Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

Overview

The second novel by the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author Madeleine Thien is "beautiful, deeply moving, [and] addresses universal questions" (Independent).

Set in Cambodia during the regime of the-Khmer Rouge and in present day Montreal, Dogs at the Perimeter tells the story of Janie, who as a child experiences the terrible violence carried out by the Khmer Rouge and loses everything she holds dear. Three decades later, Janie has relocated to Montreal, although the scars of her past remain visible. After abandoning her husband and son and taking refuge in the home of her friend, the scientist Hiroji Matsui, Janie and Hiroji find solace in their shared grief and pain—until Hiroji’s disappearance opens old wounds and Janie finds that she must struggle to find grace in a world overshadowed by the sorrows of her past.

Beautifully realized, deeply affecting, Dogs at the Perimeter evokes the injustice of tyranny through the eyes of a young girl and draws a remarkable map of the mind’s battle with memory, loss, and the horrors of war. It confirms Madeleine Thien as one of the most gifted and powerful novelists writing today.

Finalist for the International Literature Prize and the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
A Canada Reads Top Forty Book
A Globe and Mail Best Book

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393354317
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	354,714
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Madeleine Thien is the author of three novels and a collection of stories, and her work has been translated into twenty-five languages. Her most recent novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. She lives in Montreal, Canada.

Read an Excerpt

They sleep early and rise in the dark. It is winter now. The nights are long but outside, where the leaves have fallen from the branches, the snowed-inlight comes through. There is a cat who finds the puddles of sunshine. She was small when the boy was small, but then she grew up and left him behind. Still, at night, she hunkers down on Kiri’s bed, proprietorial. They were born just a few weeks apart, but now he is seven and she is forty-four.
 
My son is the beginning, the middle, and the end. When he was a baby, I used to follow him on my hands and knees, the two of us crawling over the wood floors, the cat threading between our legs. Hello, hello, my son would say. Hello, my good friend. How are you? He trundled along, an elephant, a chariot, a glorious madman.
 
It is twilight now, mid-February.
 
Sunday.
 
Tonight’s freezing rain has left the branches crystalline. Our home is on the second floor, west facing, reached by a twisting staircase, the white paint chipping off, rust burnishing the edges. Through the window, I can see my son. Kiri puts a record on, he shuffles it gingerly out of its cardboard sleeve, holding it lightly between his fingertips.
 
I know the one he always chooses. I know how he watches the needle lift and the mechanical arm move into place. I know the outside but not the quiet, not the way his thoughts rise up, always jostling, always various, not how they untangle from one another or how they fall so inevitably into place.
 
Kiri is in grade two. He has his father’s dark-brown hair, he has startling, beautiful eyes, the same colour as my own. His name, in Khmer, means “mountain.” I want to run up the stairs and turn my key in the lock, the door to my home swinging wide open.
 
When my fear outweighs my need – fear that Kiri will look out the window and see this familiar car, that my son will see me – I turn the ignition, steer myself from the sidewalk, and roll away down the empty street. In my head, ringing in my ears, the music persists, his body swaying like a bell to the melody. I remember him, crumpled on the floor, looking up at me, frightened. I try to cover this memory, to focus on the blurring lights, the icy pavement. My bed is not far away but a part of me wants to keep on driving, out of the city, down the highway straight as a needle. Instead, I circle and circle the residential streets. A space opens up in front of Hiroji’s apartment, where I have been sleeping these last few weeks, and I edge the car against the curb.
 
Tomorrow will come soon, I tell myself. Tomorrow I will see my son.
 
The wind swoops down, blowing free what little heat I have. I can barely lock the door and get upstairs fast enough. Inside, I pull off my boots but keep my coat and scarf on against the chill. Hiroji’s cat, Taka the Old, skips ahead of me, down the long hallway. On the answering machine, the message light is flashing and I hit the square button so hard the machine hiccups twice before complying.
 
Navin’s voice. “I saw the car,” my husband says. “Janie? Are you there?” He waits. In the background, my son is calling out. Their voices seem to echo. “No, Kiri. Hurry up, kiddo. Back to bed.” I hear footsteps, a door closing, and then Navin coming back. He says he wants to take Kiri to Vancouver for a few weeks, that the time, and distance, might help us. “We’ll stay at Lena’s place,” he says. I am nodding, agreeing with every word – Lena’s home has stood empty since she died last year – but a numb grief is flowing through me.
 
One last message follows. I hear a clicking on the line, then the beep of keys being pressed, once, twice, three times. The line goes dead.
 
The fridge is remarkably empty. I scan its gleaming insides, then do a quick inventory: old bread in the freezer and in the cupboard two cans of diced tomatoes, a tin of smoked mussels, and, heaven, three bottles of wine. I liberate the bread and the mussels, pour a glass of sparkling white, then stand at the counter until the toaster ejects my dinner. Gourmet. I peel back the lid of the can and eat the morsels one by one. The wine washes the bread down nicely. Everything is gone too soon but the bottle of wine that accompanies me to the sofa, where I turn the radio on. Music swells and dances through the apartment.
 
This bubbly wine is making me morose. I drink the bottle quickly in order to be rid of it. “Only bodies,” Hiroji once told me, “have pain.” He had been in my lab, watching me pull a motor neuron from Aplysia. Bodies, minds: to him they were the same, one could not be considered without the other.
 
Half past ten. It is too early to sleep but the dark makes me uneasy. I want to call Meng, my oldest friend, we have not spoken in more than two weeks, but it is the hour of the wolves in Paris. My limbs feel light and I trickle, wayward, through the rooms. On the far side of the apartment, in Hiroji’s small office, the windows are open and the curtains seem to move fretfully, wilfully. The desk has exploded, maybe it happened last week, maybe earlier, but now all the papers and books have settled into a more balanced state of nature. Still, the desk seems treacherous. Heaped all over, like a glacier colonizing the surface, are the pages I have been working on. Taka the Old has been here: the paper is crumpled and still faintly warm.
 
Since he disappeared, nearly three months ago now, I’ve had no contact with Hiroji. I’m trying to keep a record of the things he told me: the people he treated, the scientists he knew. This record fills sheet after sheet – one memory at a time, one place, one clue – so that every place and every thought won’t come at once, all together, like a deafening noise. On Hiroji’s desk is an old photograph showing him and his older brother standing apart, an emerald forest behind them. Hiroji, still a child, smiles wide. They wear no shoes, and Junichiro, or James, stands with one hand on his hip, chin lifted, challenging the camera. He has a bewitching, sad face.
 
Sometimes this apartment feels so crowded with loved ones, strangers, imagined people. They don’t accuse me or call me to account, but I am unable to part with them. In the beginning, I had feared the worst, that Hiroji had taken his own life. But I tell myself that if this had been a suicide, he would have left a note, he would have left something behind. Hiroji knew what it was to have the missing live on, unending, within us. They grow so large, and we so empty, that even the coldest winter nights won’t swallow them. I remember floating, a child on the sea, alone in the Gulf of Thailand. My brother is gone, but I am looking up at the white sky and I believe, somehow, that I can call him back. If only I am brave enough, or true enough. Countries, cities, families. Nothing need disappear. At Hiroji’s desk, I work quickly. My son’s voice is lodged in my head, but I have lost the ability to keep him safe. I know that no matter what I say, what I make, the things I have done can’t be forgiven. My own hands seem to mock me, they tell me the further I go to escape, the greater the distance I must travel back. You should never have left the reservoir, you should have stayed in the caves. Look around, we ended up back in the same place, didn’t we? The buildings across the street fall dark, yet the words keep coming, accumulating like snow, like dust, a fragile cover that blows away so easily.

Editorial Reviews

The revision of history and the dismantling of the self under communism were central themes in Thien's 2016 novel of the Cultural Revolution, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Dogs at the Perimeter, first published in Canada in 2011, reads like a seed of the later novel: contrapuntal and elegiac in tone, with a white heat beneath. Where Do Not Say We Have Nothing is symphonic and expansive, Dogs at the Perimeter turns inward, to the workings of a mind in flight from itself.

The New York Times Book Review - Ligaya Mishan

08/21/2017
When Janie’s friend and colleague Hiroji disappears from Montreal, Janie’s memories catapult her back to her youth in Cambodia just after the Khmer Rouge revolution. In a long flashback told in the uncertain and terrified voice of a child, she remembers in gruesome but increasingly detached detail her family’s forced relocation from Phnom Penh, the slave labor conditions they endured, and her eventual escape as a refugee. Back in the present day, Janie travels to Laos certain that Hiroji is not dead but rather has gone in search of his lost brother, a Japanese-born Red Cross doctor not heard from since his assignment during the Cambodian Civil War. Her story recedes as Thien fills in the painful story of Hiroji’s brother, whose survival under the brutal regime required him to entirely forget his past. The fragmented focus on two families broken by the revolution leaves both stories hauntingly unfinished, an effective narrative decision. Thien (Do Not Say We Have Nothing) narrates events to effectively mimic the mental breakdown of her characters under duress. This lyrical exploration of the weight war places on its survivors will linger with readers as it sheds light on the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

[Dogs at the Perimeter] captures the random terror and chaos of Year Zero and presents a credible portrait of Phnom Penh…Thien’s observations of the ravaged country maintain a fine balance between lyricism and horror.”

Alfred Hickling - Guardian

The beauty of Madeleine Thien’s prose doesn’t reside only in its clarity and elegance. She’s a surveyor of damaged lives, and her characters no longer possess the requisite layers of skin to protect them from what they have endured, and what they remember. Thien, a deeply empathetic writer, enfolds her wounded creations in morally precise language, offering the consolation of, in effect, storytelling.

Charles Foran - Globe and Mail

Utterly convincing in how it weighs the psychological damage inflicted by a regime that demands denial of family, friends and self as a condition of survival.

Financial Times

Fiction like this, clear-eyed and truthful, can give a shape to the chaos of history…The quiet elegance of Thien’s writing makes a brutal story powerful and moving.

The Times (London)

The strife in Indo-China has inspired some astonishing writing in recent decades…Dogs at the Perimeter belongs with the best of such works. But it also tells a more universal story about being borne back into the past—and the inescapability of history.”

Economist

★ 09/01/2017
Mei, a Cambodian war refugee from Phnom Penh, relates a harrowing story of genocide under the rule of the Khmer Rouge regime. She and her family are torn apart as they are thrust into this reign of terror. Family members "disappear"; food, housing, and medicinal supplies are scarce, making life a daily struggle for survival; and everyone lives in constant fear. Escaping to Canada, Mei becomes Janie, changing her name in a desperate act to start a new life. In stream-of-consciousness style, Canadian author Thien offers a perceptive look into a truly nightmarish world, effectively capturing the essence of someone suffering from prolonged posttraumatic stress. Janie's need for family, memories, and fulfillment of her desires have been superseded by a crushing, despotic regime that kills not only people but souls. VERDICT First published in Canada in 2011 and released here after the success of Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, this second novel by Thien is a moving, powerful, beautifully written study that illuminates Janie's reality. An important addition to the canon of diaspora and refugee literature.—Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

Library Journal

2017-07-17
Canadian Thien's second novel, newly released in the U.S. after Man Booker Prize finalist Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), moves between present-day Canada and Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia as it explores the cost of surviving a genocide.Months before the novel begins, Montreal neurologist Hiroji Matsui, whose Japanese parents came to Canada after World War II, walked out of the research center where he worked and disappeared. Janie, a researcher at the center who arrived in Canada from Cambodia as a refugee when she was 11, is now staying in her friend Hiroji's empty apartment, away from her understanding husband, Navin, and young son, Kiri, while she goes through a psychological, perhaps existential, crisis of her own, haunted by memories of her childhood. The novel's fragmentary, repetitive structure mirrors both the way the past bleeds into the present and how the lives of the characters themselves bleed together. In 1975, Janie was 8, living in Phnom Penh with her middle-class parents and younger brother before the Khmer took over the city. In snatches, she recalls the horrors that followed: her father's disappearance and the rest of the family's struggle to survive unbearable conditions. Within Janie's story are other stories of Cambodians who shift identities—her brother, Sopham, becomes Rithy in creating a new peasant identity; Janie herself becomes Mei—and who become both victims and perpetrators. Meanwhile, adult Janie comes to realize that Hiroji has gone to Cambodia to search for his older brother, James, who went missing while a Red Cross doctor there in 1975. James has his own story of loss and shifting identity after he is taken prisoner and kept alive for his usefulness as a doctor. While both are haunted by the atrocities they experienced, Janie's and James' survival take very different courses. A troubling, difficult read and a worthwhile addition to the growing body of work on the Cambodian holocaust.

Kirkus Reviews