If you are walking straight into a headwind, it is a triumph simply to keep yourself upright. Wittgenstein wrote about this with what looks like staggering foresight in 1930: that in a time of cultural impoverishment, “the strength of the individual is wasted through the overcoming of opposing forces & frictional resistances.”

This pointless dissipation of energy and talent perfectly describes the horrors that befell classical musicians during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The music they loved was forbidden. Their instruments were destroyed. They were tortured and humiliated, accused of treachery and vanity and dispatched to work in the farms and factories of the hinterlands. Their virtues — their virtuosity — were brutally recast as moral weaknesses and a national threat.

The most they could do was protect whatever frail, ghostly sense of identity they still had. It drove many to suicide. And it wasn’t just artists who suffered. Keeping two sets of selves was unbearable for millions. As one of the characters rhetorically asks in “Do Not Say We Have Nothing,” the new novel by Madeleine Thien: “What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?”

“Do Not Say We Have Nothing,” shortlisted this year for the Man Booker Prize, is Ms. Thien’s third novel. It is a beautiful, sorrowful work. The book impresses in many senses: It stamps the memory with an afterimage; it successfully explores larger ideas about politics and art (the mind is never still while reading it); it has the satisfying, epic sweep of a 19th-century Russian novel, spanning three generations and lapping up against the shores of two continents.