Forgetting to Remember

The Book of Records
Madeleine Thien
Knopf Canada
May 2025
$36.95

Martin Heidegger is “The Lecturer” in Madeleine Thien’s new book The Book of Records. Heidegger was a philosopher from the mid 20^th century. He was big on being true to yourself and creating your own purpose, rather than doing what society expects of you. Later, he thought democracy and technology made us conform to one way of being, losing touch with our authentic selves. He believed you would find authenticity through your cultural roots, not from the societal definition of equality.

By 1933, he had turned to Nazism.

Thien uses Heidegger and others as examples of how people can fall prey to a regime. This book is an allegory for how we interpret information and spout disinformation. Heidegger had a seemingly moral line of thought, but it quickly warped into an oppressive viewpoint. Thien connects this pipeline of altruistic belief to oppressive action across multiple stories in The Book of Records, showing how easy it is to fall into distorted thinking.

If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is. We are left to interpret this philosophical, dreamlike world Thien has created. In The Book of Records, we follow Lina, a young girl fleeing an oppressive regime with her father to The Sea: a surreal, time-bending building that hosts refugees and travellers. Lina craves education, but only has three books: one on Baruch Spinoza, a 17^th century Jewish scholar; one on Du Fu, poet of the Tang dynasty in China; and one on Hannah Arendt, a German philosopher. Each were revolutionary thinkers of their time: Spinoza spoke about how God is nature, Du challenged the greed of those in power, and Arendt challenged totalitarianism during the Second World War. In The Sea, she meets three friends who mirror these philosophers, and they debate over their biographies — their accuracy and their deeper philosophical meanings.

Madeleine Thien won a Governor General’s Literary Award for Do Not Say We Have Nothing. This isn’t her first time writing about such topics. Her books often deal with people caught in corrupt political systems and displacement. Thien’s parents immigrated from Asia to Canada before she was born in 1974, and it troubled her that they never spoke about the oppression they’d escaped. 

Thien has been writing this book for nine years, since the beginning of the Trump administration. It is a thoughtful commentary on current political rhetoric and how we can never trust our memories and judgement. With an overload of information online and the rise of AI, the term “fact” has a looser definition than ever. It’s much easier now to make up your own facts or find news that gives partial truths. This muddying of information encourages extremism because it’s harder to disprove information.

Thien uses her characters and philosophy to challenge us in what we “know” to be true from our memories. She makes the argument that you can never truly remember unless you’re in the moment. Blucher, one of Lina’s friends, asks Lina if she will remember the story of Hannah Arendt exactly the way Blucher will tell it, and Lina says yes. Blucher says:

“Impossible… Things have to inhabit the living or else disappear in the world and cease to exist. If things survive it’s not through abstract thought, but the realities that gave rise to those thoughts.”

Lina, through time, comes to understand that she can’t know everything, and in that understanding, she knows more than she did. 

Thien wants us to see that because memory is spotty, history is very precious, and if we forget history, we can repeat it. She masterfully uses three revolutionary thinkers whose lives mirror each other to make this point. All became outcasts because of their controversial but groundbreaking ideologies. They were oppressed for challenging social norms, and they each experienced self-doubt. But, through persistence and support, their ideas changed the world. 

Even though we can’t accurately recall history, Thien shows us that art’s emotional resonance can be timeless. We can’t experience the Tang dynasty, but we can still relateto the feelings in Du Fu’s poems. 

This book is for those who love intellectual debate and can withstand having their thoughts challenged. It’s a great read for philosophy lovers. It’s best read slowly, over multiple sessions as the language is dense and the concepts are complicated.  Processing the mind-bending content in this book is equally as impactful as reading the chapters. It’s a reminder to be open-minded to new schools of thought, yet vigilant against the distortion of truth.