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Product Description
Books in Canada
Certainty weaves a tapestry of memories into one heartbreaking, intellectually stimulating whole. A young woman has died; her family is in mourning, especially her doctor husband who is left to question not only his inability to save his globetrotting wife but to also live with the guilt of having betrayed her sexually in the year before she died. Gail and Ansel had reconciled, but the fear and suspicion caused by his affair took its toll. When a woman not yet forty succumbs to an infection, one cannot help wondering why.
Yet Gail and Ansel’s marriage is only the uppermost tier of a multiplicity of puzzles. Gail’s father, Matthew, is a man frequently lost in memories of his North Borneo childhood during the unspeakable Japanese occupation. His boyhood friendship with a little girl named Ani becomes his only anchor in this disintegrating world. Yet Matthew betrays her-albeit unknowingly-as his own father betrayed his community by collaborating with the occupiers. In Vancouver, Gail’s mother tries to help her husband, as she remembers scenes from her own Hong Kong childhood that are stitched into this narrative pattern of failures-to-save.
This sounds awfully bleak, but in fact the novel is solid, even thrilling. Besides the gift of Thien’s clear, honest prose, there are the discoveries she unfolds before the characters as she shifts the narrative from present to past; she also changes landscape, moving the reader from Canada, to war-torn and then post-war Indonesia, and on to present-day Holland. Ultimately we learn about the mysteries that absorbed Gail, a documentary filmmaker. She had travelled to Amsterdam to crack the code used by a Canadian POW to write in a diary. The man who kept the diary in Hong Kong remained a puzzle to his children, as Matthew had been a puzzle to his daughter. “Do you think it’s possible to know another person?” is the question Gail poses, not to her code-master friend, but to an older Dutch man, the missing link to the little girl from her father’s youth. This brainy, intriguing book unveils not only a myriad of mysteries but introduces a major talent in Madeleine Thien.
Nancy Wigston (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Yet Gail and Ansel’s marriage is only the uppermost tier of a multiplicity of puzzles. Gail’s father, Matthew, is a man frequently lost in memories of his North Borneo childhood during the unspeakable Japanese occupation. His boyhood friendship with a little girl named Ani becomes his only anchor in this disintegrating world. Yet Matthew betrays her-albeit unknowingly-as his own father betrayed his community by collaborating with the occupiers. In Vancouver, Gail’s mother tries to help her husband, as she remembers scenes from her own Hong Kong childhood that are stitched into this narrative pattern of failures-to-save.
This sounds awfully bleak, but in fact the novel is solid, even thrilling. Besides the gift of Thien’s clear, honest prose, there are the discoveries she unfolds before the characters as she shifts the narrative from present to past; she also changes landscape, moving the reader from Canada, to war-torn and then post-war Indonesia, and on to present-day Holland. Ultimately we learn about the mysteries that absorbed Gail, a documentary filmmaker. She had travelled to Amsterdam to crack the code used by a Canadian POW to write in a diary. The man who kept the diary in Hong Kong remained a puzzle to his children, as Matthew had been a puzzle to his daughter. “Do you think it’s possible to know another person?” is the question Gail poses, not to her code-master friend, but to an older Dutch man, the missing link to the little girl from her father’s youth. This brainy, intriguing book unveils not only a myriad of mysteries but introduces a major talent in Madeleine Thien.
Nancy Wigston (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Thien's debut novel draws its meager impetus from the tale of Matthew and Ani, two 10-year-olds in the village of Sandakan in Japanese-occupied Borneo during WWII, whose lyrical idylls buffer them from the horrors of war. Romance blossoms when they reunite eight years later, in 1953, but their past—Matthew's dead father collaborated with the Japanese—splits them up, sending the secretly pregnant Ani off to Jakarta and Matthew to Vancouver and a marriage (to Clara). Matthew and Ani's saga intertwines with the latter-day story of Matthew and Clara's daughter, Gail, a radio documentary maker, whose cozy but bland relationship is buffeted by an affair and who decides to find out about her father's mysterious past with Ani. Thien (Simple Recipes) uses this narrative as a peg for much elegiac meditation interspersed with muzzy reflections on fractals, code breaking and snowflake formation—her metaphor for the minute contingencies that shape human motivation. Her prose is poised but wan, and the patchwork story, despite jolts of tragic history, doesn't elicit much interest in her characters or their roads not taken. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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