The Nature of Things

A challenging book to read but worth the effort. Madeleine Thien's highly acclaimed novel encompassing the history of China since the Communist Revolution of the 1940s up to the present day as seen through the experiences of two families is a harrowing tale in so many ways. It details the unraveling of a society through the government's implementation of various ill-considered social experiments and we watch in horror as that society rips itself apart during the Cultural Revolution and then recoil again as students protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989. As the government reacted violently to those protests, it seemed that China might indeed be torn asunder. We see all of this through the eyes of two families who are intertwined by their experiences at the Shanghai Conservatory. These are families for whom music is the breath of life and musical notation, as well as specific musical works, play a large part in the telling of the story. Bach's Goldberg Variations as performed ...