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January 1941. Political theorist Hannah Arendt and her husband undergo a desperate and precarious trek through the Pyrenees of France occupied in Spain – one of a series of heavy trips which finally led to security and their establishment in America. Arendt, who was Jewish, later invented the expression “the banality of evil” to describe the horrors unleashed by totalitarian regimes. She had been stateless since 1933, after escaping Nazi Germany.
It is one of the three “big lives” acting as signaling panels in the new abstract and important book of the Canadian writer Madeleine Thien on time, resistance and resilience. The others are the Chinese poet of the Tang du Fu dynasty and the radical philosopher of the Portuguese coward of the 17th century Baruch Spinoza.
Thien's previous novel, Booker and Women's Prize, preselected Don't say we have nothing (2016), referred to a manuscript called The book of discs, What characters have passed in secret. At the time, Thien explained in an interview that the manuscript represented a story “in which the characters saw an alternative China where they recognize the mirrors of themselves”. (The history of Thien are the Malaysian Chinese.)
His new work bears the same name as this integrated document. Lina, a woman in the fifties, remembers that “half a century ago, during the rainy season, when I was seven years old”, she and her dissident and dying father Wui Shin arrived from Foshan, in China, at a maintenance point known only under the sea name, where she is able to connect with other refugees of all centuries.
Their stories take place with Lina as conduit. The refugees are Jupiter (nickname of Thien for fu), bento (the Portuguese name of Spinoza) and Blucher (married name of Arendt). Everyone is not exactly this historical figure, but a representative. Once again, an invented book plays a role in the story – these three displacement stories are based on three volumes of The big life of travels, The only books that Lina's father brought to their own precipitating flight: “Dad said that these people each had, at different times, figures of fascination in the People's Republic of China.” Lina growls that he “had wrapped volumes 3, 70 and 84. I wanted him to take the number 1, on the sailor of the Ming Zheng HE dynasty. Or 23 years, on the tireless vagabond Ibn Battuta. ”
At the beginning, this somewhat fanciful framing is frustrating – what is the deeper link between Lina, her father and these voices in history? As the novel takes place, their correlation becomes clearer and Thien plunges the reader into exciting and perilous jumps back and forth through time. His rendering of the animated trade of Amsterdam from Spinoza is exquisite. A city that recovers from the Thirty Years War, devastated by repeated plagues, but an international hub of canals and barges, bookstores and new concepts, is reinforced with a painting of the Dutch golden age: “The bell of the port tightened, and the ships along the Damrak have whipped and sciented, tilting like Dancers of Baruch. Ropemakers.
In 1656, at the age of 23, Spinoza, then a young merchant, was excommunicated from the Congregation of Talmud Torah in which he grew up. With his parents and most of their brothers and sisters now dead, Spinoza and his brother had continued the family business. This act, or Regionoccurred for years before Spinoza began to write the controversial ideas that would constitute his Ethics. He crossed the canal, a devastating breach, never to return to the Jewish district, and was approached by a lively Christian family, later becoming an apprentice to a manufacturer of objectives.
Arendt first fled Germany for Paris, where she lived among an artistic circle which included her close ally Walter Benjamin, “Benji” – the one that war would disperse forever. Friendship and comfort are important themes throughout the novel, whether among humans or animals. Spinoza's cat “Brother Orange” is making its way in Lina's house; FU (“thirty-eight years old, old and without prospects”) refuses, despite poverty, to abandon his beloved horse Big Red, who “knew everything”. Big Red is a silent companion of the poet's futile attempts to ensure a position and an income as a civil servant – the talent of the FU has never been celebrated during his lifetime. In the story of Thien, the precious volume of Proust d'Arendt is a gift from Gertrud, a woman she met in the gurs internment camp in France. The passion of Gerty for failures is another of the motifs of the novel, as it is Don Quixote“The book of wonders that has fueled all () games” of Spinoza children. Here, books are rescuers.
The housing by Thien of these different time scales is a marvel of research and imagination. Sometimes he takes on a surreal aspect: in a passage with Arendt, a poem by du Fu appears unlike the paper, she crosses the common typewriter of a pension in Lisbon.
Finally, the true nature of the role punishable by the government of Lina's father as an engineer of the systems managing the structures of cyberspace “and the reason to separate from the rest of their family becomes horribly clear. While guilt and betrayal nibble at the corner of each story, Thien pushes his characters forward by the crisis and urges the reader to follow the plunge. A line of the Chinese poet Yu Qiuyu, not born before 1946, is in a way implanted in Arendt's mind: “In order to prolong life and preserve civilization, we are forced to save each other.” Thien's dazzling historic somersault is doubled for humanity.
The Book of Discs by Madeleine Thien GRANTA £ 20, 368 pages
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