The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien
Reviewed by Michael Greenstein
In a Sea of Odysseys
The epigraph to Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records is drawn from Martin Buber’s I and Thou: “I require a Thou to become; becoming I, I say Thou. All actual life is encounter.” This ethical, empathetic relationship applies not only to the characters in Thien’s novel, but also to the encounter on the page between reader and writer. Furthermore, the novel’s structure intertwines narrative and historical sequences involving the stories of Baruch Spinoza, Hannah Arendt, and eighth-century Chinese poet Du Fu from the Tang dynasty. Spread over centuries and continents, these stories in turn are interwoven within a timeless futuristic frame where Lina narrates from a migratory zone, the Sea, to weave together various strands of vortical elegies and encounters.
These three stories overlap and intertwine in the same manner as Douglas Hofstadter’s braiding of Gödel, Escher, and Bach – strange loops in mathematics, drawing, and music. The outer frame that contains these stories features Lina and her father who have left Foshan, China for the “Sea” – a storied zone of time as much as space where migrants reside on a temporary or permanent basis. The Sea is porous, letting in migratory stories of Spinoza, Arendt, and Du Fu, in an enclave for the meeting of I and Thou. The West Gate of the Sea represents one interface for dialogue between east and west in a “no man’s land.” Buildings appear on top of other buildings, which appear to wrap around, and even through one another.
Staircases branch into themselves like those in Escher’s surreal lithographs. Lina’s father tells her that the buildings of the Sea are made of time, which could be represented by taking a piece of string and folding it over and through itself “to form a double coin knot.” A series of minuscule connected circles in Thien’s text accompany the narrative, and this design takes on different geometric forms and shapes in the novel. Lina’s father elaborates: “The string is time and the knot is space… But they’re the same. See?” The Sea itself is doubled in the seeing of visual detail and experience.
Since her father had been a systems engineer managing the structure of cyberspace, his explanations add the mathematics of Gödel to the etchings of Escher. “The problem of the Sea is the problem of Königsberg bridges…. The problem has nothing to do with geometry; it’s network theory and connects to Riemann manifolds.” Like the reader, Lina fails to understand these theories and connections that lead to a “torus” of more dimensions. Suffice it to say that we are in the realm of Gödel’s strange loops of mathematics and Thien’s manifolds of fiction. The musical component of Bach’s looping fugues joins in this interplay in recordings and The Book of Records. Music creeps through the neighbouring door, and Lina remembers her mother playing Bach. The melody “slowed down, was made of inward turns. The notes glided around corners, then slid and fell, and piled up like dreams.” Her father “kept hearing Bach,” the musical accompaniment for migration and a meeting point for the I of melody and Thou of harmony. He asks jokingly why Beethoven got rid of his chickens: “They wouldn’t stop saying Bach, Bach, Bach!”
“Thien’s narrative is suspended in a timeless zone that folds into itself.”
In another of the novel’s jokes, a boy asks “Why did the chicken get up and cross the Möbius strip?” He answers, “To get to the same side.” Later in the novel Hannan Arendt has a joke to tell Walter Benjamin: “of a folded-up world, a Möbius strip of tomorrow and yesterday.” Thien’s narrative is suspended in a timeless zone that folds into itself. Before we enter Arendt’s story, Lina’s external frame concludes with “Let’s see,” another reminder of the visual connection to the Sea. We immediately enter magical doors to the past: “A lifetime ago, behind the shut but unlocked door, when the Lecturer put his hand on her neck, when she said yes and not no, Hannah Arendt had been eighteen years old.” The Lecturer is Martin Heidegger, objectified because he becomes a Nazi, whose hand upon Hannah’s throat represents a choke hold on her “Schlüsselbein” (belly of the throat) or clavicula, the little key that unlocks doors and anatomy. “The pressure brought dread but also relief, as if something hidden was beginning to materialize.”
What is hidden is their clandestine affair, but also the rise of Nazism. As Heidegger’s hand touches her body, she talks about Kafka and Einstein, “as if addressing a third presence.” This third presence is outside the boundaries of dialogue, at once menacing and meaningful. She refers to Einstein’s theory of relativity: “surrounded by the clocks of Bern … he couldn’t afford to buy a clock for his living room wall.” Clocks are a recurrent image in the novel as temporal markers of history and narrative pacing – a key to throat, lock, and time. (To echo Einstein, Escher’s staircase drawing is titled “Relativity”).
Not long after her twenty-sixth birthday, Hannah purchases a used clock in the market and places it on the mantel. “A mistake. It’s ticking and hourly chime aggravated her husband…. She picked up the clock, opened the cracked case, fit the key into its slot but did not wind it.” In 1930s Germany, time “thickens” and is broken, as is Arendt’s marriage. She leaves Europe across “the churning ocean.”
The narrative turns back a few centuries to Spinoza and a river that braids and flows into the churning Sea: “Baruch Spinoza watched rain falling into the dark water. He was twenty-one years old, and seated on a barge pulled through the river by a white horse.” This scene outside Amsterdam depicts the funeral of Miguel d’Espinoza, father of the philosopher. Thien gives the dates first in the Hebrew calendar, II Nissan 5414, and then in English – the end of March, 1654. The two calendars are a reminder of time’s dialogue, even as the river communicates with other bodies of water in the novel. His father’s gravestone is without decoration, and he “was entered into the book of records, the Livro de Beth Haim.” Spinoza’s book of records is thus folded within others in The Book of Records, as Thien records history in telling details. The narrator’s comment applies to each of the stories within the novel: “Maybe an event and its telling met in a similar way, touching on the long descent.” And that thought takes shape also in Lina’s external frame: “Here in the Sea the written word was considered a kind of amulet, and travellers often hired calligraphers to copy poems, prayers, family genealogies, and sometimes the names of the dead in the book of records.” Jupiter, one of the characters in the “Lina” section, writes characters that descend vertically in columns because “words sink down through time” and into the Sea of calligraphy where east meets west. Lina and Jupiter integrate the story of Du Fu who is found “contemplating curls of ink.”
When Du Fu tries for a government position, he has to answer questions for the Academy of Talents. “When the sixteenth question was answered, he heard the timekeeper’s steps in the outer corridor and the gentle swishing of the water clock. The hour was announced and repeated, repeated, repeated.” Like the earlier triple repetition of Bach, Du Fu’s Kafkaesque ordeal circles into a larger pattern that merges in Spinoza’s lens grinding: “The grinding tool swivelled, now clockwise, now counter-clockwise.” In its swish and swivel, mechanical motion takes on greater significance: “Hours curled around him, as if surrounding him in a parabolic form. What were minutes to him now, but the slow curvature of this circle of glass, the working out of a question of form, which must be a kind of essence.” What is fascinating about Spinoza’s life is not only his philosophy, but also his excommunication and his lens grinding. Seeking his own forms of ethical dialogue, he is nevertheless banned from dialogue within his own community. Baruch’s inclusiveness flows into Bach’s fugues when Lina’s father jokingly asks why Beethoven got rid of his chickens – “They wouldn’t stop singing Bach, Bach, Bach!” And “part one” ends on that note.
“Part three” is devoted to Lina’s brother Wei, and opens with a train journey that overlaps with Arendt’s escape from Europe. A man on the train reminds us of Buber’s presence in the novel: “When two people meet in conversation … each surrenders their weapons to the other.” The narrator follows his words with “It is late and, in these hours, the Book of Records always takes on a new form.” The novel invocates itself. In Du Fu’s world a mother teaches girls to tie complicated knots: “The knots … symbolized time without beginning or end. The procedure had so many steps it was like finding one’s way through a building of ten dimensions.” Thien’s multidimensional novel crosses the Atlantic with Hannah Arendt, as sea and sky merge: “This instant felt like the shell of an infinite memory, of two mirrors facing one another and surprising themselves into an endless labyrinth.” History is Borgesian labyrinth, abyss, and vertigo.
Borges, Brecht, and Calvino also enter Thien’s hall of mirrors. Brecht breaks the narrative frame with his poem about Lao Tzu’s exile where west meets east. He floats through Arendt’s story and enters Du Fu’s, as Jupiter comments that Lao Tzu is “a total fiction,” blurring the lines between reality and imagination: “Bertold Brecht is an okay poet, but it’s all made up!” Thien odysseys through dialogic imagination to arrive at a polyphonic recording. With virtuosic braids, she plays Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; etches Escher; and figures Gödel through the great lines and lives of voyagers.
About the Author
MADELEINE THIEN is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and three previous novels: Certainty (2006), Dogs at the Perimeter (2011) and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016). Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, among other honours. Born in Vancouver, Madeleine lives in Montreal and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College at The City University of New York.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : Knopf Canada
Publication date : May 6 2025
Language : English
Print length : 368 pages
ISBN-10 : 1039009565
ISBN-13 : 978-1039009561
Brilliant review of a brilliant novel!