The Book of Records
Description
Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China.
Memory, political revolution, generational change, and the ethical imagination are at the heart of Lina's illuminating conversations with her fellows in the Sea: how we come to believe what we believe, and how every person is an irreplaceable, unique vessel of history. Through the guidance of these great thinkers, Lina equips herself to reckon with difficult questions of guilt, responsibility, and the possibility of redemption when her ailing father begins to reveal his role in their family's tragic past.
As Lina confronts her father's troubling admissions, she begins to reconceptualize the world around her, gaining a deeper understanding of how our individual futures are shaped by our political circumstances, and she relies on the collective joy of art and intellectual endeavors to carry her through difficulty. A novel that voyages between centuries, generations, and ideas, The Book of Records is an indelible testament to the migratory nature of humanity and our ceaseless search for a home-in the physical world, in cyberspace, in history, and in the imagination-in the wake of catastrophe.
Reviews / Votes
"Madeleine Thien's time-warping historical novel The Book of Records collapses centuries and geographies in an ambitious family saga.... In an aching, dreamlike narrative that overlaps distant centuries and geographies to chart cycles of authoritarianism and loss...This staggering novel blurs the line between factand fiction to underscore the importance of storytelling itself, as a practice of endurance, and resistance.... Try to read without weeping profusely." -- The New York Times "Deeply humane .... 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 .... 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 .... Try to read without weeping profusely." -- New York Times Book Review "[An] ambitious, elliptical novel .... A poignant meditation on loss and its many meanings, grief an endless loop like an Escher drawing .... The Book of Records is both a dystopian fantasy ... and an ode to a planet in crisis." -- The Washington Post "Rapturous .... The Book of Records is a rich and beautiful novel. It's serious but playful; a study of limbo and stasis that nonetheless speaks of great movement and change." -- The Guardian "Thien writes beautifully about the lives of these thinkers, and their tales of escape from political or religious oppression end up melding with Lina's own story....With The Sea, Thien literalizes a state of mind, the in-betweenness that comes before one makes a major decision. The stories Lina absorbs in that out-of-time place all ask whether to risk your family or your life on behalf of an ideal-whether it's worth sacrificing yourself for another, better world you can't yet see." -- Gal Beckerman - The Atlantic "Thien plunges the reader into thrilling, perilous leaps back and forth across time. ... Thien's inhabiting of these different timescales is a marvel of research and imagination... Thein's dazzling historical somersault doubles as a plea for humanity." -- Catherine Taylor - Financial TimesMore details
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