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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.
Boston Globe
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A girl and her father wash up in mysterious shelter by the sea, where they meet a trio of philosophers
Over the next few years, Lina's timeless neighbors become a chosen family. From their home in Foshan, Lina's father has brought only three volumes of a 90-book series named 'The Great Lives of Voyagers.' The books tell the life stories of historian Hannah Arendt, best known for her work ' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up With a setting as fascinating and surreal as The Sea, it's slightly disappointing that the alternating biographies of Arendt, Spinoza, and Du dominate the book. Lina's narration takes a distant backseat to the philosophers' trials, tribulations, and travels. These biographies are supposed to be instructive to Lina's quest to learn why she and her father have come to The Sea without her mother and brother. But this plotline feels largely inert because while readers are reminded of the dangers of totalitarianism and the tragic toll of forced migration and exile, Lina is like us: a passive receiver of familiar messages. Advertisement Arendt and Spinoza, in particular, take center stage. We follow Arendt through the formative traumas of her life, including her imprisonment by the Gestapo for researching antisemitism, and eventually, her perilous escape from Nazi-controlled France into Spain. Once in Spain, she travels to Lisbon and boards a ship to America, where she eventually settled and became renowned as an author and thinker. Spinoza's life story follows a similar arc. His pantheistic opinions lead to his expulsion from the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. Spinoza's philosophies cross over into Arendt's storyline, because her work was strongly influenced by his. The backstory of Lina's father's involvement in the creation of The Sea is delivered to the reader whole, via flashback, again without Lina having to do very much. This revelatory section happens in a futuristic China where hundreds have died in a Tiananmen Square-like 'catastrophe.' Lina's father finds himself working for a company named Days and Months Technology Corp Ltd., and with a name like that, it's easy to tell that this firm is up to no good. Advertisement Lina's father's backstory only makes The Sea more fascinating, and this reader wanted to understand the mechanics of its construction. The payoff, however, stops well short of explaining the science fiction, and Lina's father's betrayal will feel expected for anyone familiar with the Cultural Revolution. The Lina storyline, already hampered by a lack of movement, gets bogged down by repetition and a penchant for mysterious philosophical statements from her neighbors that, unfortunately, recall the musings of Yoda. 'You must let go of your fear ,' Du Fu's father tells himself at one point. Meanwhile, one of the scholars instrumental to the design of the Sea says, 'The deeper you fall into the architecture of the system…the closer you come to reality.' It's a sentiment Bento and Lina will repeat. 'Time never goes missing,' Bento proclaims. 'I think the structure of reality can be no other way.' While the musicality of such sentences is pleasing, their meanings remain elusive. Fans of books like Mohsin Hamid's ' Though one can't help but admire the breadth of Thien's imagination, it's the child's story by the sea that this reader wanted more of. Advertisement Leland Cheuk is an award-winning author of three books of fiction, most recently ' THE BOOK OF RECORDS By Madeleine Thien Norton, 368 pages, $28.99
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.'
