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Straits Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Book review: Madeleine Thien's The Book Of Records an exquisitely interlaced time-travel novel
Canadian writer Madeleine Thien's The Book Of Records is a tessellation of ideas and worlds threaded to pinpoint anxieties of modern times. PHOTOS: SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY, GRANTA BOOKS
Washington Post
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘The Book of Records' is poignant meditation on loss and its meanings
Often marginalized by critics during his life, M.C. Escher (1898-1972) is now famous for woodcuts and lithographs that roam the wild frontier of mathematics, images of rooms that warp and buckle, stairs ascending downward ceaselessly, mimicking a Möbius strip. Dimensions, whether two, three or four, don't really matter. Madeleine Thien plays with these concepts in her ambitious, elliptical novel 'The Book of Records,' which is Escherian in spirit, flattening our understanding of time and human connection in all the right ways.
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Father and Daughter Caught in the No Man's Land of Migration
In 1971, decades after her exile from Europe, the German-born political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote to her friend, the novelist Mary McCarthy: 'One can't say how life is, how chance or fate deals with people, except by telling the tale.' The generative power of storytelling inspires Madeleine Thien's deeply humane novel 'The Book of Records.' In an aching, dreamlike narrative that overlaps distant centuries and geographies to chart cycles of authoritarianism and loss, Thien uncovers glimmers of community among disparate individuals. The bittersweet novel opens on the banks of the Sea, an abandoned military outpost turned 'no man's land' where 'people who needed to disappear, or who had no other nation, began to take refuge' centuries ago. For most people, including 7-year-old Lina and her father, Wui, 'the Sea was just one stop on the way to a better place.' Its location is uncertain, a site of imagination and conjecture: Though Lina and Wui believe they're on the South China Sea, other inhabitants say it's the Atlantic, or the Baltic. They've left behind their home — and Lina's mother, brother and aunt — in Foshan, China, without explanation beyond Wui's desire to flee 'an empire in ruins,' he says, 'a hall of mirrors in which good people could betray themselves and never know it.' But Lina's loneliness and confusion clash with her father's brave front. For them, this is no temporary way station, Wui suffering from an illness that makes the Sea a final destination. Adrift, Lina seeks solace in a rare commodity: books. The only three her father hastily packed (taken from a 90-volume series for children called 'The Great Lives of Voyagers') chronicle the lives of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the poet Du Fu and Arendt herself. For Lina, 'these blue-covered books were a net that would suspend us outside the present,' Wui embellishing his reading with episodes not in the text. As she grows, she realizes his trick, that he 'made things up and thereby slowed time down, ensuring that no matter how long our journey lasted, we'd never run out of history, no matter how true or inaccurate it was.' When they're not reading, the two find kinship with three neighbors whose ethereal and unlikely presences raise the question of whether they exist at all. Inexplicably, each shares uncanny similarities with the three historical figures in Lina's books, and together they expand upon her simple children's stories to weave absorbing, evocative tales about the nonfictional 'voyagers.' These spellbinding historical passages serve as a ballast to Lina and Wui's uncertain existence. Although Thien could have written a purely historical novel, she gracefully folds these mostly true stories into an ambitious family saga, like accordion pleats. With her imagined worlds, incandescent prose and malleable sense of time and history, Thien strikes worthy comparisons to Italo Calvino, Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard and Ali Smith's seasonal quartet. This staggering novel blurs the line between fact and fiction to underscore the importance of storytelling itself, as a practice of endurance, and resistance. Years pass and Lina is fixed in place as the sole caretaker of her still-ailing father, watching ships filled with refugees come and go without any sign of her family. Trapped in a 'world of encircled beginnings,' Lina latches onto these philosophical conversations and stories as her education, as the only movement she knows. When a middle section discloses the truth behind Wui's flight from home, 'The Book of Records' then toggles in time to reconcile the brutality of betrayal with the forgiveness inherent in unconditional love. Try to read without weeping profusely.
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.
CBC
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Madeleine Thien's new time-bending novel is haunted by her father's story
Madeleine Thien is one of Canada's most acclaimed storytellers. Her novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing received both the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in 2016, telling the story of musicians during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Now, she returns with her latest novel, The Book of Records, which continues her exploration of history, memory and the political forces that shape individual lives. "As Madeleine has said herself, she doesn't see history as separate from the present moment," said Mattea Roach in the introduction to their interview on Bookends. "With this story, she questions the very nature of time, asking, 'How do we engage with great thinkers of the past, and what can they teach us about how to live now?'" Set 100 years in the future, The Book of Records follows Lina, a young girl from China, and her ailing father as they seek refuge in a place called "the Sea," where time has collapsed. In this world, voyagers and philosophers from centuries past coexist with migrants from around the globe. Lina grows up with only three books, each chronicling the lives of famous voyagers throughout history. Over time, these figures come to life as her eccentric neighbours, eventually becoming her friends. Thien joined Roach on Bookends to discuss the personal connection she feels to the fantastical world she has created, and what it means to exist in a place that blurs past and present. Mattea Roach: What would it mean for a building to be made of time, as Lina's father explains to her, because it's a very metaphysical concept? Lina's father describes it to her as a piece of string that keeps folding over itself, like a constellation knot. And really, what it is, is a crossroads of history. In some ways, it's the way that we hold history inside ourselves. It's the way that many centuries, many ideas, many philosophers, many words inhabit the space of our bodies. In a way, everyone has a kind of "Sea" within themselves. As a novelist, one tries to imagine what that would be like in a concrete sense. Escaping into literature, reading, writing, storytelling is something that Lina and a number of the other characters we meet in The Book of Records do. I understand that when you were growing up, books were somewhat scarce in your household, but you did have Encyclopedia Britannica at home. Were you an encyclopedia reader as a kid? Is your novel drawn from your own childhood reading? It's drawn from the intense longing to have books, definitely. I was just thinking about that this morning, actually — what was in the house? The Encyclopedia Britannica, condensed books and issues of Reader's Digest. I read everything that was lying around. I think, you know, my parents felt that given limited resources, what books could they put around that could kind of represent [an] abundance of reading material. I went to the library every weekend, and I'd just sit there looking at whatever I could find. The specific three encyclopedias that Lina reads over and over, are about the journeys of three historical figures — the 20th century political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the eighth century Chinese poet Du Fu. Why these three people in particular? In the book itself, the father says it's random. They're the three books he plucked off the shelf in a chaotic moment and threw into a bag and then they had to leave. For me, The Sea housed many different people at many different times. It took me nine years to write the book and people kind of moved in and moved out. But I wanted to be true to a question that had been disturbing me for a long time, which was, 'How had I come to believe the things I believed? What things were so deeply instilled in me that I didn't see them?' So on that level, I stayed with writers and philosophers and poets who had meant a lot to me for decades. Lina's father is a complex man [and] cares a lot for his daughter. You've described your own father as being a complicated man in his own way. Did you find yourself drawing on your relationship with your father at all? Maybe only in the sense that there was an exceptional person in which something was unfulfilled, and a loving person. My father had to grow up in the shadow of a father who was executed during the Second World War — who was forced to collaborate during wartime occupation, and then was killed when the occupation ended by the occupiers, because he just knew too much. The complexity and the tragedy of my father's childhood is probably woven into all my work in some way or another. Those difficult choices and the long shadow of them haunts the work. What was [your father's] life trajectory? He was born in what was British North Borneo, and then became part of Malaysia. He was the youngest child, and eventually he was sent to college in Melbourne, Australia, and there he met my mother, who was born in China and then brought to Hong Kong as a baby, also during the war. They also were refugees. My parents came to Canada in 1974, and I think it was extremely difficult. My mother was pregnant with me, they had two other children. [It's] a story we know — that uprootedness, that profound desire to make a new home, to make a better life for their kids. It's a story that we know well in Canada. I think my father was the most loving man who tried to find a footing in this continuous uprootedness. In the novel, there are these series of books and there's this epigraph that opens all the books. It's Seneca and it says, "I leave you my one greatest possession, which is the pattern of my life." And I do feel that my parents left me this pattern of their lives that I'm kind of in awe of. I feel as a writer, and just as a person, an obligation to this remembrance and love, and maybe to not being silent in the face of things when I feel something should be said. I want to ask about the dedication to The Book of Records because I know it was dedicated to your best friend, Y-Dang Troeung, who passed away in 2022. Can you tell me a bit about her? Y-Dang was an extraordinary person. She was a professor, she taught Canadian literature. She and her family were named as the last refugees when they came to Canada in the early 1980s and were welcomed by Pierre Trudeau as one of the last of the 60,000 refugees to arrive from Southeast Asia. She's definitely one of those people who gives me courage. She was just a light, I wish she was here.
