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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.
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.
Los Angeles Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Madeleine Thien's voyagers embrace humanity. That makes them outlaws
In an era in which we've been told that mass data-mining and plagiarism will lead to a magical artificial intelligence that will solve all the great mysteries of life, 'The Book of Records' is a reminder that human genius and the artistry of stunning prose are the antidote to AI's codswallop. Madeleine Thien has penned an all-too-human novel that explores themes of collaboration and resistance, exile and community, and the banality of living in 'interesting times.' Physicists have long wrestled with a basic question: What are space and time? As human beings, we think of time as the span between the day we are born and the day we die. We understand intellectually that people have come before us and people will exist after us, but being able to grasp that time relies on empathy fostered by reading, viewing art or touching ancient buildings. In 'The Book of Records,' 7-year-old Lina and her computer scientist father are on board a 22nd-century ship carrying them into exile when he explains the basic structure of time and space to her. 'He told me that everything would be obvious if I took a piece of string and folded it over and through itself to form a double-coin knot,' Lina recalls. 'The string is time and the knot is space,' he concluded. 'But they're the same. See?' Global climate change has caused the oceans to overwhelm the land, and the ship's passengers are refugees in search of solid ground. The metaphor of the double-coin knot recurs throughout the novel; each passenger is on his or her journey through time and space. Lina left her family library behind, except for three books about fellow voyagers: the Chinese poet Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza, the Portuguese Jewish philosopher exiled to the Netherlands, and Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who, as as Jew, was forced to flee when the Nazis took power. Lina knows the contents of these books so intimately that when she encounters Jupiter, Bento and Blucher, who tell stories of that trio's journeys, she becomes their wise companion. And while Thien's book is a novel of ideas, it's much more visceral, tying together the sublime joys of being human and the horrors inflicted by those other humans who hate all of the things that make us imperfect but radiant beings. Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza and Hannah Arendt were all cast out of their communities by authorities who imposed narrow definitions of acceptable thought. If we could stop thinking in such narrow definitions of time, Thien intimates, we would be capable of empathizing and understanding that even our most shattering experiences do not separate us from others. Instead, we would find meaningful community in the company of those who have been where we find ourselves now. Terence, a previously enslaved Roman playwright who wrote 'I consider nothing human alien to me,' grasped that concept, as have the myriad artists and philosophers who have expanded on that thought. Human experience, even for those we may not have personal knowledge about, helps us understand our individual selves and form the empathetic communities so necessary during dark times. Lina's own exile begins with the loss of her mother and brother. Years later, when her father is dying, he finally reveals the secret that set them on their path: The massive project to link computers and humans to fix climate change failed, and now everyone faces extinction. What will happen to human time with no one there to record it? Thien translates complex topics into art, making the esoteric deeply resonant. When Baruch gets his heart broken, she writes: 'He closed his eyes, but it only made the world within him more vivid, so he tried to picture himself between the stars, unburdened of all sensory feeling,' time a whirlwind to him. 'The world intervenes in everything we do,' she writes of his thinking, 'and we turn and stumble in its innumerable fragments.' We string together fragments to make sense of the senseless, Thien observes, 'searching backwards for a cause.' She describes the 'passionate indifference' that Arendt substitutes for love-making when her marriage becomes a broken clock that can't be fixed. Reading Thien is to admire how she brush-strokes language to create beauty. Exile is grief. And exile is set into motion by trauma, whether that be from a state set on genocide or climate change and the ravaging effects of colonialism that have stripped the land of all sustenance. Refugees from Central America, Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, refugees cast out of their faith community for heresy, artists made refugee by the delusions of their patrons, and those left refugee on America's streets because of economic disparity or domestic violence have all been torn away from what they love, all the things they've lost. I've hesitated about giving away too much of the plot of 'The Book of Records' for the same reason I don't go on guided tours of a city I'm visiting. Thien's book is full of unexpected moments of beauty and pleasure I don't want to ruin for those about to enter its pages. Delight is in discovery. In our own interesting times, it's a great relief to be reminded that none of what is happening is alien. The individual insistence that 'no one has ever faced this same moment' is the cause of so much pain, exacerbated by those governments that seek to erase the human history of betrayal and resistance and struggle, evoking a mythical, conflict-free path. Destroying connections to time and community is the goal of authoritarianism. As one of the novel's characters says, 'Survival required disobedience, and each of them must become an outlaw. So be it.' Thien has written a brilliant outlaw novel. Berry is a writer and critic living in Oregon.
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.
