Customer Reviews

Fugitive Pieces

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1 star:		(20)

 

 

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.

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.

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 story closes with the character of Ben, a young professor who has become fascinated by both Jakob and his work. Their relationship is reminiscent of the relationship of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses. Ben's family was the very antithesis of the relationship shared by Athos and Jakob. In Ben's family there was no energy, no love, no sadness. Ben seeks strength and purpose in Jakob's life and in his words, words that have the ability to transmute the horror of war and the loss of family. Words that have the power to speak that which, heretofore, has remained unspoken.

Fugitive Pieces is a beautiful novel, a meditation on love and loss and grief and solace. It is a quiet book but one that is immensely profound. Anne Michaels is a gifted poet and with Fugitive Pieces she proves that she is an extraordinary gifted writer of prose as well.

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 hands to climb out of a place. Sometimes there are steep places, where one has to walk ahead of the other. If I can't find you, I'll look deeper in myself. If I can't keep up, if you're far ahead, look back. Look back."

Anne Michaels writes with heart-stopping perception, with a purity of phrase that compels attention. This is an exquisite book about the acknowledgement of love. It heals; it cleanses. Fugitive Pieces speaks of the redemption of the spirit through remembrance. Read it, reflect, and rejoice.

Fugitive Pieces is neither a novel nor a book of poetry. It is another form of expression which shares elements of both.

With novels, the plot of the story is usually central to the understanding of the themes- not so with Fugitive Pieces; the events in the lives of the main characters are only secondary to their thoughts and feelings about their pasts. Because the plot is a less important element to the book, the author expresses her message in the thoughts of the main characters.

To try to read this work as if it were a traditional novel is pointless. It might be boring to some but only because it is entirely different from most books. There is a profundity in this book that must be sought in the metaphors and short stories rather than a main plot. Only after these are understood, do the lives of the actions of the protagonists make sense.

There are soaring passages of poetic beauty in this novel, times where I actually highlighted the text to be able to refer to it again and again, like a treasured poem. Like great poetry, there are images that bring you up short with incredible juxtapositions. For example, you never would have described a cloud like that, but reading how Michaels did, it seems natural--a new way of seeing clouds.

And the simple but profound image at the beginning of a child rising from the mud to be preserved by a Chardin-like paleantologist is breathtaking.

But as a novel, it is lacking the pace and character development required. By the two-thirds mark of the book, the beautiful writing and imagery begin to pale and you want more grist to the story, more complexity to the characters. By the end, it simply floats away with no anchor.

As a former student of Terence DePres and well-read in Holocaust literature, I found the Holocaust-related themes in the book somewhat underplayed and not well developed--there are many books that have plumbed the horror with more grit and depth than Fugitive Pieces.

Like another great Canadian poet who turned to novels, Michaels' writing is gorgeous. But unlike In the Skin of a Lion or The English Patient, the characters and the story do not rise to the level of the writing. But I am going to buy Michaels' first book of poetry!

I found this book to be immediately engrossing. Unlike many of the reviewers, I did not find it necessary to let the book "grow on me". If anything, it seemed to me that the integrity of the book deteriorated towards the end, when it became somewhat over-wrought and plot driven (not necessarily a bad thing, but secondary to the effectiveness of this book). Nevertheless, overall I would say that this is a lyrical, evocative read. I look forward to reading some of Michael's much-acclaimed poetry, because I think her style would translate more naturally into that literery form.

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.

This Toronto author was previously a poet and that is most certainly evident in her beautiful and lyrical writing style. This book is most definitely not overratted - it should be read over a few times in order for the reader to catch all the beauty of the book. The book seems incredibly slow paced at times, but is definitely not a book which I was sorry to have read. Do not read this book for plot, rather read this book for beauty.

And in reference to a previous review: this story does NOT take place in a highly idealized society, it is exactly as Toronto was (and still is in many ways) in that post-war time period. A very free and frindly place and is highly realistic in terms of plot and setting.

But I do agree as many others have stated, that at times, Fugitive Pieces is a slow moving novel. But this novel is difficult to put down because it is like a piece of poetry where you don't want to allow yourself to stop halfway through. It follows the life of a young boy named Jakob traumatized by the loss of his family and is taken in by a man named Athos. Athos has a close relationship with Jakob and what is different about this story is that it is not the typical "mentor" relationship between the two. Jakob learns from Athos, but this is never really through direct dialogue but more through observation of his life and actions.

Jakob has an inability to let go and an inability to live in the present and remember the past; his journey is one that perhaps the reader can relate to in terms of how difficult is is to move on after tradgedy. The second part of the novel is beautiful as well, in this section it follows the life of Ben, a man who finds Jakob's life absolutely fascinating. He learns from Jakob as Jakob did from Athos; a beautiful (but at times predictable) parallel.

This novel is not straight forward in any way, the more it is read, the more it is intererpereted and beautiful. The language is absolutely breathtaking. If you have a love of books and poetry, read this book. I highly recommend this novel, it is an example of great writing while exploring the delicate human condition and the importance of memories and love.