, in the words of Robert Lowell, is a "dazzling obscure writer who can be enjoyed without understanding."

"Understanding," writes Knausgaard, "must not be confused with knowledge for I knew next to nothing- but should there be, for example, skirmishes in the borderlands of an ex-Soviet republic somewhere in Asia, whose towns I had never heard of, with inhabitants alien in everything from dress and language to everyday life and religion, and it turned out that this conflict had deep historical roots that went back to events that took place a thousand years ago, my total ignorance and lack of knowledge would not prevent me from understanding what happened, for the mind has the capacity to deal with the most alien of thoughts. This applied to everything..."

On reads Julian Barnes’Levels of Life, which comprise an essay on his personal grief over the loss of his wife Pat Kavanagh, and goes back to Joyce Carol Oates' A Widow’s Story.

(Levels of Life also contain brief biographies of three Balloonists)

Joyce Carol Oates says hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.”  (this when her husband was in hospital).

A Widow’s Story deals with the death of Raymond J.Smith, author and editor and Joyce Carol Oates’ husband for 47 years. He died in 2008. Pat Kavanagh, a formidable literary agent, died in the same year. She and Barnes married in 1979 and were together till her death.

Switch over to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death In The Family, My Struggle:1 (My Struggle is an autobiographical series of six novels).  The death of narrator's father.  Knausgaard and his brother Yngve are on their way to the chapel where the Dad was "lying on a bier with his eyes closed and features composed."

Having reached the chapel,  scrambling out of the car…the he reflects:

“Some birds circled high above us, under the sky, which was still a pale grey. The Dutch painter Ruisdael always painted birds high in his skies, to create depth, it was almost his signature, at any rate I had seen it in picture after picture in the book I had about him.”

Altitudes and Heartaches

Julian Barnes' Levels of Life soars to colossal heights and plumbs depths like all good works of art. The book is a slim volume of 117 pages. All the three essays, The Sin of Height, On the Level and The Loss of Depth are interspersed with philosophical reflections and metaphors. Lucidity and brevity are the mainstay of Levels of Life.

The first two essays offers a peek into the lives of balloonists; Colonel Fredrick Gustavus Burnaby, Nadar aka Gaspard- Felix Tournachon and the French stage and film actress Sarah Bernhardt, nicknamed The Divine Sarah.

The third essay deals with the loss of the author's wife and literary agent Pat Kavanagh. The book is in fact dedicated 'for Pat.'

Sarah Bernhardt: She is temperamentally drawn to ballooning because her dreamy nature would constantly transport her to the higher regions. She feels the balloon to be the 'emblem of uttermost freedom.'

Fred Burnaby believed that shape was the key: an aerostat in the form of a tube or cigar and propelled by machinery, was the way forward- as it eventually proved.

(Ballooning represented freedom-yet a freedom subservient to the powers of wind and weather).

Nadar: Journalist, caricaturist, photographer, balloonist, entrepreneur and inventor...a tireless self-publicist. His infidelities coexisted with uxoriousness. He wrote that the three supreme emblems of modernity were 'photogarphy, electricity and aeronautics.' 

(Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the Truth.' Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers:'How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness  drop away...and forgiveness descends)