Madeleine Thien's new time-bending novel is haunted by her father's story
The Canadian writer discussed her novel The Book of Records on Bookends with Mattea Roach
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.
This interview had been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Katy Swailes.
