ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The new novel "The Book Of Records" begins when a 7-year-old girl named Lina arrives with her father in a place called The Sea - S-E-A.
MADELEINE THIEN: It's buildings that are a waystation for people who are fleeing one place and trying to make a home elsewhere. And usually people just stay there for a day or two, enough to touch land, and then begin their journey again.
SHAPIRO: Author Madeleine Thien told me she wanted to set her novel in a place that is not a natural home, somewhere different centuries might converge. Three historical figures eventually enter the story. They come from different places and different eras.
THIEN: There were many people I hoped would come and accompany Lina and her father. Her father only takes three books off the shelf. They have to leave in a hurry. He grabs three books that he tells her looked like the most unread, the ones that might withstand a thousand readings - something that maybe she would be able to live within for a longer amount of time. And they happen to be these three - Hannah Arendt, Baruch Spinoza and the Chinese poet Du Fu, all from different centuries. And I chose them because they were thinkers I had lived with for a long time, who had taken root in me, and probably their ideas had flowed through me in ways I could see and couldn't see. And I know when I wrote it, I wanted to face what those ideas meant or what I thought, what I believed I had learned or what I believed I had inherited in some sense.
SHAPIRO: These three people from different centuries each faced authoritarianism, betrayal, societal collapse. And I've heard you say that all three of them still tried to hold on to love for the world. What do you think the secret is to holding on to love for the world in the face of all of that?
THIEN: I almost think it's a necessity. You know, there's a famous Hannah Arendt line, you know, why is it so hard to love this world? But this world is also our only home, our deepest belonging. And so to face what we are within it, what it gives us, what it brings us, how it shapes us, I think all three understood that if they were going to preserve what was most dear to them, to hold everything dear, they had to love it first before knowing how to survive it as well.
SHAPIRO: Does that come naturally to you, or is one of the reasons you turn to these writers and thinkers so often is that they have been able to do something you struggle to do?
THIEN: I think you've named it, yes (laughter). I think that is the gift they gave me. In the nine years of writing this book, it really taught me how to perceive differently. And it was demanding in terms of the thinking that went into it and the grappling with their ideas, their work, their philosophies, their questions and also where they hit contradictions. There was a gift of thinking with them that also brought me to another kind of love of our world across time.
SHAPIRO: As you mentioned, you spent almost a decade writing this book, and the world has changed a lot in that decade. One way it's changed is that authoritarian governments around the world have gained power, democracy has receded. And so as you wrote these stories of people who lived in eras of history where that was the case, where authoritarianism was on the rise, what did you learn about the world that we're living in right now?
THIEN: You know, Spinoza's most famous work is "Ethics" - "The Ethics" - this sort of exploration of the consequences of consequences about human freedom and free will and perhaps some of the illusions of those things, but also what it means to have a moral life, what it means to choose, what it means to observe, how we respond to things. And I think what I carried from these three is not that there is a moral person. It's never a fixed state of being. It's about choices. And everyone has a choice at every moment to speak, to not speak, to protect another, to look away, to hold something dear, to not hold things dear. And I think that's what they gave me, is the recognition that at every moment, there is a choice to be made.
SHAPIRO: Madeleine Thien's new novel is "The Book Of Records." Thank you so much.
THIEN: Thank you. Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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