Madeleine Thien imagines Spinoza's particular friendship with the ancients

Aug 8, 2025

This post discusses a portion of Madeleine Thien's The Book of Records. I am not sure it needs a "spoiler alert," but I am putting one here -- as I do talk a bit about a particular scene in the book.

I have been struck, while reading Madeleine Thien's exceptional The Book of Records, by how serendipitous this novel feels in relation to De Cruz's "friendship with the ancients." There are many examples of direct and indirect connection - I'll wait to discuss further in a longer post - but I wanted to quickly capture a very interesting one, from Chapter 6.

In Chapter 6, we are told a story narrating Baruch Spinoza's excommunication from his community. Amidst this tale, Thien imagines Spinoza's own imaginary friendship with ancients (or dead, but not-so-ancient), figures clearly important to him: Maimonides, Averroes, and Descartes.

It's not just that she imagines him reading these figures, but rather provides an image of true intimacy:

[Spinoza's] twenty-third birthday came and went without notice. He read Descartes, Maimonides and Averroes, and together he and these voices debated and joked as if the bunch of them were schoolchildren, lawless, with all their lives ahead of them.

"Movement and time are one and the same," Averroes insisted, pointing both index fingers at the sky. "Time is something the soul constructs in movement."

"Not a bit of it!" shouted Descartes. "Time is an obvious matter of circles, loops and straight lines. And you know it!"

Maimonides threw a dinner roll at him, which Descartes tried and failed to catch.

Averroes said, "One day Descartes stopped by the tavern. 'Want a drink?' the barman said. 'I think not,' Descartes answered, and poof, he disappeared!"

They hooted with laughter. "I think not, therefore I'm not--whoops ... poof!"^[1]

What warmth is presented here in this imaginary exchange -- truly, what friendship.

What is especially interesting about this passage is where it occurs. ⊕ I don't know Spinoza's biography well, but I think this is where Thien is doing quite a bit of fictionalizing -- freely, in a way that is quite consistent with larger themes in the novel. Spinoza's fate has just been sealed: betrayed by his closest friend, he will be excommunicated. This happens between the initial confrontation and an assassination attempt; Spinoza will be excommunicated shortly after.

Thus, Spinoza has already lost a friend, and is guaranteed to be losing what little of his family remains, and the community that is all he has known. As a Jew in Amsterdam, that community doubles as a source of safety, of shelter from the ostracization and marginalization Jews could experience. His future outside that community, after exile, is deeply uncertain.

Thien placing the conversation at this moment in Spinoza's story reminds me of the Du Bois quote that De Cruz opens with, in which Shakespeare and Balzac provide a counterpart to the exile of segregation. Machiavelli's letter to Francesco Vettori similarly comes at a time of political exile in his life. To De Cruz, "His dialogues with the ancients provide a refuge from the world."^[2]

The idea that Spinoza would turn to his "ancients" at such a time in his life seems very much in the spirit of De Cruz's article.