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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Surrender to this book,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fugitive Pieces: A Novel (Paperback)
In order to appreciate this book you have to surrender to it and let its poetry wash over you. It takes some time to build up, but if you let it, it will move you with its very unique images. The structure is rather unusual: for instance, you might be given a description of the banks of a river in Canada, strange in that artifacts of daily living such as knifes and spoons and dishes are imbedded in its banks. Only later does the reader understand the significance of this description when he or she reads about the flood that almost killed one of the main characters.No other book that I've read provides such a sense of the dead--all those who once lived on earth and now are deep within the bogs, at the bottoms of the sea, in mass graves, in archaeological sites--to be dug up and remembered by the archaeologists who are like priests of memory. This book is really about memory and how we owe it to the dead to remember them: Jacob remembers his beloved sister Bella who died in the Holocaust; Athos remembers the dead of the excavated city Biskupin in Polland where he rescued Jacob; Jacob finishes Athos' work as a way to honor his memory and the learning he imparted; Ben remembers Jacob and his poetry and finds in his poetry and journals answers to his profoundest dilemmas. We numb ourselves to atrocities such as the Holocaust because the horror is so great; but books like this help us remember and pay homage to those who suffered. It's a beautiful book even though the structure is flawed and the language not always perfection. Still, it's superior to 95% of what's on the market.
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant but flawed debut novel.,
By
This review is from: Fugitive Pieces: A Novel (Paperback)
Jacob Beer is a child of the Holocost. Having witnessed yet escaping the brutal murder of his family by the fluke of happening to be in his favorite hiding place at the time of the murders, he runs off and is ultimately found by Anthos Roussos, a Greek archeologist digging in an area nearby Joacob's home. Realizing that the boy is in grave danger, Anthos abandons his dig and smuggles the boy out to Greece. Within hours of leaving, the Nazis overrun the area of the dig and kill everyone associated with it. Thus, in the first of many wonderfully crafted observations, Michaels notes that, "in effect, they saved each other."This is the sort of lyrical construction that fills a brillant book that works much better as a lyrical prose poem than it does as a novel, as structurally the book is seriously flawed. The characters remain elusively imcomplete due to haphazard breaks in the story line. For example, though Jacob's second wife obviously is the true love of his life, she has no significant role in the narrative other than that of a shadow as, shortly after she's introduced, the novel changes direction entirely, adopting a new protagonist, Ben, who is trying to recover Jacobs papers after his death. All rather awkward. As a result, too many significant characters are insubstaintial shadows, not the substantive elements of the story they obviously shape but, in the structure of the book, don't really participate in. Frustrating though these structural flaws may be, and they are frustrating indeed, Ms. Michaels nevertheless infuses this novel with such lyrical, poetic allusion, such passion, and such a keen eye for spiritual anomie that the book is, in the end, well worth reading and savoring. My hope is that future works will work better stylisctically and structurally yet remain at the same overall level of artistic accomplishment as is realized in this novel.
34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Struggle With this Book. You Are Supposed To!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fugitive Pieces: A Novel (Paperback)
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.
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