Madeline Thien’s last novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her books have been translated into 25 languages. In 2024, she received the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award. Born in Vancouver, Madeleine lives in Montreal.
The Book of Records opens inside “The Sea,” a mysterious shape-shifting enclave, a staging-post for waves of migrants coming and going, a building made of time where pasts and futures collide. It holds a mirror to the role of fate, shows how a political moment may determine the course of an individual’s life, and suggests the longings and consolations of a voyaging mind and heart.
Interviewed by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Shazia Hafiz Ramji (SHR): Madeleine, it’s such a treat to read yet another moving and inventive novel by you. Your work always makes me cry and think about the world newly, thank you.
The Book of Records opens when young Lina and her father are living in an enclave called “the Sea,” which is a “staging post between migrations.” Lina is just seven years old when she and her father have to leave their home suddenly to seek refuge in this place where “the buildings are made of time.” Her father hurriedly picks three books before they leave. These three books serve as her education and are from a series called the Great Lives of Voyagers, made for teenagers. The books are about Hannah Arendt (born 1906; the philosopher known for her theories about totalitarianism), Baruch Spinoza (17th century; known for his work, Ethics), and Du Fu (8th century; a well known Chinese poet).
Were these thinkers and writers important for you when you were growing up too? What is it about Arendt, Spinoza, and Du Fu that speak to you and to the time that we live in now?
Madeleine Thien (MT): I’m so happy to have this conversation with you, Shazia. It’s an honour and a pleasure.
I first memorized a Du Fu poem when I was a child taking Chinese classes, and I first encountered Arendt and Spinoza when I was in my twenties. I’m 51 now, and all three have been part of my life for decades. Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Men in Dark Times and Between Past and Future were a touchstone for me when I was writing about the Cambodian genocide and about China in the 20th century. She writes powerfully about writers, too, Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Hermann Broch, Isak Dinesen, Bertolt Brecht. When I was working on Dogs at the Perimeter, which is also about neurology and the mind, I read all the books by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, including his beautiful work, Looking for Spinoza. Reading and re-reading Ethics, which is a difficult but transcendent work, has been a kind of meditation for me. And Du Fu I’d been encountering all my life through translations by David Hinton, Eliot Weinberger, Wong May, and others. In my soul, all three, as well as the people they themselves write about or engage with, are in continuous conversation with one another.
I think their lives, and the ideas that grew from their experiences and encounters, always felt very near to me. Exile, estrangement, civil war, flight and refuge, the questioning of authority and faith, the search for a language to express not only an individual experience but a collective one — each of them have seen times like ours and tried not to be broken by them. They tried to piece together new understandings. They had fidelity to love itself. Love of their friends and confidants, their teachers, and also, in the case of Spinoza and Du Fu, love of that which might be called eternity.
SHR: While The Book of Records is about displacement, exile, and love (and so much more), both in terms of the plot and literary influences, it’s also a book about reading – reading closely, thinking critically, and examining one’s life. How did you revisit the works of Arendt, Spinoza, and Du Fu during your writing process? Did you read a bit every day and write in response? Did you write from memory without reading? What did that reading look like?
MT: Yes, you’ve put it so beautifully. Thank you. In the nine years of writing the novel, the books of one or another was always at hand. It was like friendship, like spending time with people I became closer to, year by year. Among the books that never left my side were Arendt’s letters to her husband Heinrich or to her professor and friend, Karl Jaspers; Du Fu’s poems; Spinoza’s Ethics and surviving letters. I wanted to bring their cities and worlds to life, and once that began to happen on the page — once I was inhabiting Amsterdam or Chang’an or Montauban — it was the physical world that made them real. I’m the kind of writer who takes a lot of notes and then never looks at them. In the moment of writing, after some intense preparatory work, I need to plunge into my imagination, and at that point, there’s nothing on the desk besides the pages of the novel itself.
Through these historical figures that we know, I tried to tell the story of Lina’s father, of the China that is his home in the near future, and about ethics and moral disintegration in a collapsing world. I felt there was something prismatic about all their worlds.
SHR: The Book of Records is structured in three parts. The first begins with Lina and Wui-Shin’s arrival in the migrant compound that is the Sea; the second follows the deeply imagined lives and struggles of the three writers and thinkers; the third is a reckoning with displacement and family history, but the story is far from chronological – it’s intricately layered and cohesive but sprawling – a remarkable feat! When did you begin writing The Book of Records and what was the biggest challenge in seeing it through to the end?
MT: Trying to find a way for this structure, the Sea, to bear the weight of any reader who might choose to enter its labyrinth. These novels are always labours of love. It seems I always need to try to write something that is beyond my grasp, and I think writers and artists are driven to do this, to keep faith that we might salvage something, that we are carrying other ideas and other times into the future. Sometimes one’s own work is not the important work; sometimes it will be the seed for another writer or artist, someone who will recognize something in what you’ve done, and who will go on to create the unforgettable and transformative work. I think that, in order keep writing across a lifetime, one has to keep this kind of faith, that you might work all your life and not find what you’re seeking, but that your efforts will help someone else find the way.
SHR: You drew inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s letters, some of which she received from her then-lover the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who later aligned himself with the Nazis. How does a character’s understanding of love shape their view of the world? Or, what does love have to do with writing?
MT: Her love for Heidegger, a love which began when she was eighteen and he was in his forties, and lasted her entire life, became a very deep part of her thinking. Crucially, at a young age, she seemed to have made a decision within herself not to judge herself for the act of loving. She would be loyal not to Heidegger but to the Hannah who had experienced this capacity for love. She sees him clearly and she judges him and she also knows there is no going back to the person she was before she loved him. Throughout her writings, she always returns to the world that exists between people — this space that is the world itself, the world in which, by our speech and actions, we appear. Her writings on totalitarianism and atomisation and loneliness are influential. But threaded through these subjects are ideas about beginnings, forgiveness, plurality, love for the world, and promises. She differentiates between what it is to love in private — to love one’s friends or family, to forgive, to be devoted, to be a home for another — and what it is to love the world. She believes that to love the world, the world we hold in common, is to take responsibility for it.
SHR: I think writing changes the writer in ways that are drastic, but perhaps not overtly visible to others. How did writing this novel change you?
MT: It changed me forever, and I’m so grateful for the perceptiveness of this question. I find it difficult to speak about my relationship with the novel. I wrote it thinking about my mother who had passed away when I was in my twenties; and about my father and my best friend, Y-Dang Troeung, who passed away during the years I was working on The Book of Records. To be in conversation with the living and the dead, to pay tribute to the shape of a life, to write a novel whose structure insists that the voyage is ongoing, and that each of us must choose the record we are keeping, and the things we hope will survive us into the future — this was a decade of my life. The characters entrusted their ideas to me, and they taught me things that my own life had not shown me. The Walter Benjamin character in my novel tells us that the attempt to breathe something into life again is the root cause of our sadness. I think this is true; the attempt brought me tremendous sorrow as I accompanied the characters through their lives. But they also brought me so much light, so many conversations, and they help Lina, the young girl at the centre of the novel. They help her to leave them behind, and to know the times in which she is alive.