Fugitive Pieces

author
Anne Michaels

the spiel
Faulkner claims that every novelist is a failed poet.  Wrong.  And Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces dismisses this claim as pure flim-flam by the end of the first chapter—indeed the first page.  Michaels, an already successful poet, turned from poetry to write her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, but brought with her a poet’s sensibilities, rhythmic elegance, and textured resonance.  Her prose sing with grace.

Fugitive Pieces recounts the story of a Jewish boy, Jakob, who is rescued from a Polish forest during the Holocaust by Athos, a Greek scholar, after Jakob’s parents and sister are murdered—a fate he himself narrowly escapes, by cramming his seven-year old body into a crawlspace.  Taken by Athos to the island of Zakynthos, Jakob begins the arduous process of learning to grieve and live simultaneously.  Surrounded by the Greek landscape of ocean and steep, craggy hillsides, and comforted by Athos’s world of geology, botany, astronomy, and classical poetry, Jakob soaks up knowledge while mourning for his dead parents and missing sister.  We follow Jakob and Athos’ journey from their hilltop refuge on Zakynthos, to mainland Athens, to Canadian Toronto.  And simultaneously, we follow Jakob’s journey to create meaning—beauty—out of his own abysmal history and the more hopeful, steady history of the world itself.

Jakob expresses:
“It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old.  (Like the faint thump from behind the womb wall.)  It is no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous.  We long for place; but place itself longs.  Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment.  Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted.

How many centuries before the spirit forgets the body?  How long will we feel our phantom skin buckling over rockface, our pulse in magnetic lines of force?  How many years pass before the difference between murder and death erodes?
            Grief requires time.  If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul.”

Now talk to me about failed poet.

some of the hype
"Word by blessed word, it is a gorgeously written book: aflame with the subzero cold of hitory and the passions of emotional comprehension."  —Boston Globe

"Perhaps only a poet could venture the brutal beauty involved in settin up a dialogue between the extremes of horror and glory in Western civilization."  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

"This extraordinarily beautiful novel is a world...It mends the hopeless and dances with loss. Trust it and
read it."  —John Berger

"Anne Michaels has created a world of stunning, heartbreaking clarity where even the unspeakable is captured in the light-web of her words. She is a superb poet, a breath-stopping storyteller."  —Christina Garcia

other things this author has written
The Weight of Oranges
Miner's Pond
The Winter Vault