The Book of Records (2025)
Why this one?
This one’s concept grabbed me, as well as Thien’s pedigree and the fact that I hadn’t read any of her previous work.
Madeleine Thien (1974- ; active 2001-) was born in Vancouver, Canada to a Malaysian Chinese father and a Hong Kong Chinese mother. She was initial planning to be a dancer, studying dance at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver before switching to Fine Arts with a specialism in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.
She began by writing short stories in the late 1990s, winning several Canadian prizes in the process. Her first book was 2001's shorts collection Simple Recipes, and in the same year she also wrote a children's book based on a film. Her debut novel, Certainty (2006) and her second, Dogs at the Perimeter (2011) were both widely acclaimed and gained her several more nominations and prizes.
Her third, 2016's Do Not Say We Have Nothing, brought even further international success, winning Canada's Giller Prize but also shortlisted for both the 2016 Booker Prize (eventually won by The Sellout) and the 2017 Women's Prize (won by The Power). ..
The Book of Records will be published by Granta in May 2025. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.
Thoughts, etc.
The Book of Records has as its central thread the story of Lina, a young girl who has been forced to emigrate from her homeland (seemingly part of China), and with her father has arrived at a mysterious enclave called 'the Sea', a shapeshifting and timeshifting fantasy of a refugee camp. In the process they have been separated from Lina's mother and brother, with their present whereabouts and status unknown. Among their minimal possessions are three volumes taken from The Great Voyagers encyclopedia series, which Lina obsessively reads and memorises.
As her father becomes ill, Lina befriends her neighbours in the enclave, whose names and stories blur with the subjects of her encyclopaedia volumes. Bento is the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated for his radical views on religion; Blucher is Hannah Arendt, fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter is the Chinese Tang-dynasty poet Du Fu. While the book is anchored in the future ('the Sea' section appears based on fragments of evidence to be around a century from now, though given the fluidity of time in this books who knows really) its most extensive and powerful sections are those set in the past inhabited by these three historical figures, who are in a session the real protagonists of the novel.
Most powerful of all for me were the sections around Arendt. The book came to life in these sections, populated as they are with other well-known characters from the period, such as Walter Benjamin ('Benji'), and telling familiar tales of perpetual escape endured at the time and over the centuries by Jewish people. These sections provide both obvious relevance to a reader in the modern day world that is seemingly set up for a re-run this climate of nationalism and persecution, and gripping and compelling drama, regardless of your existing knowledge of the story.
The sections featuring Spinoza are also patchily excellent. He too has been forced out of homes and communities, both for his religion, and later for his rejection of the very concept of religion. Like the other historical figures featured, Thien has mentioned a desire to focus on the lesser-known aspects of their lives, so we also get in-depth detail on Spinoza's time working for pennies in a workshop making glass for spectacles and telescopes, which prove surprisingly fascinating in addition to their obvious metaphorical value around 'lenses'. We also find ourselves in 1666 and the time of the great Plague, which provides one of the more thought-provoking and moving moments of the book as a peer of Spinoza's explains the devastating impact of his work on a personal acquaintance of theirs who has lost family to the disease - in trusting Spinoza's intellect and therefore his rejection of religion, the bereaved man has lost his only source of consolation.
The Du Fu sections for me were the hardest to get a grip on. The central focus here is more on Du Fu's own frustrations as an unrecognised poet. In common with the other sections, though, is the impact of wider historical events on Du's own life and work. Like the others he is forced to move multiple times, due to famine and war. Like the others, at times he has no means to support himself and must make sacrifices to survive. But overall I found this section harder to parse, perhaps because of my own slightly narrow worldview and relative lack of familiarity with the history of Chinese poetry or indeed China as a whole.
You'll note that I am speaking mainly about these sections to the exclusion of talking about the main thread of the book, dealing with Lina and the Sea. 'Lina and the Sea' was apparently the working title of this book, and I'm actually not overly shocked that it was changed. To me, Lina's story, while well set-up in terms of intrigue, becomes less compelling as the book goes on, and my interest in her world diminished. I found her sections ended up feeling more like a hook on which to hang the stories of these historical figures, rather than a genuinely engaging story of its own.
That's not to say her story recedes entirely. We learn more about her history and the deep loss felt especially by the separation from her brother. We also see her in the further future, returned from the Sea and living a more humble and familiar-seeming life. And there's a whole long section in the middle decicated to her father's past and the events that seemingly contributed to their exile. Her father worked in 'Cyberspace', something that's repeated quite a lot with a deep sense of mystery and meaning hanging over it, but I found the explanation (if that's what it was) of the relevance of all of this drifted over me somewhat.
In general, I found flickers of understanding in the way this novel was structured, rather than feeling like I entirely grasped Thien's purpose. It's evident that we're beginning by looking at a kind of dystopic future in which today's biggest issues (climate, nationalism, polarisation, etc.) have been amplified to a point in which new ways of dealing with those issues have to be invented, and some of the old ways of going about life erased. And the 'Great Voyagers' stories and their merging and blending with the modern world of the book are there as deliberate pointers towards how, despite the seemingly apocalyptic circumstances in which the Sea exists, many of the contributing factors to the present situation are not exceptional. Great thought, throughout history, has been born of seemingly impossible circumstances, and those who have pushed boundaries in philosophy and art are often those who have been persecuted and driven from their homes, forced to fight for the survival of their ideas.
These are big, timely and important ideas. I didn't always feel as if I was keeping up with Thien and her evidently enormous intellect in her deployment of these themes in this book, but I found their exploration through the lives of the historical figures consistently fascinating. I just wish that the main thread featuring Lina had kept to its initial promise and managed to hold its own in the face of those great stories that began as punctuation but ended as the dominant text. Perhaps that's part of the point, though: in highlighting the smallness of our lives under the weight of all that history, and the similarly bleak fact of the unexceptional nature of even the darkest events in our present day.
Score
7.5
A really dense and intellectually rich novel, with some standout sections and ideas. But also one that didn’t feel wholly coherent on first pass, and in its depth and relentless darkness, was not always the easiest of reads.
Next up
I’ve found my recent reading has been a bit relentlessly dark and doomy, which coupled with world events isn’t the most fun. So I’m trying to mix it up a bit, with some very light non-fiction on the side and an attempt to find some novels that are at least a little more tonally varied. Will report back if I find any!
