Fugitive Pieces

The period in my title is both optional and essential. This rich and evocative book (much more an extended prose poem than a novel) is both about the situation of being buried alive by a traumatic past (the Holocaust), and about a spiritual trajectory that begins in death and ends in transcendent life. As a child, Jacob Beer buries himself in the ground to escape detection in the Holocaust. He is rescued by a Greek archaeologist, who hides him in occupied Greece and then emigrates with him to Canada. Images of burial and unearthing recur throughout the book, whose theme is less the Holocaust itself than the challenge of coming to terms with the past sufficiently to make a life in the present. In the end, Jacob Beer, now a well-known poet, succeeds triumphantly, and joy in life blossoms out of memories of death. Anne Michaels is a poet herself, and at the beginning her style can seem overwrought for its subject. But she has created a book which, like Sebald's AUSTERLITZ and Thomas' THE WHITE HOTEL, approaches its vast subject obliquely through the non-linear accumulation of images, ultimately achieving a radiance which is all her own. Other readers have commented on the fact that, three-quarters into the book, when Jacob's narrative ends, another character (Ben) is introduced, whose story has only incidental connections with Jacob's own. It is a risky device, but one that I personally find successful, since it does eventually come to reflect upon Jacob, while at the same time suggesting that his story is not the situation of one unique exception, but more the common experience of all those who have been touched by great trauma and must somehow emerge from its shadow to make new lives.

Fugitive Pieces is a visionary work of literature that contains some of the most sublime prose written in the English language. At its core, Fugitive Pieces conveys the deep and everlasting scars that come from having survived extreme loss and horror. The images of grief and the subtle stories of how this grief unfolds in the lives of those who have survived are compelling and genuine, and in this poetic novel we are given a portrait of survivors: their wounds and the possibility of their healing. When I consider this single line, I am reminded anew of regeneration in the face of despair: "Every cell in my body has been replaced, suffused with peace." I recommend this book most highly.

If you are looking for literal, linear prose, give this book a miss. Canadian writer Ann Michaels writes a novel that penetrates the surface of things as they are: a narrative that seems to point to the deepest core of all human longing and grief.While Michaels'novel does not offer a series of perfectly arranged plot sequences,it does something that is far superior; the story presents a spiritual revelation of sorts, about living and dying (about having lived and having died); one that will leave you staring into space, appropriately silent, shocked, moved-for days, maybe months. There are moments in her story that still make me weep openly, though I am not typically an emotional reader. Lyrical and poetic, and yes- Ondaatjesque, but better, Michaels takes us a step further than even beautiful language and immaculate fragments, to the delicate, opaque meanings behind gesture and memory. If truly exceptional writing is able to name truths we already recognize but cannot always name, Michaels does this repeatedly, flawlessly and I think, unpretentiously: "After years, at any moment, our bodies are ready to remember us." Already, my copy of the novel is carefully marked in countless places I want to remember, words and phrases that stopped me in my tracks: "Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them." I am a 34 year old black man -an African immigrant living in Boston-and she spoke to me-very clearly. Buy this book only if you are ready for this kind of confrontation with beautiful, raw truth.

Fugitive Pieces is Canadian poet Anne Michaels' first novel and it is beautiful in the extreme. At the heart of this lovely and moving book is the struggle to understand the despair of loss and the solace of love and, most of all, the difficulty of reconciling the two. The protagonists are two Jewish men, one a Holocaust survivor, the other the son of Holocaust survivor parents.Material such as that explored in Fugitive Pieces could very easily become trite and cliched, but in Michaels' extraordinarily gifted hands suffering, loss and grief become nothing less than transcendent. An extraordinarily gifted writer, Michaels creates wonderful characters and tells an engrossing story through the use of gorgeous, but spare, dialogue and subtle metaphor.The plot is a rather simple one (this is definitely a character driven story) but it is profound and also a profoundly moving meditation on the nature of grief and the redemptive power of love. The first line in the book, "Time is a blind guide," is haunting, but it is also ironic, for the story will prove that time is anything but blind.One of the protagonists, Jakob Beer, was orphaned as a seven-year old boy in Poland. Although the death of his parents affects Jakob most greviously, it is his sorrow at the death of his beloved older sister, Bella, that will remain with him for a lifetime. Jakob, himself, escapes the Nazis and flees into the forests of Poland where he is rescued by a Greek geologist, Athos Roussos, who eventually smuggles the boy to the Greek island of Zakynthos.On Zakynthos, Jakob can finally begin to put his life back together again. He is, however, haunted by memories of Bella, a gifted pianist. It is Bella who ultimately becomes Jakob's Beatrice as he begins his fascination with the poetry that will play a central role in the balance of his life.Athos, himself a widower, and Jakob, an orphan, seem to find in each other what they thought they had forever lost: a sense of family and abiding love and trust. As Athos finds joy in raising Jakob, Jakob finds joy in the values Athos seeks to instill in him: the love of language, scholarship and ethics.Although Athos seeks to heal Jakob, he does not attempt to obliterate his past. Ïnstead, Athos encourages Jakob to learn his Hebrew alphabet, telling him it is the future he is remembering rather than the past. As Jakob practices both the twisting and ornate letters of Hebrew and Greek, Athos tells him that both languages contain the "ancient loneliness of ruins." The narrative eventually moves from Greece to Toronto where Jakob becomes the product of his love for the late Bella and the teachings of Athos. The love given him so freely by both will serve as a continuum for the rest of Jakob's life as he realizes that the best teachers encourage, not the mind, but the heart. Jakob comes to know that Athos instilled in him the necessity of love and, that, to honor both Athos and Bella he must resolve a "perpetual thirst." The stor

An exaltation of life, the most terrible death - both are seared across the pages of a remarkable debut novel by Canadian author Anne Michaels. No, let's not call it a novel. More accurately it is an artistic achievement which weds poetry and prose, unites history and science to create metaphors that illumine human nature. The story of three men whose psyches are scarred begins when a Polish village is sacked during World War II. Seven-year-old Jakob Beer witnesses his parents' murder and the abduction of his dear sister, Bella. Fleeing from the ghastly scene, Jakob runs into the night forest where he hides himself: "I knew what to do. I took a stick and dug. I planted myself like a turnip and hid my face with leaves." Traumatized and seemingly without hope, Jakob is rescued by a Greek geologist, Athos, who takes the boy to his home on a small island. Jakob describes the learning of a shared language, "A little of my Yiddish, with smatterings of mutual Polish. His Greek and English. We took new words into our mouths like foreign foods, suspicious, acquired tastes." High above the Ionian Sea, Jakob listens as Athos tells stories and reads aloud - books on animal navigation, on icons, on insects, on Greek independence, botany, and poetry by Masefield and Keats. In the sharing of a hiding place, the two formed a bond of love. "I will be your koumbaros, your godfather," Ahtos said. "We must carry each other. If we don't have this, what are we?" Following the war, Athos accepts a position at the University of Toronto. Although still haunted by past horror and inextricably tied to his lost sister it is here that Jakob searches for meaning. He becomes a translator and poet. Having learned "the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate," he now sought in poetry "the power of language to restore." Later, there is a glimmer of peace for Jakob in Michaela, a woman 25 years his junior. He remembers a poem: "...in two lines, the poet shakes her fists then closes her hands in prayer. 'You're many years late/how happy I am to see you.'" Before Jakob and Michaela die, he speaks to the children they do not have, "Child I long for...You, my son, Bela, living in an old city...Or you, Bella, my daughter. May you never be deaf to love..." Part two of the novel is devoted to a younger man, Ben. He, too, is a blemished soul, the son of Holocaust survivors who cannot bear the weight of their travail. Fearful, he believes, "My parents' past is mine molecularly." Yet, he has been so touched by Jakob's writing that he leaves his wife, Naomi, and goes to the Greek island of Idhra in the hopes of finding Jakob's notebooks. Ben finds the journals, and poems Jakob had written during his few years with Michaela, "...poems of a man who feels, for the first time, a future." Thus, through the example of Jakob's life, Ben finds a tomorrow for himself. Preparing to return to his wife, he remembers what she once said, "Sometimes we need both