IT FALLS TO MUSIC, ART AND LITERATURE TO SALVAGE FLEETING MOMENTS OF BEAUTY.

ter his death. The notebook, full of Sparrow’s beautiful handwriting, transcribes a famous novel called the Book of Records about “an adventurer named Da-wei who sets sails to America and a heroine named May Fourth who walks across the Gobi Desert.” Far more than an adventure story, the Book of Records contains, according to Ai-ming, the “things we never say aloud and so they end up here, in diaries and notebooks, in private places.” Although this novel-within-a-novel doesn’t actually exist outside Thien’s imagination, it resembles ancient Chinese texts like the Book of Changes, which is without author or known origin. This allows the Book of Records to become a vast body of collective wisdom that ordinary people can both learn from and add to as they see their own lives and fates reflected in its mythical stories.

What Ai-ming ends up telling Marie is, in fact, a web of tales about her own family. A colourful cast of characters comes to life, taking the reader on an odyssey from the Chinese Civil War and Land Reform Movement to the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square protests. Through Thien’s ingenious trope, the unsettling cyclical quality of the violence of 20th-century China comes to the fore.

At times, however, the ambitious scope of the novel bogs down its writing, feeling like a history lesson in disguise. Background information weighs down dialogue, with unnatural monologues whose main purpose is historical exposition. Here, Thien’s writing loses the subtlety and elegance for which she is known, and I found myself yearning for the more streamlined approach in some of her previous work.

Fortunately there are other sections that show Thien at the height of her abilities. Take, for example, Zhuli, Sparrow’s cousin, in line for rations: “It was midday, the shade had long retreated and, in the glare, the buildings were dissolving into watery reflections. She stepped to the side and peered ahead. Seventeen. The pavement had dulled to grainy whiteness. There was a growing disturbance behind but Zhuli, focused only on obtaining the rations, didn’t turn.” Violence breaks out as Red Guards, the fanatical student body of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, begin mocking and slapping a woman, and Zhuli, unable to bring herself to join in, soon becomes a target herself. With unflinching clarity, Thien examines the strange, frightening psychology of mass violence in this period and how countless lives were lost as a result. It falls to music, art and literature to salvage fleeting moments of beauty from the ruins of history, the lives of the dead.