Day 97: The Book of Records

I read Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift in 1989 and I loved them because they taught me that a novel could be about reading other books. Or some writers, especially Iris Murdoch, wrote books about big ideas. I suppose that Thien’s book aims to be somewhere in between the two categories.

The Book of Records starts with a frame tale, the sort that John Barth was fond of that he found in the collected tales called One Thousand and One Nights. Many decades after the fact, a daughter, Lina, and her father, Wui Shin, are traveling through the sea — some sort of ethereal liminal space called the Sea. Along the way, the two discover the lives of three people from a text called The Great Lives of Voyagers. Those three are 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, 20th century historian and political theorist Hannah Arendt, and Tang dynasty poet Du Fu. Most of the book is taken up with the challenging lives the three faced in alternating chapters. However there were, at least in my opinion, two flaws in these chapters. One flaw was that the stories were engaging, but we learn almost nothing about the ideas or books these people wrote. The second flaw was that a good amount of space was given to the lives of Spinoza and Arendt, I thought that there should have been more material about Du Fu.

The audiobook has five different narrators, and Thien herself narrates the sections where Lina and Wui Shin are traveling on the sea. She has a breathy voice which adds to the general floating dreaminess of those liminal space chapters of the frame tale. These abstract sections make for a bold contrast with the three biographical chapters of people trying to escape totalitarian suffering, particularly Arendt. At some point, the connection between Lina and Wui Shin becomes more clear as we learn that the father was “a systems engineer managing the structures of cyberspace” and that they are now fleeing people working for that government.

I remain ambivalent about this book and whether I do or do not recommend it.

28 May 2025. kindle and Audible audiobook. 335 pgs.