THE BOOK OF RECORDS, by Madeleine Thien
In 1971, decades after her exile from Europe, the German-born political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote to her friend, the novelist Mary McCarthy: “One can’t say how life is, how chance or fate deals with people, except by telling the tale.” The generative power of storytelling inspires Madeleine Thien’s deeply humane novel “The Book of Records.” In an aching, dreamlike narrative that overlaps distant centuries and geographies to chart cycles of authoritarianism and loss, Thien uncovers glimmers of community among disparate individuals.
The bittersweet novel opens on the banks of the Sea, an abandoned military outpost turned “no man’s land” where “people who needed to disappear, or who had no other nation, began to take refuge” centuries ago. For most people, including 7-year-old Lina and her father, Wui, “the Sea was just one stop on the way to a better place.” Its location is uncertain, a site of imagination and conjecture: Though Lina and Wui believe they’re on the South China Sea, other inhabitants say it’s the Atlantic, or the Baltic.
They’ve left behind their home — and Lina’s mother, brother and aunt — in Foshan, China, without explanation beyond Wui’s desire to flee “an empire in ruins,” he says, “a hall of mirrors in which good people could betray themselves and never know it.”
But Lina’s loneliness and confusion clash with her father’s brave front. For them, this is no temporary way station, Wui suffering from an illness that makes the Sea a final destination. Adrift, Lina seeks solace in a rare commodity: books. The only three her father hastily packed (taken from a 90-volume series for children called “The Great Lives of Voyagers”) chronicle the lives of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the poet Du Fu and Arendt herself.
For Lina, “these blue-covered books were a net that would suspend us outside the present,” Wui embellishing his reading with episodes not in the text. As she grows, she realizes his trick, that he “made things up and thereby slowed time down, ensuring that no matter how long our journey lasted, we’d never run out of history, no matter how true or inaccurate it was.”
When they’re not reading, the two find kinship with three neighbors whose ethereal and unlikely presences raise the question of whether they exist at all. Inexplicably, each shares uncanny similarities with the three historical figures in Lina’s books, and together they expand upon her simple children’s stories to weave absorbing, evocative tales about the nonfictional “voyagers.”
These spellbinding historical passages serve as a ballast to Lina and Wui’s uncertain existence. Although Thien could have written a purely historical novel, she gracefully folds these mostly true stories into an ambitious family saga, like accordion pleats. With her imagined worlds, incandescent prose and malleable sense of time and history, Thien strikes worthy comparisons to Italo Calvino, Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard and Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet. This staggering novel blurs the line between fact and fiction to underscore the importance of storytelling itself, as a practice of endurance, and resistance.
Years pass and Lina is fixed in place as the sole caretaker of her still-ailing father, watching ships filled with refugees come and go without any sign of her family. Trapped in a “world of encircled beginnings,” Lina latches onto these philosophical conversations and stories as her education, as the only movement she knows. When a middle section discloses the truth behind Wui’s flight from home, “The Book of Records” then toggles in time to reconcile the brutality of betrayal with the forgiveness inherent in unconditional love. Try to read without weeping profusely.
THE BOOK OF RECORDS | By Madeleine Thien | Norton | 357 pp. | $28.99
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