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This book took my breath away. Literally. Towards the very end of the story, I became aware that I was holding my breath, allowing in only tight short intakes, afraid to disturb the rhythm of the space I had dropped into, not wanting it to ever end.
This is not a book to coast through. It asks to be read slowly; to appreciate the nuance, the context, the care that has gone into its crafting. This is a book of such insight and beauty that I will want to read it again, later, after I’ve felt the edges mellow a little and want to bring it all back into focus.
The story follows a set of remarkable characters; understated, quiet, characters; each of them “part of something ancient, but also very new at the same time”, with lives that are in some sense just beginning, as the story picks us up and takes us through their intersecting narratives crossing over in and around the eighties in revolutionary China.
Momo is a student, an engineer, a believer in science and his place in the new world. Burning with “electrified impatience”, he can’t wait “for time to pass, so that in his life, there would be less yearning and more having, less becoming and more being”.
Dawn is a violinist – brash, confident and passionate about music and its profound and intimate capacity to take us inside it, to inspire, to articulate and to make our lives “larger”.
Cassia is a nurse, an emotionally-closed enigma – the hardest of the three protagonists for the reader to understand, it will take time for us to get to know, to experience, Cassia’s story, which is in many ways the most heartbreakingly primal of all.
The story dips and weaves in ways that are impossible to summarize with any sort of justice, so skillfully does the author introduce and then cycle back to the themes, intricately braiding the story, like ribbons, right up to the wondrous and profoundly inspiring ending.
“Love is a wound that closes and opens, all our lives”
How does one live (hope) though grief. Loss. Surrender. Fear. Disability.
What control do we have over our lives? Are we fated, destined or really just experiencing a series of happy accidents?
How profound is it that age and experience in each of us unfurls nostalgia, even for aspects of our not-so-comfortable pasts, as long as it is lived through the echoes of our “youthful certainty”.
And finally, the author suggests, “if not a normal life, then why not a spectacular life?”
What exactly that means, for each of us, may be the most interesting question of all.
A great big thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for an advance review copy of this stunning and magnificent novel in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts presented are my own.
