what really is
250629 | Excerpts from Madeleine Thien’s novel, ‘The Book of Records’
Hello,
Here are some of my favourite passages from Thien’s most recent novel, The Book of Records (2025).
“Lina, don’t upset yourself. You’ll never be contant if you can’t separate what you want from what really is. This world isn’t what you wish it to be, this world is more than we can begin to imagine, and sometimes I think it’s more than we deserve.” (4-5)
“I want something I can trust, Baruch. I do not want to follow a code interpreted for me by another man. I want to know what is right. I want to know it in the fibre of my being.” (72)
“This administration of lawlessness has collapsed the structure of things, destroying the pact between power and submission. This pact only exists by agreement, my son. When the reckoning comes, the price will be horror. There will be a rampage in which no life is spared. Pity your country, my son. Pity a people betrayed by its rulers.”
The lines that slipped from his brush now surprised Du Fu. Love and dispassion, he believed, must exist together, like necessary beginnings of a single knot. Because of love, not in spite of it, he had an ethical duty to be dispassionate, to be objective. (134)
“You think you can’t go on.”
“I can’t, Baruch.”
“Believe me when I tell you we are all a piece of that lasting thing, existence. Me, you, and your dear, beautiful son. Even though we are mortal. Because we are mortal. I believe, and I hope you too will come to believe, that we hold within us the remedy to sorrow.” (332)
We hold within us the remedy to sorrow.
Benji tests his forehead for fever and stares fixedly at some distant point. He says, “I know what you feel at this moment because I feel it, too. But in all times, and not just ours, catastrophe is the rule, not the exception. This state of emergency is one we hoped would bypass us, and so we failed to react. Don’t lose sight of this as we turn history over and over in our hands.” (339)
“In order to extend life and preserve civilization, we are obliged to rescue one another.”1 (340)
This novel washed over me like water; I hope to read it again before I meet the Sea.
Nations erase nations and we fail to react. Don’t lost sight of this as we turn history over and over in our hands.
~d
From Yu Qiuyu’s The Book of Mountains and Rivers tr. Jeremy Tiang