DOGS AT THE PERIMETER

By Madeleine Thien

253 pp. W.W. Norton. Paper, $15.95.

Borders are porous in Madeleine Thien’s novel “Dogs at the Perimeter,” both in the world and in the mind. The narrator is a neurological researcher whose carefully compartmentalized memories of her childhood in Cambodia living under the Khmer Rouge — the communist guerrillas whose reign of terror in the 1970s left an estimated 1.7 million dead — start to leak into her present day after a colleague disappears in search of a brother lost, like hers, in her home country. Timelines converge; suddenly nothing separates the woman in a lab in Montreal, sharing with her son the beauty of a neuron “lithe as a starburst,” from the 8-year-old girl gazing up at a swarm of airplanes over Phnom Penh as the guerrillas close in.

To navigate the slippage in her mind, she turns to case studies of brain damage — a patient who “ceases to recognize faces, including her own,” and a sufferer of asomatognosia, unable to detect the physical boundaries of her body while “her thoughts continued, anchored to nothing.” She recalls how, as a child in Phnom Penh, she gave all her dolls the same name: Vesna, after Vesna Vulovic, a Serbian flight attendant who survived a jetliner explosion in 1972, falling 33,000 feet over what was then Czechoslovakia . She even tapes a picture of Vesna — “like a drop of rain or a very tiny bird, someone whom the gods had overlooked” — to her wall when she arrives in Canada as a refugee, “ashamed that I had lived.”

Her own name, the name her parents gave her, is never revealed. Early on, a Khmer Rouge soldier urges her to “become someone else” and calls her Mei, an act of both erasure and protection, freeing her from the crimes of her educated parents. (“Families are a disease of the past,” says the Angkar, the Khmer Rouge leadership.) Later, in a foster home in Canada, she is reborn again as Janie. Both names hover over her awkwardly, like aliases. Once, “in the temple schools, a new name had been a rite of passage, a bridge from one shore of life to the next,” she muses. Now, “names were empty syllables, signifying nothing, lost as easily as a suit of clothes, a brother or a sister, an entire world.”

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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.