The Book of Records
Madeleine Thien
This is the first time, since starting this blog, that I’ve finished a book and seriously considered not writing anything about it. The Book of Records is an astounding novel; it features the Chinese poet Du Fu, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt and the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. It is packed with snippers of poetry, philosophical observations and a great deal of historical research. Yet, much to my embarrassment, a great deal of it was lost to me. About sixty pages in I realised I’d missed something – things weren’t making sense. In my defence, the narrative structure of this book is far from straightforward. The novel has a central narrative: Lina and her father, Wei Shin have fled China to a place called the Sea, a kind of limbo and, during their time there, they befriend three neighbours, who tell the stories of Arendt, Spinoza and Du Fu. The novel itself admits that ‘the three neighbours took turns telling stories, embroidering them together. All the episodes were disjointed yet somehow this felt freeing’. Moreover, within all four narratives, memory and reality often blur.
It is, then, a novel to which one must give one’s full attention. Unfortunately, at the start, I didn’t. I said earlier that I soon realised things weren’t making sense. More accurately, about two third of the things weren’t making sense; every time the book returned to the story of Hannah Arendt, I found I could follow the narrative and was fascinated by it. And so I ploughed on, forging my way towards the next Arendt section, hoping the bits in between would fall into place. They didn’t, really; the stories of Spinoza and Du Fu eluded me, as did the nuances of the central narrative.
In short, I should have gone back to the beginning. I knew it was foolish not to and yet I continued nonetheless. I don’t like to think too much about what this says about me…
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