Customer Reviews

The Winter Vault (Vintage International)

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Eleven years after the publication of Fugitive Pieces: A Novel, her only other novel, Anne Michaels has published a monumental philosophical novel which is also exciting to read for its characters and their conflicts. Complex and fully integrated themes form the superstructure of the novel in which seemingly ordinary people deal with issues of life and death, love and death, the primacy of memory, the search for spiritual solace, and man's relationships with earth and water--huge themes and huge scope, reflecting huge literary goals. And Michaels is successful, not just in dealing with the big issues and themes affecting mankind itself, but in bringing them to life through individuals who muddle along, seeking some level of personal connection with the world while trying to appreciate life's mysteries.

Avery Escher is a young engineer in 1964 when he and his wife Jean travel to Egypt's Abu Simbel site, where he is charged with the task of helping to remove the Great Temple and reconstruct it in the cliff sixty feet higher. Gushing water, which will be released when the Aswan Dam is finished, will flood the area where the temple lies, and the new Lake Nasser will cover all the land downstream. As he works on the site, Avery feels that "Holiness was escaping under the [workers'] drills," and he comes to believe that "the reconstruction was a further desecration, as false as redemption without repentance."

All the Nubian people who have lived in the area below the dam for tens of generations have been relocated, but they are bereft of their roots, their memories, and their dead. This is not the first time Avery has been exposed to the dislocation of long-time residents. His father, William Escher, was an engineer who worked to build the St. Lawrence Seaway, which flooded ten Canadian villages near the Eschers' home and built a lake. Stories about the Eschers' displaced family friends are touching and bring the thematic development--and the sadness--down to a more intimate personal level. A third thread takes place in Warsaw, following World War II when the city reconstructed its bombed-out historical core, though its heart was missing, as were its memories--along with almost all its Jewish people.

Within this fully developed thematic framework, filled with symbols, Anne Michaels creates a passionate love story between Avery Escher and his wife Jean, a botanist who collects seeds and seedlings, transplants gardens, grafts trees, and, during a particularly difficult time in her relationship with Avery, plants flowers at night in public places to surprise visitors. Their love is tested to the limits by their different understanding of man's relationship with nature and the interconnections of land and water with memory, the past, and ultimately the present and future.

Michaels's talent as a poet is obvious in her gorgeous ruminations about the meaning of love and life, and in her evocative, unique imagery, but the beauty of the language is matched by the richness of the novel's underlying concepts, which give depth and significance to this challenging and satisfying novel. Raising fascinating questions, Michaels piques the imagination and guides the reader into new realms of thought. n Mary Whipple

Not many authors would have the boldness to connect three completely unrelated examples of engineering ingenuity in three different continents under one thematic arc, however complex and multilayered. Anne Michaels has done just that in her new, long awaited second novel, THE WINTER VAULT. Michaels' passion is, however, less focused on the impressive visible results of these engineering achievements - the Aswan Dam in Egypt, the St. Lawrence Seaway in Canada and the post-World War II reconstruction of Warsaw's Old City - and centred more on the people who have been involved in these constructions or those who have been impacted by the resulting changes. In rich poetic prose, the author interweaves the intimate experiences and musings of her protagonists with broad societal questions and her own philosophical reflections.

The story begins in 1964 when the ancient Abu Simbel temple complex in Upper Egypt needed to be carved up and moved block by block, through a complicated process, to higher ground, to protect it from the impending flood waters of the dam. Avery Escher, a British engineer, is overseeing this delicate operation. His relevant experience stems from his training through his father during the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Avery is a practical, forward looking man, who can only imagine positive change emerging from such major redesigning efforts. His young wife Jean, having grown up in this region of Canada, had a different perspective on the project, and as a result is less convinced of the potential benefits of change for the affected people. She is also concerned with the need to preserve what was there, such as the local flora and fauna.

What brought those two very different people together, other than some parallel aspects in their personal lives? In Michaels' sensitive portraits they come across as complementary soul mates rather than passionate lovers "... at what moment during their years together had this woman... become Jean Escher? He knew it had nothing to do with marriage, not even with sex, but somehow had to do with all this talking they achieved together." And talking to each other they do, indeed! Much of their background is revealed through back story sharing. From the beginning, though, Michaels gives Avery the more prominent voice; strongly influenced by his father, he is grounded in his convictions, confident in his actions. Jean is an excellent and beautiful listener following Avery's story while her own reflections are more easily kept to herself than expressed to her mate.

Their dissimilar characters are well explored through their differing reactions to the Abu Simbel project and the visit of an abandoned Nubian village. The author takes great care to convey the beauty of the place, the romantic atmosphere on the one hand and, on the other, the deep pain that those who had to leave it must have experienced. While Jean feels for the refugees and the loss of their ancient history and of their natural environment, Avery prefers to see the positive side of new beginnings: the life that buildings can emanate. His perspective of "home" is that is something that we create over time and not the place where we were born or grew up. "Home is our first real mistake. It is the one error that changes everything... It is from this moment that we begin to build our home in the world. It is this place that we furnish with smell, taste, a talisman, a name."

The couple's fundamentally different mind-sets come to the fore when tragedy strikes them to the core. They return to Canada to struggle with the fallout in their own, separate ways. What is striking right away in this second part of the novel is that, apparently, the "talking they achieved together" and that had cemented their relationship, is no longer an adequate tool for dealing with the crisis. Avery quietly fades into the background while the focus is on Jean as she attempts to reclaim her poise. Can she change sufficiently to succeed in her efforts? There are questions that linger.

It is at this point that, rather unexpectedly, the third successful architectural construction project is woven into the narrative. Using the same technique as earlier - personal flashbacks - timelines appear to be deliberately blurred, as the author's focus is as much on the devastating impact of occupation, destruction and dictatorships (Nazi and Soviet) on the population of Warsaw as on the reconstruction itself. Again, Michaels expands into opposing philosophical positions: faithful restoration of historical sites as a positive step to reclaim the past vs. any restoration of historical places defined as fake and therefore fundamentally wrong.

Michaels delves into a range of fundamental themes, such as human suffering due to displacement, loss of cultural roots and identity, the needs of the many over the rights of the few - the Nubians vs. the Aswan Dam, etc. Yet, she is first and foremost a poet. Her language and imagery is often impressionistic, leaving the reader to interpret the meaning and, even more so - not always successfully - to attempt linking poetic phrases to the novel's depicted realities and characters. At times, Michaels interweaves her own musings, and while we can admire her power of words, it can also distract the reader away from the narrative flow.

The two parts of the novel could easily be treated as stand-alone novellas, linked loosely through Jean as the consistently present protagonist throughout. Whether Michaels brings the novel and the story of Avery and Jean convincingly to a close in the short third section has to be left to the reader to find out. For this reader, a number of issues remain unresolved. It is evident also that the author's overriding preoccupation in this novel is not to produce a plot driven or character-based story, but to open the reader's mind to important and existential topics, even if they at times swell beyond the confines of a more traditional novel. [Friederike Knabe]

Readers will doubtless encounter rave reviews of this book, and indeed it deserves them for its greatness of scope, generally fine writing, and thematic resonance. But compared to Anne Michaels' previous novel, FUGITIVE PIECES, this is less a story than a poetic meditation, a collection of evocative images and pregnant thoughts, tied to characters who seldom spring into independent life. Most people will admire Michaels' ideas, which certainly have an integrity of their own, but those looking for narrative consistency may well be disappointed.

The start is promising. The setting is Egypt in 1964, during the construction of the Aswan High Dam that will hold back the Nile, creating the huge Lake Nasser, and displacing thousands of Nubian villages. One of the engineers supervising the removal of the temples of Abu Simbel to higher ground is Avery Escher, who lives on a small houseboat with his new wife, Jean. The story of their courtship and marriage in Canada is interwoven with their year in Egypt, as both Avery and Jean are affected by the human tragedies that they see around them, and by a loss that touches them more personally. Something of Anne Michaels' evocative scale of reference, together with a poesy that can veer into silliness, can be seen from the following:

"When Avery lay next to his wife, waiting for sleep, listening to the river, it was as if the whole long Nile was their bed. [...] The river, he felt, heard every word, wove every sigh into itself, until it was filled with dreaming, swelled with the last breath of kings, with the hard breathing of labourers from three thousand years ago to that very moment. He spoke to the river, and he listened to the river, his hand on his wife in the place their child would some day open her, where his mouth had already so often spoken her, as if he could take the child's name into his mouth from her body. Rebecca, Cleopatra, Sarah, and all the desert women who knew the value of water."

These lines speak of the passage of time, but they are also filled with the possibility of renewal. And renewal will be needed, since the book as a whole is about loss and the difficulty of recovering from loss. Although not a Holocaust novel as FUGITIVE PIECES had been, it still has the specter of the Holocaust lurking in the background; the book is an extended Kaddish for lost peoples, lost places, and losses too personal to name. A winter vault, it turns out, is a small sanctified building that houses the dead while the ground is too frozen for burial. "The winter dead wait... for the earth to relent and receive them. They wait, in histories of thousands of pages, where the word love is never mentioned." In this book, the word love is mentioned many times, and perhaps that love will be enough to achieve a proper burial and rebirth -- but by the end, the writing has become too disjointed for the reader to know or perhaps care.

The trouble is that the winter vault image is pasted into the book, not experienced directly. As she had done in FUGITIVE PIECES, Michaels goes off in a new direction about halfway through, introducing new characters who have only a peripheral relationship to the protagonists. The lines above are spoken to Jean by a Polish artist named Lucjan, whose personal experiences of loss come from the destruction of Warsaw in 1945. Certainly, this extra layer of images deepens the book, but it also makes one realize that the author feels free bring in anything even tangentially relevant with barely a pretext. Her avoidance of quotation marks makes it hard to know who is speaking, but most of the characters are too poorly fleshed out for that to matter. Instead, you sense that everyone is merely a mouthpiece for Michaels' own voice, filling the book with pithy, elegant, but barely meaningful remarks such as this stand-alone paragraph: "He thought that only love teaches a man his death, that it is in the solitude of love that we learn to drown."

Anne Michaels will be compared to other Canadian poets whose novels go beyond normal prose. Her Egyptian setting calls to mind Michael Ondaatje's THE ENGLISH PATIENT. Some of her scenes on the St. Lawrence and many of her images remind me strongly of Jane Urquhart's A MAP OF GLASS. Michaels certainly belongs in their company, but until she finds a way to reconcile the narrative thrust of a novel with her own instincts as a poet, she will not be their equal.

I think this is Michaels' finest work yet. It deserves to be read slowly and thoughtfully--like a meal to be savored, not fast food to be bolted. It is about place and its meaning in our lives, and the inevitable loss of our places to the forces of time and "progress". It is also (of course) about loss, both that of physical space and also of people. But best of all, it also about all the consolations that one can find in dealing with loss. And art like this is one of those consolations.

Anne Michaels poetic rumination on loss, The Winter Vault, is a beautiful story, but I do not think it is for every reader. If you require a plot in your novels, this one probably is not for you. If, however, you enjoy reading beautiful language and a thoughtful, almost meandering story, you will certainly enjoy The Winter Vault. The Winter Vault is the story of a young married couple, Avery and Jean, in the mid-1960s. Avery is an engineer who works on river damming for electricity projects. He plans loss, essentially. There is much loss in this novel, planned and unplanned, but, because the writing is so beautiful, so thoughtful, reading The Winter Vault is an uplifting enterprise. Michaels puts a lot in this novel ever so gracefully. The Winter Vault is a well-told tale for fans of serious writing.

"The Winter Vault" is a complex, passionate novel about loneliness, destruction, replication, personal loss, and memories of one's roots, and it requires high levels of patience and concentration if one is to absorb everything that Anne Michaels is trying to say. It is neither a plot-driven nor a character-driven novel and, in fact, those are its weakest elements. Rather, it is a philosophical novel filled with rambling monologues, lessons, and meditations that often have little to do with plot. Further, the book's main characters, although they can be memorable, often have more the feel of actors being brought on stage simply to make an author's points than the feel of real, breathing people.

It is 1964 and Avery Escher is in Egypt to save Abu Simbel's Great Temple from the floodwaters soon to be released by the new Aswan Dam. He is there to oversee the dismantling of the centuries-old Temple so that it can be reconstructed some sixty feet higher in a cliff where it will be safe from the flooding. His wife, Jean, who witnessed a similar event in Canada when ten villages were sacrificed to the waters of the new St. Lawrence Seaway, is in Egypt with Avery, whom she met when he worked the Seaway project.

Jean is saddened by what she sees in Egypt, the displacement of the Nubian people whose government is happy enough to sacrifice them for the greater good of the country. As trainload after trainload of these people are relocated and their ancestral villages are destroyed and flooded, Jean realizes that she and Avery are part of something destructive rather than something positive. When a personal tragedy forces her to return to Canada, she finds that her feelings about her life and marriage have changed and she decides to live alone.

The second half of the book sees Avery largely fading into the background while Jean tries to put her life back together with the help of her new friend, Lucjan, a Polish immigrant who, as a boy, survived the World War II destruction of Warsaw. In Jean, Lucjan has finally found a woman with whom he can share his detailed memories of those days, including how disoriented he was when he first walked the streets of the uncannily accurate replication of the old city completed after the war.

The two halves of "The Winter Vault" share a common theme but their plots and characters are so different that they read like two novels under one cover. Anne Michaels has published several poetry collections and the prose of "The Winter Vault," only her second novel, is often as striking as her poetry. Unfortunately, however, some of her extended passages continue to be vague and distracting no matter how much attention and time a reader gives them. It should also be noted that the decision not to use quotation marks or chapter breaks in this 336-page novel may tempt some readers to abandon it well short of its final page. Those who persevere will, however, have much to think about when they finish "The Winter Vault."

Rated at: 3.5

The Winter Vault follows two characters, Avery and Jean, as Avery's work as a dam engineer takes them through Canada and Egypt, to villages and towns that will disappear behind the completed dam. The plot of the novel reveals itself slowly in flashback and character conversations. We travel through a surreal yet familiar world of vignettes, following Jean and Avery over the course of their relationship, their work and hobbies. Jean is a gardener, remembering her mother as she works in the dirt, while Avery remembers his father who was also an engineer.

As Jean and Avery get to know each other, their conversations are sprinkled with wisdom about life, such as "daughters don't stop crying for their mothers" and "we cannot separate the mistakes from our life; they are one and the same." This is a serious novel, to be read slowly and pondered over. My heart ached as Michaels' conveyed the grief the villagers felt as their towns were covered with water so deep they couldn't even visit their buried loved ones. I found myself caring for the characters right up to the end and wanting to know what happens to them. Flashbacks of WWII Poland also make up a large part of the last third of the book, painting a starker vision of loss during war.

Michaels' poetry background is evident in the carefully crafted phrases and descriptions of loss that remind the reader of his or her own losses in a very poignant way. Readers should be warned that the book is written in a limited punctuation style that does not detract from the clarity of the prose. I hope that the editing errors found in the Advanced Reader's Copy will be fixed in the final published edition.

by Karen Ballinger

for Story Circle Book Reviews

reviewing books by, for, and about women

The first page of this book (something between an epigraph and a prologue) informs the narrative thrust of the story and glues the abstract elements into a philosophical cohesiveness. This novel, while still a loosely constructed story with main characters and a forward progression, is primarily a meditation on the eternal forces of the human condition entwined with the timeless elements of the earth. The poetic narrative is like an instrument hovering above the earth's atmosphere and producing a lyric and a music of everything that is nascent to life, as well as everything that withstands it, crushes it, beholds it--and it is this instrument that carries the memory of love, light, space, and grief. The bones of the story are the ashes of the earth, and the compost of the earth imbue the bones of the story.

On this poignant first page is written "Grief is desire in its purest distillation." I did not initially comprehend this and thought it was a pithy but obtuse statement. However, as I continued to read, it evolved into a meaningful, trenchant theme that coursed through every facet of the novel. Like many of the seemingly elusive cogitations contained in this book, it leads to a profound examination of human nature. Every tragedy in the book is borne from desire, and every desire has a lasting relationship with grief.

Avery is a young and able engineer, the son of a deceased but once preeminent engineer, who passionately wants to preserve and continue his father's great legacy. In 1964, Avery is charged with heading an operation in Egypt to remove an ancient temple in embedded rock and placing it on higher ground. In order to do this, they must build a cofferdam, which will displace and flood water temporarily into the water of the adjoining village. The removal of the relics of the temple is an exacting process. One millimeter off in measurement and the relics can be ruined, cracked beyond redemption.

This project requires that the Nubian villagers be moved from their homes--these indigenous people who have a deep and native history with this place--and displaced to a new location. Avery's wife, Jean, a botanist who loves to carry seeds from the places of the dead to new ground, and who reveres the natural world, is disquieted by the project, but supportive of her husband's philosophy of man and machinery working together to lofty purposes. But, when personal tragedy and a glitch in the project gouges the foundation of their bond, their ability to find solace with each other is shattered and they must journey alone to find each other again.

I am not a scholar who can deconstruct this novel into all its meanings, only a reader who engaged with this enigmatic story. I may have failed to assemble or pinpoint or break it down for a potential reader reading this review. What I can tell you is that this is an atypical story written in poetical prose. It is not a pretentious rambling or unfathomable masquerade. You must pay attention and let it wash over you, read it slowly or read it out loud (I found myself doing this at intervals), surrender to the indefinite and its mien. At some point, you will abdicate need and expectation and just succumb to it. I have not read another novel that examines grief with such awakening, and that finds such incipient stems of rebirth in human suffering, all by combining and enfolding the essence of humans, nature, and machinery into folds of memory. Once you capitulate to its montage, it assembles into the most breathtaking convocation of gestures--gestures that encompass everything, and cascade like the butterfly effect.

The author is an amazing poet. As a novelist, she is still writing poetry. Lovely concept but reading her text is rather long and boring.

No one talks like a real person in this book, everything - even the most mundane exchanges - are poetic, philosophical, important. Everyday events are overloaded with so much meaning, it's hard to figure out when something actually important happens to these characters. It's a fascinating idea to think about what happens to the communities lost when dams are built. But this book puts a major burden on the reader to find this interesting thread because it's buried under the angst and gloom of the characters - skip this one.