Madeleine Thien: ‘The big questions we ask as children don't go away'
Canadian author Madeleine Thien's new novel The Book Of Records, her first since her 2016 Booker-shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing, took a lot longer to finish than she had anticipated. But books have their own time, she tells me over a Zoom call from her home in Montreal. It's no surprise to hear this, considering time and all of its mysteries and fascinations are central to Thien's novels.
At the heart of The Book Of Records is a story about a girl, Lina, and her father, and how they came to be separated from Lina's mother and brother. Lina and her father are staying in a mysterious place called The Sea, a kind of central hub for refugees. Most people stay just a day or two before moving on, but some, like Lina and her father, are here for a longer period. As well as Lina's story, the novel also includes substantial biographies of real-life historical figures, namely the
Chinese
poet Du Fu, the German and American philosopher
Hannah Arendt
and the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
Through these characters Thien explores most of life's big questions, which are also the big questions we ask as children. '[Those questions] don't go away,' she says in her gentle voice. 'They're probably agitating us from somewhere within even though we're pushing it all away – what is all this, what is it for, what happens to us when we die, are we really free, is everything determined?'
It's a complex, multilayered book about many things. 'For me it's about a father trying to prepare his daughter for the world without him and wanting to provide her with some guidance in a world where he doesn't feel he's the proper model. For me personally, it's about what education is or could be. It was my way of exploring how I had come to believe the things I believed.'
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With the real-life characters of Du Fu, Arendt and Spinoza, Thien focuses on biographical blind spots, the parts of their lives where, still, little is known. 'That gave me space as a novelist to both be guided by the people they had become and the writing they did later, but to think about that turning point of youth and the collapse of their worlds around them, or the loss of their community, because I think this is what Lina is facing. It felt like they had something to tell her about how she might go on.'
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Writing about the collapse of community and loss of family is central to Thien's work, from the garlanded Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), which tells the story of 20th-century China, to her second novel Dogs At The Perimeter (2011), which focuses on Cambodian genocide, to her debut novel, Certainty (2006), which looks at Japanese-occupied Malaysia. 'Almost certainly it must have something to do with my parents,' she says of her fascination with these topics.
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'My father was a young child during the second World War. His father was executed by Japanese-occupation forces, actually after the war was officially over but before the town where he lived was liberated. My mother was born in China but was taken as an infant to Hong Kong as a refugee, and then they went to school in Australia where they met. They ended up back in Malaysia but they left in 1974. I think I always felt my parents' longing to go home and they never really could. But I was always interested in how people can reinvent themselves, how they have to find that other self that exists within them, live in a different language, speak to their children never in their mother tongue, always in English ...'
Thien's readers will recognise the title of her new novel from the pages of her previous novel, which featured a book of records, a kind of infinite novel kept by different characters who were trying to protect certain names and histories. Is that what Thien does with her own work? 'Sometimes we smuggle our own stories inside the life of another perhaps more well-known figure.'
The idea for The Book Of Records first came to her after her mother died 20 years ago. 'I had this idea that one day I would write about a building made of time. I think I was reading a lot of neurology and physics after my mom passed. I had a hard time reading fiction. It was that question, you know, where did she go? That wholeness of time that she lived, where is it? I think maybe The Sea was a way to explore what timelessness felt like. I guess I just wanted it to be a home. The physicists and poets keep telling us we live in time and we can only live in time but what does that mean?' she asks, in her gentle voice. 'I tried to build a structure that we could live in time.'
With her character Lina, Thien says she wanted to explore the idea of filial piety and duty ' ... what she carries from her father, that she may be the only one to carry this memory of her family'. Thien's own father died during the writing of this novel. Does she feel a similar filial duty to carry on her own family's memories?
'I often think would I have made them proud? I remember when I published my first book my parents had very divergent reactions. They were both very proud but my mother said that, because certain aspects of my family showed up in little glimmers in that first book of stories [Simple Recipes; 2001], she said when I read your book I realised I hadn't been alone. And my father said it's all fiction! So I think of them a lot in that complex ground of both remembering and creating.'
The Book of Records is dedicated to her friend Y-Dang Troeung, who was born in a refugee camp in 1980 after her family had fled Cambodia, and who died in 2022. 'I think there's a part of me, and it comes probably from writing about Cambodia and China, I've long thought that mourning is maybe the thing that most allows us to think about this world and what we hope it could be. In a way, we have to mourn what we've loved so we can find a way for that still to remain in the world. There's something about what that kind of love and devotion elicits in us that to me feels like something that would feed political choices, political actions, ethics, morals.'
Which brings us to politics. Thien is an undeniably political writer. Her books have addressed the trauma of war, genocide and migration. She donated her prize money of $25,000 from a 2024 Writers' Trust of Canada award to charities such as the Palestine Children's Relief Fund and the Lebanese Red Cross among others. She has spoken out about censorship and has defended the right of a university colleague to due process after allegations were made against him. Does she speak out because she is so aware of what staying quiet has cost people in the past?
'It's hard to unravel it ... There are certain things that we feel we need to protect on behalf of each other and among those are due process rights and that we're equal before the law. When those rights are stripped away from each other I do feel a responsibility not to just turn away. But sometimes it's hard to know when one's words can help and when they might not help.'
Despite being set elsewhere in time, The Book Of Records feels chillingly politically relevant. 'When I started writing this book it was 2016. I felt that there were authoritarian impulses that were materialising in all kinds of ways and probably I was very worried, but I think so many years of thinking about China, travelling in China, thinking about how different political campaigns and movements rose and fell away and how quickly the ground can shift beneath people, I did feel that even when I was writing about the past, it felt like it must be someone's present now. Maybe someone who wasn't in the frame, in the visual field. Maybe not someone we were seeing on a daily basis, but it was someone's reality. I think it's much more intensely in the frame of view now.'
The Book of Records is published by Granta.
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