When considering Booker Prize-shortlisted author Madeleine Thien, the title “children’s author” doesn’t immediately come to mind. And yet, for her latest novel, The Book of Records, Thien was determined to make the ideas in the text accessible to anyone the same age as her fourteen-year-old narrator.

The novel follows the journey of a child refugee, Lina, and her father, and deals with pressing topics—migration, authoritarian governments, cyberspace, climate change.  Set in a labyrinthine building called “The Sea,” The Book of Records introduces thinkers from different eras—Hannah Arendt, Spinoza, and the Tang Dynasty poet, Du Fu. Lina learns from all three of them by reading about their lives, and it gives her the courage to confront her ailing father about their family’s tragic past. 

When Thien and I spoke over Zoom in early March, it was still cold and dreary on the East Coast. It felt like we were huddled in a corner of her apartment, talking in hushed tones about books and writing. With her mourning dove-soft voice, Thien has the rare ability to put one at instant ease. Her speaking style, in fiction and real life, is relaxed and friendly. We spoke about lens-making, dance, the importance of the collective, and what it means to survive.  

Naheed Patel: Your narrator, Lina, arrives as a child refugee from a fictional place called Foshan with her father to a place called The Sea, a labyrinthine structure that seems straight out of Borges or Calvino, that is “made of time.” Migrants arrive by the boatload at The Sea and sometimes stay for years before boarding other boats to their final home. You modeled it after Kowloon Walled City. How did this very real place inspire the fictional structure that ended up being The Sea?

Madeleine Thien: Kowloon Walled City has been demolished, but it was just minutes from where my mom grew up, in what used to be called No Man’s Land. When Hong Kong transferred to the British, this little parcel of land wasn’t ceded. It was an old Chinese military outpost, and because the British had no rights to it, and China couldn’t access it, it became a place for people who couldn’t afford to live nearby or needed, for various reasons, to remain outside the law, or were refugees who began building on this parcel, as it wasn’t under any regulatory authority. The building was makeshift. It’s a huge area of 300 interconnected buildings that people built on top, beside, and through. It’s a labyrinth. At its most inhabited, it had almost 60,000 people. It had everything needed to sustain them: bakeries, medical offices, workshops, small industries, manufacturing, dentists, restaurants. But in my head, the idea of this makeshift place existing for a time and giving refuge to those with no papers or place to go, is only a stop, not a permanent settlement, but a place to gather oneself to continue. That’s the place I had in mind. I imagine many similar places existed in the past and exist now. So it was that kind of timeless space.

NP: Did you have access to architectural blueprints of Kowloon Walled City while creating The Sea?

MT: I found a Japanese artist, Hitomi Terasawa, who did this incredible cross-section of one layer of Kowloon Walled City. It’s beautiful because she’s very artistic, and she drew all the rooms and people doing their activities. I think it’s inspired many: this city existed outside any government and was anarchic, but self-governing, for decades. It has all the things that one would expect with being in the shadows. It had a lot of crime, and people in terrible poverty or struggling with addiction. But it also had families, schools, churches, and temples. It’s an astonishing place. I imagined The Sea like that, with a moving population rather than a permanent one.

NP: What informed your descriptions of the migratory flow in and out of The Sea? There are boats arriving. There are people under duress. There are some who’ve left loved ones behind. There’s the intense anxiety of a last chance for loved ones to join you before everyone’s scattered all over the earth. What sources did you draw your observations from?

MT: I drew mostly from news reports. Over a decade ago, I wrote a novel about Cambodia and the Cambodian genocide, focusing on escape routes. Sometimes that was by sea, fraught with all the dangers, hope and horror that entailed. It was in the ether: the plight of people seeking safety. It felt painfully eternal and heartbreaking to write about The Sea, as other lives are being displaced daily. I was trying to find—for Lina—refuge and joy at an extremely traumatic time in her life.

NP: The novel begins with Lina arriving at The Sea with her few belongings, including three books: three volumes with powerful educational and emotional value. The books are on three historical figures: Du Fu from the eighth century, Spinoza from the 17th century, and Arendt, who lived during the 20th century. The volumes outline less well-documented periods of their lives. What led you to that choice?

MT: For Lina, the books represent companionship and friendship. I loved that this child, this young woman, saw these figures as equals. While writing the novel, I considered detailing their entire lives—Arendt’s, Du Fu’s, Spinoza’s. That would be a 3000-page book! Lina’s at a stage where the self is starting to concretize; she’s a young person considering the world’s ethics or non-ethics, about reinventing oneself because conditions have forced you into a new existence. I became interested in how Arendt, Du Fu, and Spinoza survived loneliness and dealt with the need to transform without disintegrating their past self. I focused on those moments in their lives where we know less about them—it’s when they started to become the figures that history remembers them as. That moment before thinking solidifies.

NP: So, we meet them when they’re choosing between belonging and community, and an immutable truth about the world that they cannot bring themselves to ignore.

MT: I was guided by a famous line of Hannah Arendt, where she argues that we must love the world to understand and alter it. When we want to change things, we want to tear them down, destroy them, and remake them. But the forces unleashed can be unforgiving. It’s a difficult question, how to change the world, because you love it. I think we might enact that differently. That is the undercurrent running through the novel, with Lina, with me, with the historical figures. We’re all thinking about this question.

NP: The characters’ love of the world comes through in the sensory details, the inventive and lively descriptions. I especially liked the part where Spinoza is a lensmaker’s apprentice in Amsterdam. It’s rich with detail and must have required a lot of research.

MT: I had a fellowship at the New York Public Library, with a universe at my fingertips. I spent a long time learning about lens grinding machines for telescopes. There was a wonderful hundred-year-old book about telescope-making, with intricate details about grains, sand, and processes. Everyone studying Spinoza knows he was a lens grinder, but the physicality excited me. I could understand how he was considering consequences of consequences of consequences in our thinking and feeling, and also in creating a lens to help us see clearly or see greater distances. It was wonderful to be in this part of his mind.

NP: “Focus” is Latin for heart and home, as you mention in the novel. A lens brings all the light home. By illustrating this part of Spinoza’s life, you introduce a metaphor within lens-making, of searching for universal truth and focusing the light home. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

MT: There was a real pleasure for me in in trying to show philosophy through the concrete things Spinoza touched and handled. The physical world is our philosophical world. It doesn’t come from the ether. Spinoza made philosophical observations through tangible things. Back then it was all a single field: science, philosophy, the natural sciences. They were considered a unity. Nowadays, we’re used to focused, intense expertise and fragmented knowledge. But part of the joy of being a novelist is to reunify ideas and experience them as a single pursuit.

NP: At one point, you wanted to be a dancer, but then you switched to writing. What prompted that? 

MT: I’d danced since childhood. My mother enrolled us in ballet and traditional Chinese dance, and we did parades and acrobatics. At university, I started with contemporary dance and literature as a double major. I wanted to be a choreographer but lost my scholarship early on. I couldn’t maintain the GPA and had to leave school. I applied to a different university, got into a creative writing class, earned some scholarship money, got a job, and returned to school. At that point, the path towards dance ended. I would have wanted to keep doing it, but I didn’t know how between working 30 hours a week and going to school. For years I went back to dance class. I love it, but I don’t know if I would’ve survived in this milieu of incredible talent. To sum up, the desire to pursue dance never ended, but the path ended for me. I remember, as kids, our amazing ballet teacher, who became famous, but at the time, they had a tiny attic studio with one window. I’ll remember this room forever, the sound of the wooden boards, and the chalk for the shoes floating in this very particular attic light. And the sound of the piano, slightly out of tune. That attic room is the site of so much of my imagination, and my thoughts about beauty, desire, hard work, and physicality.

NP: Everything always comes back to the writing for me. Watching a performance, there’s endurance and physicality, and yet from the audience’s point of view, it comes off as effortless, fluid. Good writing is similar, I feel. There’s all this muscle working quietly behind the scenes.

MT: You’ve put your finger on the main thing about dance that has stayed with me in my writing. It’s that desire, knowing how hard it is, day in, day out, the endurance, self-criticism, repetition. But it should look effortless so that the audience experiences something of their own. You don’t want them to think, “God, you work hard.” You want them to move into another state of mind.

NP: Does being a novelist kind of feed into that desire to be a choreographer?

MT: What stuck was my relationship to music. That’s the closest I’ve come to feeling guided by a greater power. In dance, you have a piece of music, a soundscape, and you pull open movement, a narrative, from that sound. Sometimes I’m typing with headphones, and a beautiful piece of music comes on, and I feel like the music is coming from my fingers, even though I’m writing text. You can get stuck in a rhythm of habitual language. Music breaks me out of that, the words transform in a way that seems not to come from me. There’s a sense of movements that blend and emerge, and they’re all one orchestral or symphonic piece, but with different motifs. One hopes the polyphony will unify.

NP: In your acknowledgements, you mentioned that Walter Benjamin, a contemporary and close friend of Hannah Arendt, guided you through writing this novel. How did his writing become a beacon for you?

MT: There’s a beautiful but obscure essay by Walter Benjamin about his childhood in Berlin. He knows he must leave Berlin, due to the forces pushing him out of Germany: the rise of fascism, and laws removing Jewish people from visibility and public life. From connectivity. In that essay, he wants to write his most cherished memories to vaccinate against their loss. He understands that it is both a personal and collective loss. We have private tragedies, but Arendt and Benjamin decided that focusing on the collective is the only way for them to survive intact. It helped them numb some of their private pain and made them act. This novel is very interested in collectivity. Sometimes Arendt’s words are transformed by Spinoza, and Spinoza’s ideas are expressed by Du Fu. I was looking for collective survival, collective love. I was doing a little bit of redistribution, because I felt that they would recognize things in each other. They’re all of them exiles, refugees who suffered great losses due to the politics of their time.

NP: Because they refuse to tamp down on their opinions in order to stay safe.

MT: There was something made of iron in them. They understand the need for a core, principled self that remains unbreachable, or else why not just hand everything to the forces of destruction? It’s going to take everything anyway. Why not just hand it over? They can’t. I admire that refusal to be ground down. And that’s the double-edged part of the collective, it nourishes a consensus, so you give up the determination to think for yourself. It’s a struggle, because the collective gives us belonging and identity. If the collective and identity are powerful, they give our lives meaning. To walk away from the collective and retain a sense of meaning and value, is extremely difficult, and very few can do it. Can withstand excommunication, public shaming. During the Cultural Revolution, they called it being made a non-person. All three had deep friendships that they nurtured. Friendship is like love. You take care of each other. That might be what drew me to all three—this gift of friendship, which I felt, imaginatively, they would extend to Lina.

NP: That’s a beautiful pivot back to Lina. Despite the intricate philosophical ideas in this book, you wanted it to be legible to someone Lina’s age. You wanted a 14-year-old to pick up this novel and understand its themes. Was that something that was very important to you?

MT: It’s a threshold age. What a 14-year-old absorbs, observes, and questions will stay with them for life. It’s a challenging age, and I felt that hunger to know, learn, and question was most alive in a 14-year-old’s mind. As we get older, some questions dull, or we push them away because we lack answers, or just getting through life takes up too much energy. But there are moments in childhood that are extensive. That 14-year-old understands there are things they don’t understand. That’s part of the discovery and excitement. As we age, there’s greater resistance to that acceptance. But I hope to retain forever that wonder and humility before the world.

NP: Your 2016 novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, spans the Chinese civil war to the present day. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018 and won the Governor General’s Award for English language Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Is there a through line between your works, or have you been building upon them?

MT: With each novel’s completion, new questions emerge. Something is always unresolved when I finish a book. It’s that seed that generates the next book. Over the past ten years, I’d written two books: one, as I mentioned earlier, about the Cambodian genocide and the other about the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 protests. During those 10 years, I was living with extremely difficult materials, lives, testimonies, and images that haunt me—the things humans inflict on other humans. I think in those two books, there’s a lot about the cost of survival, and what we must destroy within ourselves to survive. My new novel wanted to explore what we create within ourselves to survive.

NP: Spinoza says, in this new novel, that you must love yourself to survive.

MT: The novel asks what it means to love and have a responsibility to the world. These two forms of love, love of oneself and love of the world, shouldn’t be at odds. Spinoza writes about self-preservation as a driving force and acknowledges that we may be primarily self-serving. He felt it was important to see that clearly, so we could alter some choices in a conscious way: be guided by an ethics aware of the drive for survival but make room to choose something beyond the self. It’s this question of what it means to survive, and what kind of world I want to survive in. At some point, I hope the person I want to survive is worthy, but I need a certain kind of world for that worthy person to survive in, so I need to do something about the world to preserve the self I want to exist. Everything is interconnected.