A universe between the covers

The Book of Records
by Madeleine Thien

Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2025
$36.95 / 9781039009561

Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski

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The Book of Records, by Vancouver-born Madeleine Thien, is probably unlike any other novel most readers will have encountered. For starters, it has four completely separate storylines. But that is just the beginning.

Those who know Thien’s previous novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, will recognize some familiar elements—not least of all the term “Book of Records.” In the earlier novel, the “book” is a narrative to enlarge the lives of generations of people sharing its chapters through presenting alternatives to the official history Chinese Communist Party. In this current novel, Thien expands the notion in a strikingly inventive way to embrace centuries and continents. 

Indeed, was there ever a book more about books than this one? The very form of Thien’s novel, in its complex, shifting, mirroring interconnection with “reality,” plays off against many, many books themselves, both physical volumes and the words they contain. Indeed, three books “plucked from the shelf in a moment of chaos and derangement” frame the whole novel. These three, from a ninety-volume set, The Great Lives of Voyagers, are about three people, themselves writers. One is Du Fu the (now) revered poet from seventh century China. The second is about fourteenth century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and the third, twentieth century German political theorist Hannah Arendt.

The very fact that these books are about writers who themselves are fascinated by pure thought, social reality, and books, sets the groundwork for a whole shifting, iridescent web of interconnections. The narrative patterns Thien employs reinforce the effect. Far from a straightforward story, hers defies predictability. The shrewd reader will not only pay careful attention to the introductory information on the cover jacket but also retain the smallest details (hint: notice, for example, every “pattern of perfect circles”). The crafting is intricate. To say the least.

The basic story is, admittedly, simple enough: over the course of several years a young girl, Lina, and her father find shelter in a vast, apparently fluid shorefront building called, evocatively, the Sea. Think: Borges. As they wait, hoping to board a ship, their lives intersect with those of three neighbours. This framing narrative feels, in three main ways, both intensely real and strangely unreal.

First, the three volumes to which Lina clings remain both steadfastly concrete and luminously alive. In fact, as the narrative switches, in sections, to the lives of the three subjects, Du Fu, Spinoza, and Arendt, the “biographical” narratives become more intensely real than Lina’s framing narrative, sharp both with striking sensory detail and vivid thoughts and feelings. Whole passages at a time lift off the page: “Finally the warning, a long whistle, and a hiss of steam, as if air were being let out of all the women. The wheels tightening, tightening into motion. They were off. A woman moaned, disbelieving. The waves of light began to change.” Effectively, we have moved from biographical writing about lives to life itself.

Second, these switches in point of view are disorientingly unpredictable in both sequence and length. Du Fu, for example, disappears for a whole section of the book, only to reappear much later more alive than ever. Third, details from the framing narrative flicker almost unnoticed, in the biographical passages—not least the names of Nina’s three neighbours, Jupiter, Bento, and Blucher, for example, but also, importantly, the term “Book of Records.”

An additional narrative feature of this book of books, and one that makes entirely opposing demands on readers, is the fact that often naturalistic fiction is suffused with challenging, even elusive “philosophical” thought: the concrete and the abstract pull in opposite directions. Some readers will love getting their teeth into such abstract passages. Others will feel…challenged.

The additional fact that Thien includes traditional philosophical issues alongside mathematics, physics, and even dystopian politics further spices the stew. And yet, far from nailing down any philosophical positions, she typically leaves such passages to hang in the air, untethered to any fixed position.

A young woman to whom Spinoza is attracted muses on Descartes’ use of “marbles” to illustrate the principle of dualism: 

Who moves the marbles? …. Who keeps the Book of Records? I suppose people wish it to be the hand of God, or maybe God’s mind. But what if it’s just the slope of the incline, or the gravity and physics of our world? What if such visible rules can give rise to the kaleidoscope of our thoughts? Maybe they all belong to the same order of things, even God.

Other abstract passages have an entirely different quality—inventive, futuristic, integrated into the purely fictional framing narrative: 

 … ‘perforation’ had become a method of both security and disruption. Cyberspace was tightly woven, yet plasticity was its nature. It had star patterns, galaxies and places of ‘nothingness.’ It had highways and urban clusters, but also tunnels, unpaved roads and remote wilderness. How did a designer or programmer prevent, or perhaps create, catastrophic change? Change could be a slow encirclement: a pattern that did not register as a pattern until its damage was irreversible.

To reinforce the effect of such writing, Thien sews the whole book with provocative aphorisms: “I think friendship is time itself”; “I think friendship is the homeland”; “A state without limits is a state ruled with indifference”; “Nothing is more persuasive than the beliefs of others”; “The attempt to breathe something into life again is the root cause of our sadness.” Yet, because such aphorisms are usually neither marshalled nor linked, the chief—salutary—effect is to reinforce the sense of a world where thought and substance intertwine. 

Even when intermixing concrete and abstract within sections of vividly “real” writing, especially in the biographical story lines, Thien toys with the alert reader by simultaneously creating an opposing impression of artifice. Nowhere is this impression more apparent than in the way that she patterns the stories of Du Fu, Spinoza, and Arendt: the lives of the three “voyagers” interlock and echo hypnotically. 

Centuries apart as they are, the three live in parallel worlds with parallel struggles. All, for example, are outsiders. Du Fu, in spite of his poetic achievements, is rejected by government bureaucracy. Spinoza, because of his heretical writing, goes into exile, excommunicated by the Jewish Orthodoxy (mirroring his family’s flight from persecution years earlier). Arendt, considered an “enemy alien” by the French government, is incarcerated and later flees for her life. All three, however, refuse to buckle. 

The stories of all three are also (per the title of the ninety-volume set) the stories of difficult journeys, whether from hunger, inimical military forces, or even natural disasters. Indeed, their tactics for survival make for some of the most gripping writing in the novel: Spinoza journeys through a plague-smitten land, Du Fu struggles, without protection, through downpours and floods, and, most extensively, Arendt, in disguise, escapes from the Nazis down France, over the Pyrenees, through Spain to Portugal, and across the Atlantic.

Yet, in spite of their difficult journeys, all three find love, however constrained (for Spinoza particularly). Perhaps more important, though, all three are saved by the kindness they encounter in chance meetings. Thien ensures that such incidents where Du Fu, nearly dead, is brought in from a storm and warmed finds echoes in that incident where Spinoza is sheltered by an old friend, or those several incidents when the fleeing Arendt is protected and given scarce food. Says a helpful Portuguese to Hannah: “In times like these, friendship is one of the only certainties people can give each other.” The same experience is shared by all of Thien’s voyagers.

And, most significant, all three are deeply committed to the written word and to books. The book is indeed riddled with books—Spinoza grew up on Don Quixote, for example, while Arendt clings to a copy of Proust, a chance boy buries himself in a volume of Archimedes and so on.

To some extent, these patterns are echoed in the framing story. Lina and her father, Wui Shin, apparent refugees, struggle to survive—for several years in fact—while waiting for a ship to take them out of a tumultuous China. Like Du Fu, Spinoza, and Arendt, they, too, are shown kindness. And they, too, feel the power of the book.

As if, however, both to reinforce this sense of parallel lives and to counterbalance it, Thien channels this framing narrative into a countervailing direction. Written in the first person, Lina’s story does move forward over several years and with brief leaps into several decades later. However, instead of recording a physical journey for father and daughter, in their story the author directs the narrative thrust into the past. Why, she prompts her readers to ask, are father and daughter alone? What forces have separated them from the mother and son whom they desperately love and equally desperately hope to see again?

The answer to these questions turns the theme of oppression (acute in the biographies) on its head. Instead of being the victim of oppressive and domineering forces, Lina’s father, as Thien only gradually reveals, was party to them. In fact, by having Wui Shin linked to a swarm of state-supported cyber and/or bureaucratic terminology, the author makes the progression over time of institutional oppression ever more disquieting: “Soon after, it was announced by the government that Foshan would be included in the five-year plan, known as the New Era of the Imperishable, or Daybreak, headed by the Infrastructure Office and the Ministry of Security, supported by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.” The very fact that Lina’s father seems to have been an almost naively complicit part of a tyrannical intelligence system deepens the nightmare. So submersive, in fact, has been his collaboration, that he unblinkingly reported on his own wife—until, harrowingly, she discovered his treachery. Why has she left him? The question is answered.

The sense of meticulous craft is deepened another way. Threading through the writing are touchstone words and concepts that appear and re-emerge in new contexts or with new nuance. One is change and mutability. Thus, for example, at one point Spinoza asserts, “Every human being is a piece of time.Your very cells have become part of the soil, other animals, the air. Your hours, minutes and seconds have long since dissolved.” Arendt’s thoughts produce but one of many, many echoes: “Rembrandt’s subject is not beauty but transience.”

At one point, in turn, Blucher’s words connect change and transience to another key notion, memory: “It’s not that a listener forgets, but that the one who survives to tell the story is always addressing a changed world. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it, Lina? Memory and its alterations.” This idea is given a further twist by Arendt: “Memory’s habit is to dissolve what it can’t contain.” Lina’s father goes yet further: “The only way to remember is to forget, to let time fill the story up, and create it all over again.” And so on.

But this is just a tiny sample. The whole novel glows with similar interplays of similarly repeated words and issues, ones that touch on the most fundamental nature of the human experience—truth and knowledge, beauty (especially of music), love, and, perhaps most fundamentally, happiness.

Perhaps, in the end, though, what will linger the longest for many readers is neither the storylines, nor the rich swarm of ideas, but the haunting atmosphere of fear, sorrow—and consolation.

Born on Vancouver Island, Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. Visit his website here. [Editor’s note: Theo Dombrowski has written and illustrated several coastal walking and hiking guides, including Secret Beaches of the Salish Sea (Heritage House, 2012), Seaside Walks of Vancouver Island (Rocky Mountain Books, 2016), and Family Walks and Hikes of Vancouver Island (RMB, 2018, reviewed by Chris Fink-Jensen), as well as When Baby Boomers Retire. Recently, he’s reviewed books by Tim Bowling, Stephen L. Howard, Michael Whatling, Frank Wolf, George Zukerman, Robert Mackay, Genni Gunn, Eric Jamieson, Adrian Markle, and Tim Bowling for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster