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| Madeleine Thien (photo: Andrew Querner) |
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Booker Prize finalist Madeleine Thien (Do Not Say We Have Nothing) is an award-winning novelist and short story writer living in Canada. Her fiction explores questions of memory, identity, and place, especially across generations and cultures. In The Book of Records (Norton; reviewed in this issue), Thien threads a conversation among three historical figures--poet Du Fu and philosophers Baruch Spinoza and Hannah Arendt--as well as a young girl and her father living in a near-future liminal space called the Sea.
Lina is seven when she arrives at the Sea and 14 when she departs. What made Lina the right voice and 14 the right age to tell this story?
I always knew that this number, 14, had a lot of weight for me. It is the moment when Lina has this immense curiosity and openness--she's porous. She's both humbled before the world and also coming into her own in a very solid and complicated way. Fourteen was that threshold moment, expressing the duality of leaving one part of life behind and embarking on another.
Doors and thresholds are a huge part of the book as are those dualities, especially the contrast between the heaviness of the content and an unexpected lightness of tone. How were you able to strike such a balance?
It was something I really struggled with, trying to hit what this melody, this depth was going to sound like. Because I had spent 10 years writing about very difficult things--the Cambodian genocide and the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen demonstrations--I carried that heaviness. But I also wanted to pursue that question of what makes us feel alive, what makes us feel light, what allows us to continue? How can you carry so many things and keep moving?
Lina is looking for a way to continue. Her neighbors try to tell her these stories in a way that will make her courageous, that will give her information, give her real safeguards and companionship. It might sound simplistic, but I think part of where that lightness comes from is the fact that there's this intense tenderness and love between them. It's connected to that sense of wanting to hold one another aloft.
Of all the figures in history, why these three--why Du Fu and Spinoza and Arendt?
I had many people who passed through the Sea, but not all of them took up residence. These were the three who had meant a lot to me in my own life, and also seemed willing to stay and talk to this girl. These three had profoundly altered me in ways that I couldn't even put my finger on. That relationship was what I was trying to bring to life with Lina--the figures that have shaped you but that you also need to revisit in order to see them clearly. It's how they try to express themselves and what she actually picks up and how she interprets it and, yes, that's how we carry these ideas into the future.
There are so many ideas that we could engage with. Descartes, Benjamin. Kant, Proust, so many indelible voices speaking into these stories. It's as if you've gathered all these great philosophical minds around one table; we just want to listen in. In all this, is there a question or a line of inquiry that you think best defines this book?
The idea I kept coming back to was something said by Hannah when she talks about this world: Why is it so hard to love this world? We love it, but it can be a cruel, cruel place. And it's that friction, I think, that sometimes unbearable love of this home that's also our only home and our temporary home. I think it's the driving question that binds the threads of the novel. And then how to live an ethical life in that place? I think it's those two strands. What does it mean to make ethical choices in a world that sometimes has very little to recommend it?
The books Lina keeps, they chronicle the life stories of these great voyagers, and perhaps what you've done is open it up to show how they are just one voyager among all of us?
Exactly. That's so powerful. Yes, I was thinking about what names, what acts, what deeds cling to the famous lives, and how we find a trace of those other, often very heroic, acts by the nameless, without whom these people would not have survived. They're like bits of dust clinging to the robes of this figure that is going to end up on a statue. But they're all part of the same fabric.
So much of the book is rooted in these historical figures, but at its center is the story of Lina's father and his work, which is more in the speculative fiction range. How does his story fit with theirs?
I carried that story for a long time, not knowing how to write about this person who is a good person yet utterly betrays them in the most unethical way. And with the lives of Arendt, Du Fu, and Spinoza, I knew that unless I thought deeply about the kinds of hard questions they were asking, I would not be able to tell the story of the father. It's in the texture of it. It's in the choices he makes and doesn't make, it's in his desire for belonging. It's in his delusions as well and the righteousness that he feels, the right that he feels he has to make certain decisions. In some way that is hard for me to pinpoint, all those philosophies showed me the world in which Lina's father is living. I have this long fascination with the Internet, with what we keep there and the kind of library and archive that it is, with its mutability, with what it brings out in us. Its sense of the infinite like a Borgesian library. I just felt if I were writing about a kind of archive of the past, I couldn't not write about this cyber world that is our reality.
It's not unlike The Book of Records itself, a record that is held in common and held by few, evolving and never ending, yet also somehow encircling us always.
Yes, if you could transcribe what you just said, I think that is better than any answer I could give. It exactly sums up all those dynamics.
Well, if I got it right, it's only because your book got it right first. I'm certain this is going to be one of those books that I keep thinking about and that I will ask others to consider with me because it's not like anything else I've ever read. Thank you. --Sara Beth West