Fugitive Pieces: A Novel [Paperback]

Anne Michaels (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 26, 1998

A New York Times Notable Book of the YearWinner of the Lannan Literary Fiction AwardWinner of the Guardian Fiction AwardIn 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption.As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Anne Michaels, an accomplished poet, has already published two collections of poetry in her native Canada. She turns her hand to fiction in an impressive debut novel, Fugitive Pieces. This is the story of Jakob Beer, a Polish Jew, translator, and poet who, as a child, witnessed his family's slaughter at the hands of the Nazis. Beer himself was found and smuggled out of Poland by Athos Roussos, a Greek archaeologist who carried him back to Greece and kept him there in precarious safety. After the war they emigrated together to Canada. Jakob's story is told through diaries discovered by Ben, a young man whose parents are Holocaust survivors and who is a vessel for their memories just as Jakob is the bearer of his own.

Fugitive Pieces is a book about memory and forgetting. How is it possible to love the living when our hearts are still with the dead? What is the difference between what historical fact tells us and what we remember? More than that, the novel is a meditation on the power of language to free our souls and allow us to find our own destinies. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Searing the mind with stunning images while seducing with radiant prose, this brilliant first novel is a story of damaged lives and the indestructibility of the human spirit. It speaks about loss, about the urgency, pain and ultimate healing power of memory, and about the redemptive power of love. Its characters come to understand the implacability of the natural world, the impartial perfection of science, the heartbreak of history. The narrative is permeated with insights about language itself, its power to distort and destroy meaning, and to restore it again to those with stalwart hearts. During WWII, when Jakob Beer is seven, his parents are murdered by Nazi soldiers who invade their Polish village, and his beloved, musically talented 15-year-old sister, Bella, is abducted. Fleeing from the blood-drenched scene, he is magically saved by Greek geologist Athos Roussos, who secretly transports the traumatized boy to his home on the island of Zakynthos, where they live through the Nazi occupation, suffering privations but escaping the atrocities that decimate Greece's Jewish community. Jakob is haunted by the moment of his parents' death?the burst door, buttons spilling out of a saucer onto the floor, darkness?and his spirit remains sorrowfully linked with that of his lost sister, whose fate anguishes him. But he travels in his imagination to the places that Athos describes and the books that this kindly scholar provides. At war's end, Athos accepts a university post in Toronto, and Jakob begins a new life. Yet he remains disoriented and unmoored, trapped by memory and grief, "a damaged chromosome"?the more so after Athos' premature death. By then, however, Jakob has discovered his metier as poet and essayist and strives to find in language the meaning of his life. The miraculous gift of a soul mate in his second wife, "voluptuous scholar" Michaela, comes late for Jakob. Their marriage is brief, and ends in stunning irony. The second part of the novel concerns a younger man, Ben, who is profoundly influenced by Jakob's poetry and goes to the Greek island of Idhra in an attempt to find the writer's notebooks after his death. Ben is another damaged soul. The son of Holocaust survivors, he carries their sorrow like a heavy stone. Emotionally maimed and fearful, Ben feels that he was "born into absence... a hiding place, rotted out by grief." Yet when it seems that the past will go on wreaking destruction, Jakob's writings, and the example of his life, show Ben the way to acknowledge love and to accept a future. These intertwined stories are related by Canadian poet Michaels in incandescent prose, dark and tender and poetically lyrical. A bestseller in Canada, the novel will make readers yearn to share it with others, to read sentences and entire passages aloud, to debate its message, to acknowledge its wisdom. 35,000 first printing.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 294 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Paperback Ed., 1998 edition (May 26, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679776591
• ISBN-13: 978-0679776598
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (157 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #57,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anne Michaels's first novel was the international best seller Fugitive Pieces, now a major motion picture. It won several awards, including the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Guardian Fiction Award, and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Michaels is also the author of three highly acclaimed poetry collections. She lives in Toronto.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Surrender to this book, October 13, 1999

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., August 23, 1998

By 

David J. Gannon (San Antonio, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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!, December 27, 2002

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.