View All Photos
Madeline Thien – CERTAINTY : A NOVEL
qrf
qrf
hdrpl
qrf
qrf
qrf
qrf
qrf
qrf
qrf
qrf

CERTAINTY : A NOVEL

Madeleine Thien
BRAND NEW, PAPERBACK

RM14.00

A Fiction About The Legacies Of Loss, The Dislocations Of War, & The Timeless Redemption Afforded By Love

ISBN 9781783783731
Book Condition BRAND NEW
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher Granta Books
Publication Date 06 Apr 2017
Pages 320
Weight 0.32 kg
Dimension 20 × 13 × 2 cm
Retail Price RM43.69
Availability: 2 in stock

Additional information

2 in stock

SHARE:
  • Detail Description

Description

★★ Shortlisted For The Man Booker Prize 2016 ★★
 
Madeleine Thien’s stunning debut novel hauntingly retells a crucial moment in history, through two unforgettable love stories.
 
In her stunning debut novel about a woman’s journey to unravel the mystery of her parents’ lives, Madeleine Thien proves herself a writer of vision, maturity, and style.
 
In present-day Vancouver, Gail Lim, a producer of radio documentaries, is haunted by the mystery of her father’s Asian past. As a child, Gail’s father, Matthew Lim, lived in a Malaysian village occupied by the Japanese.
 
He and his beloved Ani wandered the jungle fringe under the terrifying shadow of war. The war shattered their families, splitting the two apart until a brief reunion years later. Matthew’s profound connection to Ani and the life-changing secrets they shared cast a shadow that, later still, Matthew’s wife, Clara, desperately sought to understand.


Gail’s journey to unravel the mystery of her parents’ lives takes her to Amsterdam, where she unearths more about this mysterious other woman. But as Gail approaches the truth, Ani’s story will bring Gail face-to-face, with the untold mysteries of her own life. Vivid, poignant, and written in understated yet powerful prose, CERTAINTY is a novel about the legacies of loss, the dislocations of war, and the timeless redemption afforded by love.
 
Thien’s story begins in Vancouver, with a doctor named Ansel mourning the sudden death of his young wife, Gail, a radio documentary producer. Gail, we learn, is the only child of Matthew and Clara, Chinese immigrants (she from Hong Kong, he from North Borneo) who had met up after the war in Australia.
 
But Australia, although willing to allow Asians in as students, would not in that period accept them as potential immigrants, so Canada became their home. At the time of her death, Gail is working on a radio piece about a Canadian soldier who had kept a diary in code during his years as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese in Hong Kong. By the 1960s, when the soldier finally shows the diary to his family, he has forgotten his method of encryption.
 
Deciphering the book’s messages had become one of Gail’s obsessions. Wiping out the past, then rediscovering it and making sense of it, is what Certainty is all about.There are so many pasts in this novel, so many secrets. There is Ansel’s clandestine affair, which casts an anxious shadow over his marriage to Gail.
 
There is, for Clara, the long-ago horror of seeing a boy fall off a Hong Kong rooftop onto the sidewalk in front of her. Largest of all, there is Matthew’s childhood in British North Borneo (now East Malaysia), where his special friendship with an orphaned girl named Ani helps stave off the terror of Japanese troops all around his home and community.
 
Matthew’s father is a collaborator with the Japanese, and the boy witnesses his father’s postwar fate (and that of many collaborators): a bullet to the brain. Matthew and Ani feel safest, paradoxically, in the bowl of a vast crater created by mortar fire: “The bottom of the crater curved up like a boat, a hollow in which he and Ani could rest.”
 
Separated at war’s end, Matthew and Ani rediscover each other a few years later, and their relationship takes a more adult turn. But Matthew knows he cannot make a future in a place that still remembers his father’s treachery, so he leaves for Australia and his new life.
 
Ani surfaces in Jakarta with her small son, Wideh, and makes a living in a photographer’s darkroom, coaxing images out of chemicals. Her Dutch friends in Indonesia are repatriated to Holland: the Dutch East Indies have ceased to exist.
 
Family members, communities, and whole countries disappear. Life goes on. “On the hillside overlooking Sandakan, there had once been hundreds of crosses and markers to remember the dead. Later, these graves were cleared to make room for new houses.” Allied planes lie side by side with Japanese battleships on the ocean floor.
 
At the end of the novel, when Gail goes to Holland seeking answers to her family’s mysteries, she walks over a reclaimed section of sea in Flevoland: “They found shipwrecks from the middle ages, as old as the twelfth century. In the 1960s, they uncovered Allied planes shot down during the war.” On all sides of the world, apparently, the detritus of loss.
 
Thien has a tendency to put complicated scientific ruminations into the mouths of all her characters, whether or not their level and type of education lend plausibility to these observations. On the other hand, she is a brilliant creator of images. There are purely sensual ones, such as this: “The harbour was crowded with boats again, with prahus and steamers; on windy nights, their hulls knocked together like a great wooden chime.”
 
There are also unforgettable human images, such as Thien’s description of the photo of an elderly woman kneeling in the dirt before an open grave with a photo in her hand, paired with this text: “For thirty-five years, I did not know where he lay. Now I know, and all my hopes are here, they will not wake again.”
 
There is unbearable sadness here, and yet there is hope as well. Thien’s message, an ancient one, is that the truth will set you free. Reaching certainty about what happened in the past will not make the present and future more certain, but it will make “the indefinite, the uncertain hereafter” a more bearable, more human place.
———————————————————————-
Review 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.
 
———————————————————————-
Review From From Booklist :
 
In her beautifully written debut novel, Thien spins a silky web of a story, a lovely and powerful multigenerational saga that explores a family’s secrets stemming from events that occurred in a Malaysian village during the Japanese occupation of World War II.
 
Death lurks behind much of the story and, in fact, the main character, Gail Lim, dies in the opening pages. The story begins there, though, and easily moves readers from the past to the present, as family members detail their own, sometimes very painful, recollections of events.
 
These events include the death of Lim’s grandfather at the hands of Japanese soldiers as well as the grandfather’s possible involvement in wartime collaborations with the enemy, a lost love lurking in the jungles of that stricken Malaysian village.
 
And the story of the eventual migration of the family, via Australia and Hong Kong, to Vancouver, British Columbia. There is a light, translucent quality to Thien’s prose that casts a certain dreamlike quality on the tale, and yet the magnetic plot will keep the reader’s interest through the end.
 
—————————————–
About the Author
Madeleine Thien is the daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants. She has won numerous awards for her short stories. She lives in Quebec City.

[ --- Read more --- ]
You've just added this product to the cart: