A Father and Daughter Caught in the No Man’s Land of Migration

THE BOOK OF RECORDS, by Madeleine Thien

In 1971, decades after her exile from Europe, the German-born political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote to her friend, the novelist Mary McCarthy: “One can’t say how life is, how chance or fate deals with people, except by telling the tale.” The generative power of storytelling inspires Madeleine Thien’s deeply humane novel “The Book of Records.” 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.

The bittersweet novel opens on the banks of the Sea, an abandoned military outpost turned “no man’s land” where “people who needed to disappear, or who had no other nation, began to take refuge” centuries ago. For most people, including 7-year-old Lina and her father, Wui, “the Sea was just one stop on the way to a better place.” Its location is uncertain, a site of imagination and conjecture: Though Lina and Wui believe they’re on the South China Sea, other inhabitants say it’s the Atlantic, or the Baltic.

They’ve left behind their home — and Lina’s mother, brother and aunt — in Foshan, China, without explanation beyond Wui’s desire to flee “an empire in ruins,” he says, “a hall of mirrors in which good people could betray themselves and never know it.”

But Lina’s loneliness and confusion clash with her father’s brave front. For them, this is no temporary way station, Wui suffering from an illness that makes the Sea a final destination. Adrift, Lina seeks solace in a rare commodity: books. The only three her father hastily packed (taken from a 90-volume series for children called “The Great Lives of Voyagers”) chronicle the lives of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the poet Du Fu and Arendt herself.

For Lina, “these blue-covered books were a net that would suspend us outside the present,” Wui embellishing his reading with episodes not in the text. As she grows, she realizes his trick, that he “made things up and thereby slowed time down, ensuring that no matter how long our journey lasted, we’d never run out of history, no matter how true or inaccurate it was.”