On a recent trip to Europe, Madeleine Thien dragged her partner, writer Rawi Hage, over a treacherous mountain path through the Pyrenees.
The trek was a minor disaster – authors are rarely known for their outdoorsiness (“I thought she was trying to kill me,” Hage deadpanned) – but Thien was determined to trace the steps of philosopher Hannah Arendt, who fled to Spain from Vichy France during the Second World War.
This was all done in the name of research, Thien told me over a beer when we met on a gloriously mild afternoon in Montreal, where she and Hage have lived for more than a decade.
The pub’s crowd spilled onto the sidewalk, buzzing in anticipation of spring, as Thien discussed her admiration of Arendt, one of several philosophers and poets whose stories and ideas fill the pages of her long-awaited new novel, “The Book of Records,” which hits shelves Tuesday.
Thien, whose friends call her Maddie, recently turned 50, but appears youthful, her black hair streaked with subtle shades of grey. Soft-spoken, she delivers her ideas with slow and thoughtful intention. She claims she is a hermit, but in conversation with friends, she is both generous and engaging.
With just days until the novel’s release, Thien seemed excited, if slightly nervous. “The Book of Records” is her first major work of fiction since 2016’s “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” – a daring, multi-generational epic about the struggle for survival amid the terrors of China’s Cultural Revolution – took home both the Giller Prize and the Governor’s General Award, and skyrocketed her to international fame.
Like Thien’s previous works, “The Book of Records” is an urgent and deeply political novel. But it’s also her most personal – though not in a way you might expect.
Set 100 years in the future, the novel tells the story of Lina, a young girl from China, and her ailing father. Fleeing the devastating effects of climate change, they arrive as refugees at a densely populated way station called “the Sea” – an uncanny space where time has collapsed and where voyagers and philosophers from centuries past mingle with migrants from around the world.
Blending historical fiction, adventure, romance, family drama and intellectual autobiography, “The Book of Records” is a riveting and unruly examination of the formative thinkers who shaped Thien as a writer and a human being – Arendt, 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza and Tang dynasty era poet Du Fu.
Prismatic and dazzlingly unorthodox, the novel’s ambition is apparent within its first pages, as Thien seeks to drill to the very core of the human condition.
“I wanted to write a book that a teenager would find expansive and thrilling, a book that would touch some of the deeper questions they have about existence, while also being a page turner,” Thien told me in a video call earlier this spring
She smiles broadly – there’s an irony in describing a book that features interludes on Kantian ethics being described as a romp.
“Some people might laugh at this, but the philosophers I chose to write about so longed to communicate,” she continued. “And I felt these ideas belong to all of us – not to replicate, but to grapple with.”
Nine years in the making, “The Book of Records” was born out of a time of personal transformation, and arrives at a time of political upheaval – of displacement, atomization and obliteration. And though it leaps across centuries, from the past to imagined futures, it is “painfully saturated with the present.”
“It deals with questions about survival, about our obligations to one another … about what it means to think about the time we live in. And what that thinking requires then of action.”
Thien fell in love with Arendt almost immediately.
Though she had no formal training in philosophy, the young writer found herself transfixed with the political theorist upon discovering her letters with American novelist Mary McCarthy. “I admired her for her hardness, her sardonic qualities, the complexity of her insight,” Thien told me.
A German-Jewish intellectual writing in the wake of the second world war, Arendt believed that a life without politics – without public speech or action – is “literally dead to the world.” Modernity, she argued, has eroded our capacity for politics, reducing human life to mere biological existence. It is in these conditions that totalitarianism flourishes – in which the banality of evil takes shape. Only bold, heroic action returns meaning to life.
These ideas informed Thien’s recent novels, which explored the impacts of totalitarianism in China and Southeast Asia.
“If you’re trapped in a room, and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do?” a character asks in “Do Not Say We Have Nothing.” “You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. You have to climb out and save yourself.”
Thien herself has emerged in recent years as something of an Arendtian figure: an outspoken intellectual and the quiet conscience of Canadian literature, bravely leveraging her international status to speak truth to power – from her forceful objection to the crackdown on pro-democracy movement and dissent in Hong Kong, to her from her forceful objection to the crackdown on pro-democracy movement and dissent in Hong Kong, to her condemnation of violence in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
In November, she penned a letter of solidarity to Jimmy Lai, the imprisoned Hong Kong democracy activist and former news publisher.
“Where do my responsibilities, which are an expression of my love for this world, lead me?” she asked herself. “What is the thing which I am not permitted to say? What is the cost of not saying these words?”
These questions – sweeping and existential – loom large in “The Book of Records.” But Thien’s answer is remarkably clear.
“I believe the world we want starts at this moment, not tomorrow. It is being created by every single act, every decision, we make.”
Thien was born and raised in Vancouver. Her father was Hakka from Malaysian Borneo, and her mother was from Hong Kong. They immigrated to Canada shortly before Thien was born.
Her early fiction was profoundly influenced by Alice Munro, whose short stories she “walked through as if they, too, were my home.” Thien’s 2001 debut short story collection, “Simple Recipes” explored themes of sexuality, identity and the immigrant experience.
When Thien was in her late twenties, her mother died unexpectedly, months before they planned to travel together to China for the first time. Immersed in grief, Thien took the journey by herself and spent the next decade travelling through Asia and Europe. She briefly married, quickly divorced, and eventually landed in Quebec.
Her concerns as a writer shifted, and she began to interrogate themes of war and dislocation. Her 2006 novel, “Certainty,” told the story of a woman seeking to unravel the secret of her father’s life in Japanese-occupied Malaysia. Thien’s second novel, 2011’s “Dogs at the Perimeter,” offered an unflinching look at the violence of the Camodian genocide.
Five years later, Thien published “Do Not Say We Have Nothing,” a sprawling, intricate portrait of a group of musicians whose lives were uprooted by the Cultural Revolution – a decade-long political upheaval that included a brutal crackdown on artists and intellectuals – and traced the events leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Though dense and at times difficult, it connected deeply with both readers and critics.
“No other book has made a larger impact on me as a reader or writer,” Su Chang, a Toronto-based novelist who was raised in China, told me. Deeply researched and empathetic, it offered a rare glimpse into a history that was largely obscured by government propaganda, Chang said, “a portal to a time and place sealed away from my countrymen who were constantly fed “half-truths.’”
But the emotional impact of the novel transcended the Chinese diaspora, connecting with readers in Poland, Ukraine, Indonesia and other places in the midst of transformation.
What followed was a series of events that transformed Thien’s approach to her craft.
In the summer of 2016, she travelled alongside a group of authors to the West Bank. In an essay for Granta, she wrote about what she called the “totalizing consequences” of Israel’s occupation, and the fragile, but deeply necessary acts of friendship that managed to survive and flourish amid violence.
That experience left her “wordless” at first, but sparked a fundamental change in how she viewed the political realm.
“You don’t need any special perceptive, intuitive or imaginative capacities to witness the destruction of an entire world,” she explained. “You just need ordinary eyes and to make the choice that you’re not going to look away.”
A year later, after months spent on the road, Thien’s father passed away after a brief illness. Despite her recent success, she felt precarious, and longed for a sense of stability.
She accepted a job teaching at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York, a public liberal arts college largely made up of working class and immigrant students. She spent seven years travelling between Montreal and Brooklyn.
Amid these upheavals, Thien began to question her own ways of thinking.
“I’d spent 10 years writing about extremely devastating subjects,” she said. “There were so many betrayals in those novels. I wanted the next one to be about where to place our faith, but also how to be people in whom that faith could be placed.”
When her father fell ill, Thien spent weeks at his bedside, floating in “a tangential world, without hours or days.” She turned to books for companionship, among them Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities,” a postmodern novel in which an explorer describes dozens of fictional cities – “concrete, but not possible” – each one a reflection on time, memory and the human condition.
She found herself inextricably drawn to a recurring image that she’d always dream of creating: a city made of time.
“The Book of Records” is the materialization of these dreams. Inspired in part by Kowloon Walled City – a densely populated, infamously lawless enclave in Hong Kong – “the Sea” represents an imagined future, a city where buildings rise above a vast ocean like “a thousand pieces of coloured glass.”
Lina is just seven when she and her father arrive at the Sea, after being separated from her mother and brother. Lonely and yearning for knowledge, she befriends three eccentric neighbours, whose lives mirror those of Arendt, Du Fu and Spinoza.
“I was really interested in the mind of a young girl,” Thein said. As a child, her father suffered from “profound depression,” while her mother worked three jobs. “One of my strongest memories is watching my mother going over the bills at night, in a state of deep stress. We didn’t have many books in the house, so I was always spending my weekends at the library. Maybe I was lonely, but I felt fed by this world beyond the life that I had.”
As the years pass and her father’s health worsens, Lina’s neighbours recount tales from their lives and guide her through questions about memory, history and the nature of truth.
The novel is demanding – it moves quickly between centuries and perspectives, and includes lengthy interludes on cyberspace, transcendental idealism and historical materialism. But Thien’s prose is evocative and buoyant; her storytelling filled with dramatic tension and unexpected twists.
And yes, it is a page turner.
In a series of gripping passages peppered throughout the novel, Thien boldly enters the mind of her intellectual heroes, dramatizing and recreating in vivid detail deeply researched moments from their lives. In the case of Arendt, Thien imagines her romance with the towering German philosopher (and eventual Nazi) Martin Heidegger; her internment at Camp Gurs in Vichy France; her harrowing escape to America; the solace she found among her intellectual peers — “these true and faithful friends without whom she herself might have lost hope.”
“It was terrifying — it felt like a transgression,” Thien told me, noting that Arendt was famously private about this period of her life. “But I also know that she reserved a special place for poets and writers.”
“I’ve lived with that idea for a long time,” she said. “I have a deep love for imagination. I really think of it as a deep thinking process. And I think that is why autofiction is never going to be enough for me. I need to leave myself – it’s the only way I can arrive at a kind of thinking more rooted in the world, beyond what I myself, as an individual way, might have come to.”
“‘Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it,’” she said, reciting a line from Arendt’s essay on Danish author Isak Dinesen.
“This ship was insignificant, and its passengers even more so,” Thien writes, as Arendt’s thrilling journey from Paris to the Atlantic Ocean reaches its conclusion. “But hadn’t they moved heaven and earth to reach this moment?”
Last November, Thien took the stage at The Writers’ Trust Awards in Toronto to accept the Engel Findley Award.
The event took place a day after the Scotiabank Giller Prize gala, an event that had divided the Canadian literary community over its lead sponsor’s ties to an Israeli weapons manufacturer. In the lead-up to the gala, hundreds of authors had pledged to boycott the prize, while Thien and several former Giller winners penned an open letter in the Star. Thien told the audience she was donating the $25,000 prize money, splitting it between the Woodcock Fund, which supports Canadian writers facing emergencies, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and the Lebanese Red Cross.
“Heavy is the root of light, as the old philosophers say,” Thien said, quoting the Tao Te Ching. “How we stand here is important, how we breathe.”
“In an era where so many of us feel we can’t speak about Gaza or about Palestine for fear of being censored, Madeleine’s courage has been a beacon of light for so many writers across the country,” said Anjula Gogia, a bookseller and events coordinator with Another Story Bookshop.
But for Thien, it was not a question of courage. That a writer who has the ability to speak out would choose silence, she told me, would corrupt the very act of writing.
“The ability to express oneself, and the belief that there are words that will matter, but to then not speak about something that feels so important to all of us – that compromises the vocation to its very core, and I would then choose not to be a writer at all.”
“It’s not just up to the ones we admire to take action,” she added. “It’s everyone’s duty at this point not to dehumanize other people. Not to be complicit.”
