Madeleine Thien’s Courageous Fiction
Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver in 1974, the same year her Malaysian-Chinese parents immigrated to Canada from Malaysia. In Thien's new novel, Dogs at the Perimeter, her heroine's life in Montreal as a neuroscientist, wife, and mother unravels when she is overwhelmed by the haunting legacy of her horrifying childhood in post-war Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge's brutal rule. As readers, we are plunged into the child's effort to survive a savage catastrophe, and the adult's struggle to transcend the sorrows of the past.
As a part of the UPEI Winter's Tales Author Reading Series, Thien will read and talk about her fiction on Thursday, February 7, at 7:30 pm in the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. A reception and book signing will follow her reading.
Her first book, Simple Recipes, a short-story collection, won four prizes, including the City of Vancouver Book Award. Certainty, her first novel, won the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award and has been translated into 16 languages. Thien now resides in Quebec.
In an article Thien wrote for The Guardian (UK) about Dogs at the Perimeter while at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last year, she said, 'In my 30s, I began spending time in Cambodia. I found, as the months and years passed, that I could not let the country go, and I began, despite many doubts, to write about the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge years. There are, I believe, eternal and harrowing questions that the Cambodian genocide poses, and which we have never confronted. The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities, people changed their names, let go of their identities and effaced their selves; the world forgot a small country that had suffered immeasurably from the interference and the wars of larger powers.'
'I am almost 40 now,' she wrote, 'the novel is finished, but my questions remain. If a person erases him or herself in order to survive, how can they find that self again? Can survival bring them peace, or is it only madness to remember?' Her new novel offers powerful answers to these questions.
Madeleine Thien is a voice of courageous vision from the newer waves of Canadians whose heritage and ancestral histories are not in western Europe, but in such regions as Southeast Asia. The UPEI English Department, in collaboration with Confederation Centre Art Gallery, and with support from The Canada Council of the Arts, is honoured to present Thien and her fiction to an Island audience.
