An all-too-human novel that explores themes of collaboration and resistance, exile and community ... While Thien’s book is a novel of ideas, it’s much more visceral ... Thien’s book is full of unexpected moments of beauty and pleasure I don’t want to ruin for those about to enter its pages. Delight is in discovery.
Deeply humane ... Bittersweet ... Spellbinding ... Toggles in time to reconcile the brutality of betrayal with the forgiveness inherent in unconditional love. Try to read without weeping profusely.
Inventive and ambitious ... Many readers will find the novel’s observations about the nature of authoritarian governments especially timely ... Though one can’t help but admire the breadth of Thien’s imagination, it’s the child’s story by the sea that this reader wanted more of.
Rapturous ... A book of ideas ... A rich and beautiful novel. It’s serious but playful; a study of limbo and stasis that nonetheless speaks of great movement and change.
At first this somewhat whimsical framing is frustrating — what is the deeper link between Lina, her father and these voices from history? As the novel proceeds, their correlation becomes clearer and Thien plunges the reader into thrilling, perilous leaps back and forth across time. Her rendering of the bustling commerce of Spinoza’s Amsterdam is exquisite ... Thien’s inhabiting of these different timescales is a marvel of research and imagination. At times it takes on a surreal aspect: in one passage featuring Arendt, a poem by Du Fu appears on the reverse of the paper she threads through the communal typewriter of a boarding house in Lisbon ... Thien’s dazzling historical somersault doubles as a plea for humanity.
Ambitious, elliptical ... Escherian in spirit, flattening our understanding of time and human connection in all the right ways ... The novel is not without flaws. Thien’s cosmic musings occasionally obscure her plot. Her pacing slackens as she probes the curvature of narrative itself. Yet she maintains a grip on her through-line, exuding a dark energy—invisible, paradoxical, potent—amid her sentences. Hers is a poignant meditation on loss and its many meanings, grief an endless loop like an Escher drawing ... Mostly successful, The Book of Records is both a dystopian fantasy in the mode of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and an ode to a planet in crisis, riddles that mold our relationships.
hough the results are inconsistent and sometimes frustrating, Thien’s case for the search for home as a central tenet of our humanity makes this complex novel worthy of attention.
