Summer Reading Picks: Changing The Question

It’s the time of year when celebrities of one kind or another are asked to tell us their Summer Reading plans, providing them – if they choose - with opportunities to show themselves in a good light and do favours for their friends. The latter is not always acknowledged – though in today’s Financial Times, I notice Philippe Sands prefacing a book choice with a “My friend …” thus avoiding any risk of a later appearance in Private Eye’s end of year log-rolling awards, for which there are no shortage of candidates among those who review and recommend books.

I had the thought that the Summer Reading formula could be varied a bit. Instead of asking about actual reading plans, I imagined this question:

If you could only take on holiday this year a book which you read sometime last year (2017), what would it be?

The question is a challenge for me because I don’t go on holidays and don’t often read a book a second time unless in connection with something I am writing. But I looked at the books I reviewed here in 2017 and decided that if I had no choice this summer but to re-read, I would pick:

Madeleine Thien Do Not Say We Have Nothing, reviewed here on 12 April 2017, which has an extraordinary layered complexity which deserves a second reading.

And then, since that book would take up a lot of my imaginary holiday, I would settle for a short novel which I have already read twice and would have no trouble reading again:

Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday, reviewed here on 8 June 2017

But having re-written the summer reading picks question, it's now back to Freud.

Review: Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The 2016 Man Booker Prize was won by Paul Beatty's The Sellout which I reviewed on this Blog 2nd November 2016. Madeline Thien's much longer book ( 470 pages against 288) was short-listed. Both books will be challenging for most readers because they are written from inside specific cultures about which many readers will have only schematic knowledge. Beatty's is written from inside Black American cultures and Thien's from inside the cultures of  Western classical music and Chinese literary, musical and political life.

So I am sure I missed a lot reading both books but I ended up feeling that Thien's multi-layered historical novel is a much more significant work than Beatty's. She takes seventy years of Chinese history, a cast of characters in love with stories and music - and in the central cases, professionally engaged with Western classical music -  and she writes about the experience of civil war, The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square,  Bach, Beethoven, Profokiev, Shostakovich and much more besides. The novel is not only panoramic but complexly structured and at times I had to check back when I lost a thread. I read the book slowly.

It has very clever aspects especially in the way it acknowledges its own partiality and incompleteness, just one among the millions of  stories which circulate in the world. It emphasises how things are lost but often not completely so that fragments remain, which may be greatly valued in themselves - a theme which I no doubt responded to because I make something of it in my own book Materials and Medium: An Aesthetics (2016).

There is an extraordinary, haunting theme about searching for lost others by leaving coded stories lying around the world in bookstores, libraries, on Blogs and websites.

The book is an extraordinary achievement. It must be out there at the limits of what a single writer can be capable of creating. Maybe the sheer layered complexity of the book put off the Man Booker judges. I just hope it wasn't the severe, critical narrative of Chinese political history since 1945 which deterred them.