The Whisperers

Gosh it takes a long time to read a book these days and this is a whopper. It based on the kind of archive and access that you would give a leg for (you can see a taste of this at http://www.orlandofiges.com/), and much of what it covers you know - or think you know - in outline. But there are sections that are very hard to read. It tells us that women would sometimes deliberately get pregnant in the camps, despite the awful conditions, simply so as not to be alone - but their children were taken away from them and kept in nurseries as they went back to work, and were terribly vulnerable. There is one story of a girl who died at fourteen months that still haunts me. Sometimes history is there to make us see the things we wouldn't otherwise want to look at too closely.

I was expecting more on whispering - it is such an arresting image, but it gets buried in the mass of personal stories - not that these aren't fascinating in themselves, but the whole idea of lives lived with the volume down ..... Have reached the final chapter on memory, and so much of what is said here about the layering of memory and the way in which memories are patched together from the personal and the collective resonates with what one suspects about China. So despite some of the longueurs [oooh, good word] of the mid-sections, ending picks up, and pulls out something that we don't get from the earlier chapters.

It's a hard book to categorise. On one hand, what historian would pass up that material? On the other, who is meant to read The Whisperers and does the intended audience limit what you can do with it? (Check Scopus before we read too much into that...)