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Spectator
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Time travellers' tales: The Book of Records, by Madeleine Thien, reviewed
Those who have read Madeleine Thien's bestselling Do Not Say We Have Nothing will recognise The Book of Records as being the title of the manuscript at its heart – a dangerously dissenting history of China. In her latest novel, Thien uses the title to explore the future rather than the past – or so it seems at first. Extensive flooding has caused Lina and her father to leave Foshan and retreat to 'the Sea', a labyrinthine 'nothing place' where people usually shelter just for a short while before moving on. It resembles Kowloon Walled City, the immense, densely populated structure that, before being demolished, was close to where Thien's mother grew up. The Sea is also an uncanny manifestation of space conflated with time, where historical figures live in neighbouring rooms. Lina treasures her last remaining three volumes of an encyclopaedic series, The Great Lives of Voyagers. One focuses on the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu; another on the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza; and the third on Hannah Arendt, the 20th-century German political theorist. When Lina discovers a secret door leading to three neighbours – Jupiter, Bento and Blucher – who turn out to be mysterious iterations of these three great voyagers, they proceed to tell her their tales. So, in an extraordinary narrative space, Lina's story frames those of the impoverished Du Fu and his struggle for recognition; Spinoza's exile from Amsterdam's Jewish Quarter; and Arendt's terrifying flight from Nazi Germany. The rendering of these lives is vivid, gripping and moving, especially in comparison to Lina's muted philosophical conversations with her father. But there are three other lives that are painfully missing: those of Lina's mother, brother and great-aunt.
Winnipeg Free Press
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
A delicate structure
Fans of Madeleine Thien's writing could be excused for feeling impatient about the author's followup to her bestselling novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing. The novel, published in 2016, won the Montreal author the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and landed on the short list for the Booker Prize. The nine-year gap was worth the wait. Babak Salari photo Madeleine Thien is the author of four novels and a short story collection. Thien's new novel, The Book of Records, published May 6 by Knopf Canada, is sure to satiate fans and win new ones, and will likely again draw the attention of national and international book prize juries. Thien didn't anticipate the novel, which she started in 2016, would take so long to come together. 'All I knew at the beginning was I wanted to write about a father and daughter and I had this idea about a building made of time — I was thinking about Einstein: time is space, space is time. I thought, 'What are the ideas or the questions I want to live with, I need to live with for the next five years?'' Thien says by Zoom. 'It turned out to be almost 10 years — maybe because I felt like I was chasing something for a long time that I couldn't pin down.' The Book of Records defies simple summation. In the future, Lina and her ailing father flee their home in Foshan as it is ravaged by the effects of climate change, arriving at a mysterious building called the Sea, which seems to exist outside conventional notions of space and time. Other migrants come and go from the Sea, but the two settle in for years. Lina has brought three books with her that detail the lives of three real-life thinkers: 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza; 8th-century poet Du Fu;and 20th-century German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt. A trio of neighbours at the Sea, essentially stand-ins for the real-life trio, tell their stories in an attempt to set their proverbial records straight; Thien provides riveting accounts of actual events that took place in each of their lives. 'One of the paradoxes of writing literature is that you're almost always trying to capture in language that thing which is not capturable by language. And even if you're able to hold it in your hands, you think, 'But that's not it' — and the search continues. So much is intertwined, so much only becomes visible as the structure materializes over the course of the book. It's not something that can be seen in the first 15 or 20 pages — it requires going on a journey together,' Thien says. On her journey, the 50-year-old Thien found more literary companions in authors Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and Yoko Ogawa. 'The joy of having those as figures in my mind … was that they're all so different from each other, and I'm so different from them, so there was no model, just companions, and maybe a recognition that they too, had been looking for structures that could hold that thing that is just beyond our grasp,' she says. Despite the weighty philosophical and political themes that run throughout The Book of Records — displacement, migration, climate change, biography and betrayal — the novel is propulsive, with the ideas acting like brushstrokes that form a rich and complete picture by the novel's end. The Book of Records While writing the book, Thien envisioned a reader along the lines of Lina's age (she's seven when she arrives at the Sea with her father and 14 when they leave). 'There's a lightness of touch that I wanted, that sense that these ideas belong to all of us, that I, too, am just an ordinary reader. I'm not a philosopher, I'm not a theorist of any kind, just a person looking for answers, meaning, some way to hold all this together,' Thien says. 'Young Lina was very much at the forefront of my thoughts as an imagined reader.' Winnipeg Jets Game Days On Winnipeg Jets game days, hockey writers Mike McIntyre and Ken Wiebe send news, notes and quotes from the morning skate, as well as injury updates and lineup decisions. Arrives a few hours prior to puck drop. The passages detailing events in the lives of Spinoza, Du Fu and Arendt saw Thien attempt to see the world from their respective perspectives, a task requiring extensive research. 'I tried to read what they were reading at that time in their life, but it was an almost impossible task because someone like Hannah Arendt was reading Immanuel Kant when she was 14 and that is not me,' she says, laughing. And while Thien found it daunting to tell their stories in her sprawling, fluid literary landscape, she also enjoyed the trio's company. 'I did feel at times — and maybe every fiction writer has to believe this — I felt they were sitting beside me. They were so real to me. They are so real to me. I feel like I spent nine years in a room with the three of them talking to each other and that I was just literally the housekeeper,' she says. Thien launches The Book of Records at McNally Robinson Booksellers' Grant Park location at 7 p.m. tonight, joined in conversation by Jenny Heijun Wills. Ben SigurdsonLiterary editor, drinks writer Ben Sigurdson is the Free Press's literary editor and drinks writer. He graduated with a master of arts degree in English from the University of Manitoba in 2005, the same year he began writing Uncorked, the weekly Free Press drinks column. He joined the Free Press full time in 2013 as a copy editor before being appointed literary editor in 2014. Read more about Ben. In addition to providing opinions and analysis on wine and drinks, Ben oversees a team of freelance book reviewers and produces content for the arts and life section, all of which is reviewed by the Free Press's editing team before being posted online or published in print. It's part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Irish Times
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Madeleine Thien: ‘The big questions we ask as children don't go away'
Canadian author Madeleine Thien's new novel The Book Of Records, her first since her 2016 Booker-shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing, took a lot longer to finish than she had anticipated. But books have their own time, she tells me over a Zoom call from her home in Montreal. It's no surprise to hear this, considering time and all of its mysteries and fascinations are central to Thien's novels. At the heart of The Book Of Records is a story about a girl, Lina, and her father, and how they came to be separated from Lina's mother and brother. Lina and her father are staying in a mysterious place called The Sea, a kind of central hub for refugees. Most people stay just a day or two before moving on, but some, like Lina and her father, are here for a longer period. As well as Lina's story, the novel also includes substantial biographies of real-life historical figures, namely the Chinese poet Du Fu, the German and American philosopher Hannah Arendt and the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Through these characters Thien explores most of life's big questions, which are also the big questions we ask as children. '[Those questions] don't go away,' she says in her gentle voice. 'They're probably agitating us from somewhere within even though we're pushing it all away – what is all this, what is it for, what happens to us when we die, are we really free, is everything determined?' It's a complex, multilayered book about many things. 'For me it's about a father trying to prepare his daughter for the world without him and wanting to provide her with some guidance in a world where he doesn't feel he's the proper model. For me personally, it's about what education is or could be. It was my way of exploring how I had come to believe the things I believed.' READ MORE With the real-life characters of Du Fu, Arendt and Spinoza, Thien focuses on biographical blind spots, the parts of their lives where, still, little is known. 'That gave me space as a novelist to both be guided by the people they had become and the writing they did later, but to think about that turning point of youth and the collapse of their worlds around them, or the loss of their community, because I think this is what Lina is facing. It felt like they had something to tell her about how she might go on.' [ Hannah Arendt and the meaning of evil Opens in new window ] Writing about the collapse of community and loss of family is central to Thien's work, from the garlanded Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), which tells the story of 20th-century China, to her second novel Dogs At The Perimeter (2011), which focuses on Cambodian genocide, to her debut novel, Certainty (2006), which looks at Japanese-occupied Malaysia. 'Almost certainly it must have something to do with my parents,' she says of her fascination with these topics. [ Madeleine Thien: Imagine if expressing a thought meant life or death Opens in new window ] 'My father was a young child during the second World War. His father was executed by Japanese-occupation forces, actually after the war was officially over but before the town where he lived was liberated. My mother was born in China but was taken as an infant to Hong Kong as a refugee, and then they went to school in Australia where they met. They ended up back in Malaysia but they left in 1974. I think I always felt my parents' longing to go home and they never really could. But I was always interested in how people can reinvent themselves, how they have to find that other self that exists within them, live in a different language, speak to their children never in their mother tongue, always in English ...' Thien's readers will recognise the title of her new novel from the pages of her previous novel, which featured a book of records, a kind of infinite novel kept by different characters who were trying to protect certain names and histories. Is that what Thien does with her own work? 'Sometimes we smuggle our own stories inside the life of another perhaps more well-known figure.' The idea for The Book Of Records first came to her after her mother died 20 years ago. 'I had this idea that one day I would write about a building made of time. I think I was reading a lot of neurology and physics after my mom passed. I had a hard time reading fiction. It was that question, you know, where did she go? That wholeness of time that she lived, where is it? I think maybe The Sea was a way to explore what timelessness felt like. I guess I just wanted it to be a home. The physicists and poets keep telling us we live in time and we can only live in time but what does that mean?' she asks, in her gentle voice. 'I tried to build a structure that we could live in time.' With her character Lina, Thien says she wanted to explore the idea of filial piety and duty ' ... what she carries from her father, that she may be the only one to carry this memory of her family'. Thien's own father died during the writing of this novel. Does she feel a similar filial duty to carry on her own family's memories? 'I often think would I have made them proud? I remember when I published my first book my parents had very divergent reactions. They were both very proud but my mother said that, because certain aspects of my family showed up in little glimmers in that first book of stories [Simple Recipes; 2001], she said when I read your book I realised I hadn't been alone. And my father said it's all fiction! So I think of them a lot in that complex ground of both remembering and creating.' The Book of Records is dedicated to her friend Y-Dang Troeung, who was born in a refugee camp in 1980 after her family had fled Cambodia, and who died in 2022. 'I think there's a part of me, and it comes probably from writing about Cambodia and China, I've long thought that mourning is maybe the thing that most allows us to think about this world and what we hope it could be. In a way, we have to mourn what we've loved so we can find a way for that still to remain in the world. There's something about what that kind of love and devotion elicits in us that to me feels like something that would feed political choices, political actions, ethics, morals.' Which brings us to politics. Thien is an undeniably political writer. Her books have addressed the trauma of war, genocide and migration. She donated her prize money of $25,000 from a 2024 Writers' Trust of Canada award to charities such as the Palestine Children's Relief Fund and the Lebanese Red Cross among others. She has spoken out about censorship and has defended the right of a university colleague to due process after allegations were made against him. Does she speak out because she is so aware of what staying quiet has cost people in the past? 'It's hard to unravel it ... There are certain things that we feel we need to protect on behalf of each other and among those are due process rights and that we're equal before the law. When those rights are stripped away from each other I do feel a responsibility not to just turn away. But sometimes it's hard to know when one's words can help and when they might not help.' Despite being set elsewhere in time, The Book Of Records feels chillingly politically relevant. 'When I started writing this book it was 2016. I felt that there were authoritarian impulses that were materialising in all kinds of ways and probably I was very worried, but I think so many years of thinking about China, travelling in China, thinking about how different political campaigns and movements rose and fell away and how quickly the ground can shift beneath people, I did feel that even when I was writing about the past, it felt like it must be someone's present now. Maybe someone who wasn't in the frame, in the visual field. Maybe not someone we were seeing on a daily basis, but it was someone's reality. I think it's much more intensely in the frame of view now.' The Book of Records is published by Granta.
The Province
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Province
Governor General's Award and Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Madeleine Thien is back with new novel
Vancouver native comes home for Vancouver Writers Fest event to celebrate latest work The Book of Records Award-winning author Madeleine Thien will be talking with fellow writer David Chariandy about her new novel The Book of Records at a Vancouver Writers Fest event on May 8 at the Annex in Vancouver. Photo by Babak Salari / Babak Salari Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. Vancouver native Madeleine Thien will be marking the publication of her latest novel The Book of Records, out May 6, with a special Vancouver Writers Fest event on May 8. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Exclusive articles by top sports columnists Patrick Johnston, Ben Kuzma, J.J. Abrams and others. Plus, Canucks Report, Sports and Headline News newsletters and events. Unlimited online access to The Province and 15 news sites with one account. The Province ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on. Daily puzzles and comics, including the New York Times Crossword. Support local journalism. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Exclusive articles by top sports columnists Patrick Johnston, Ben Kuzma, J.J. Abrams and others. Plus, Canucks Report, Sports and Headline News newsletters and events. Unlimited online access to The Province and 15 news sites with one account. The Province ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on. Daily puzzles and comics, including the New York Times Crossword. Support local journalism. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Thien, whose book Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, will take to the Annex stage (823 Seymour St.) for a conversation with Vancouver author David Chariandy. Postmedia reached out to Montreal-based Thien and asked her a few questions. The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien. Photo by Courtesy of Penguin Random House / Courtesy of Penguin Random House Question: What do you say when someone asks what your new book about? Answer: The Book of Records is set in a building made of time. It is about the ideas that transform us, the lives we imagine for ourselves and others, and the hopes we carry. It is about a father who knows that his time is limited, and who wants to give his daughter an inner world that will sustain her after he is gone. Q: In your book The Sea is a large complex that houses migrants. What makes The Sea different in terms of what we generally perceive as migrant centres? Essential reading for hockey fans who eat, sleep, Canucks, repeat. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. A: In fact, The Sea is not a migrant camp or a detention centre. It's an abandoned enclave that, physically, echoes the now demolished Kowloon Walled City. People who have been displaced by war, by the rising sea, by conflict, by dwindling resources, pass through it; The Sea is just one stop on their search for home. Only a very few remain there, often because something prevents them from moving on. Q: You have been working on this book for a decade. How do you feel about it coming out now with immigration such a hot topic? A: My novel — which, I think it's fair to say, is a strange work — is itself, metaphorically, a building, a place that shelters different philosophies across time; it houses people who are grappling with questions about free will, ethics, and what it means to live a good life. In The Sea, ideas migrate, take on new life, are misunderstood, revised, and sometimes reimagined in the hope that they might guide us when all else seems lost. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Of course, ideas are not made of air. They are carried by human beings across space and time, across borders. My heart breaks because I do not know a time when migration, displacement, homelessness, and the search for safety were not part of our world. Q: What themes will fans of your earlier work see you revisiting here in this new book? A: I think I keep returning to the force of history and the significance of individual lives. Perhaps The Book of Records continues an exploration of collaboration, collusion and silence, but also the loyalties of friendship; in this novel, more than the others, there's an exploration of namelessness, and what it means to save another person, especially someone with whom we have no ties of kinship, family or national identity. Q: American political theorist Hannah Arendt is once again in your thoughts as the life of a character in this book mirrors Arendt's life. What keeps you coming back to Arendt? This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. A: I think often of these words written by Arendt in January 1968, in the preface to her book Men in Dark Times. She writes that 'even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth.' Q: Your novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. Your work has been translated into 25 languages. All that said, what do you consider the most successful signpost for your work? A: Every work changes the novelist herself. For me, that's the vocation. I write to see something clearly in this world. I hope this attempt will resonate. But in the end, we are trying to make sense of the brief life that is given to us, and the immensity within this brevity. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Q: What do you hope readers take away from The Book of Records? A: That every act matters and no choice is insignificant; that everything we do or don't do, say or don't say, is the book we are writing upon this life. Q: When you come back to visit Vancouver what are some of things you like to do when you are here? A: I see my friends. We cook and eat together, we walk everywhere. I feel humbled by this city that has shaped me. Vancouver changed so much since my childhood in the 1980s, and yet I know this place in a very deep and personal, way. I hope it's not too morbid to say that I also tend the graves of my parents and those I love. It's a daughter's duty and one I cherish. 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Telegraph
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Fancy a fictional train-ride with the best of Europe's philosophers?
The Book of Records is a hard novel to pin down. The title draws on a motif from Madeleine Thien's last novel, the Booker Prize-shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), about the far-reaching effects of the Cultural Revolution on a group of musicians who met at the Shanghai Conservatory. One of the new book's subjects is the complexity of historical memory. Complex in various ways: since every story is an attempt to impose a version of the truth, historical memory and the ways it can be manipulated become instruments of state control. But memory is also one of the last defenses of the powerless, even if it leads to its own problems: 'Could a person and the memory of that person diverge so far that recollection itself became a kind of betrayal?' The novel begins with a middle-aged woman remembering some of the defining events of her childhood: namely, arriving with her father at a refugee camp, known a little confusingly as the Sea. Lina is seven years old and doesn't understand why they've left their hometown of Foshan, in China, or why they've become separated from her mother and brother, and we're as much in the dark as she. Narrative confusion, though, offers an expansion of possibilities – time and space function in unpredictable ways. Windows and doors open unexpectedly onto different views and realities, depending on the people who are in them or their moods. As Lina's father, Wui Shin, explains to her, 'the buildings of the Sea are made of time.' Ships arrive periodically to carry the refugees away, but the body of water they appear on changes from day to day. Sometimes it's the Atlantic, sometimes it's the Atrai River or the South China Sea… Part of the point is to turn the Sea into a symbol of refugee camps all over the world, across all times, but also to suggest the way that each of those camps is in itself a shifting, temporary ground where different cultures briefly, glancingly, come together before moving on. When they fled Foshan, Lina's father took with him three books from her childhood home, instalments from an educational series on The Great Lives of Voyagers. He picked them because they looked like they hadn't been read: 'Number 3 was about Du Fu, the poet. Number 70 was Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher. Number 84 was Hannah Arendt, a writer.' The plot, such as it is, begins to take shape when Lina opens a previously unseen door in her apartment block and enters into a world of mysterious neighbours – two men and a woman who turn out to be, in ways the novel never quite specifies, vague incarnations of the subjects of her three books. Meanwhile, the neighbours tell stories, about Du Fu, about Spinoza, about Arendt, separated by centuries and oceans but held together by a common search for meaning – a kind of forced migration in itself, toward truth but away from home. Thien doesn't make her job easy. She has to keep creating narrative momentum from scratch, and it's a testament to her skills as a writer that she manages so often. One of the highlights of the novel is Arendt's escape from occupied France, through which Thien guides us with great patience and dramatic skill. But even here she sometimes lets the ideas take over from the more intimate weight of the personal stories. On her train ride into Lisbon, Arendt gets into a philosophical debate with the strangers in her cabin. One of them cites Descartes: 'Tell me this… If the outside world is erased from all five senses, what is time?' It's a conversation that makes sense in a novel that functions at the crossroads of fantasy, history and philosophy, but those games come at a price: the moment doesn't feel very real. As I said: a hard novel to pin down or sum up. Thien writes brilliantly about Wui Shin's history, and the reason why he fled Foshan with his daughter. He's a systems engineer who had, almost unwittingly, become a state informer: 'He'd had no moral centre because he had taken it as a matter of fact that he could not be corrupted.' Eventually he even informs on his wife, not because he wants to but because he thinks it would look more suspicious if he doesn't say anything: systems involve you in their own logic, whether you believe in them or not. And yet the story of his life with Lina never quite takes off and remains a framing device – the fantasy element is a kind of puncture in reality through which narrative pressure leaks away. Of course, the novel is self-aware enough to know that. As Lina's father warns her at the beginning: 'you'll never be content if you can't separate what you want from what really is.'
