A delicate structure

Fans of Madeleine Thien’s writing could be excused for feeling impatient about the author’s followup to her bestselling novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

The novel, published in 2016, won the Montreal author the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction and landed on the short list for the Booker Prize.

The nine-year gap was worth the wait.

Thien’s new novel, The Book of Records, published May 6 by Knopf Canada, is sure to satiate fans and win new ones, and will likely again draw the attention of national and international book prize juries.

Thien didn’t anticipate the novel, which she started in 2016, would take so long to come together.

“All I knew at the beginning was I wanted to write about a father and daughter and I had this idea about a building made of time — I was thinking about Einstein: time is space, space is time. I thought, ‘What are the ideas or the questions I want to live with, I need to live with for the next five years?’” Thien says by Zoom.

“It turned out to be almost 10 years — maybe because I felt like I was chasing something for a long time that I couldn’t pin down.”

The Book of Records defies simple summation. In the future, Lina and her ailing father flee their home in Foshan as it is ravaged by the effects of climate change, arriving at a mysterious building called the Sea, which seems to exist outside conventional notions of space and time.

Other migrants come and go from the Sea, but the two settle in for years.

Lina has brought three books with her that detail the lives of three real-life thinkers: 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza; 8th-century poet Du Fu;and 20th-century German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt.

A trio of neighbours at the Sea, essentially stand-ins for the real-life trio, tell their stories in an attempt to set their proverbial records straight; Thien provides riveting accounts of actual events that took place in each of their lives.

“One of the paradoxes of writing literature is that you’re almost always trying to capture in language that thing which is not capturable by language. And even if you’re able to hold it in your hands, you think, ‘But that’s not it’ — and the search continues. So much is intertwined, so much only becomes visible as the structure materializes over the course of the book. It’s not something that can be seen in the first 15 or 20 pages — it requires going on a journey together,” Thien says.

On her journey, the 50-year-old Thien found more literary companions in authors Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and Yoko Ogawa.

“The joy of having those as figures in my mind … was that they’re all so different from each other, and I’m so different from them, so there was no model, just companions, and maybe a recognition that they too, had been looking for structures that could hold that thing that is just beyond our grasp,” she says.

Despite the weighty philosophical and political themes that run throughout The Book of Records — displacement, migration, climate change, biography and betrayal — the novel is propulsive, with the ideas acting like brushstrokes that form a rich and complete picture by the novel’s end.

While writing the book, Thien envisioned a reader along the lines of Lina’s age (she’s seven when she arrives at the Sea with her father and 14 when they leave).

“There’s a lightness of touch that I wanted, that sense that these ideas belong to all of us, that I, too, am just an ordinary reader. I’m not a philosopher, I’m not a theorist of any kind, just a person looking for answers, meaning, some way to hold all this together,” Thien says.

“Young Lina was very much at the forefront of my thoughts as an imagined reader.”

The passages detailing events in the lives of Spinoza, Du Fu and Arendt saw Thien attempt to see the world from their respective perspectives, a task requiring extensive research.

“I tried to read what they were reading at that time in their life, but it was an almost impossible task because someone like Hannah Arendt was reading Immanuel Kant when she was 14 and that is not me,” she says, laughing.

And while Thien found it daunting to tell their stories in her sprawling, fluid literary landscape, she also enjoyed the trio’s company.

“I did feel at times — and maybe every fiction writer has to believe this — I felt they were sitting beside me. They were so real to me. They are so real to me. I feel like I spent nine years in a room with the three of them talking to each other and that I was just literally the housekeeper,” she says.

Thien launches The Book of Records at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location at 7 p.m. tonight, joined in conversation by Jenny Heijun Wills. ben.sigurdson@winnipegfreepress.com