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From Amazon
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 the Hardcover edition.
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 the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
something to think about,
By
This review is from: Fugitive Pieces (Audio CD)
I am a teenager and I understand this book so I'm sure the people that call it boring or "flawed" didn't really think about it very hard. I have heard many accusations that this book was flawed or sloppy in the plotline. First of all, how can a book, especially one so poetic and deep, be flawed? It's like saying Picasso made a mistake in one of his paintings. If you see the plotline as being broken then you missed the point of the book. It takes you beyond the story, or at least it is supposed to in my opinion. The poetry of the book is a window to the deep meanings of the book. For example, the relationship between death and memory. The characters and storyline are only there to display the meaning. If you read this book, it is for the meaning, not the story, though the story is very moving. The best thing about Fugitive Pieces is that it is NOT TYPICAL. It's creative, emotional, and original; the ingredients for a true classic.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Just a Little Too Poetic for This Reader's Taste,
By
This review is from: Fugitive Pieces (Audio CD)
The book opens with Jakob Beer as a seven-year-old child hiding in the bog in order to escape the Nazis. His family did not escape and were killed. Jakob was found by Athos Roussos, who smuggled him out of Poland and brought young Jakob to live with him in Greece. After the war, they immigrated to Canada. Jakob later becomes a poet and translator. The story is told by Ben, who discovered Jakob's diaries, a man whose parents are Holocaust survivors.This is primarily a story about memory, love, and loss. Anne Michaels is an accomplished poet, which is really demonstrated in this, her first novel. Every sentence is carefully crafted poetry. Her descriptions have great depth and make the reader see the great beauty and great horror. This book is not a fast read. I found myself having to stop and ponder a lot. This was both negative and positive for me. I am not a huge fan of poetry, so in that sense this book was too lyrical for me. However, by being forced to stop and ponder I found some wonderful pearls. I saw the movie version, which is what prompted me to read this book. The movie was a gem and I loved it. Sometimes it takes an overly lyrical novel to make a great film. It is very rare that I like the film version better than a book, but this is one of those cases. I'm glad I read the book. I got to explore the characters more deeply. Now I want to see the movie again.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
the weight and lightness of being,
By Ben Orlove (Davis, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Fugitive Pieces (Paperback)
When poets try to write novels, they sometimes fail, since the ability of poets to find deep meaning in words and phrases cannot always be sustained for greater length of novels. When they succeed, the result can be utterly engrossing. Michaels writes of a possible situation--a Greek poet who rescues Jakob, a Jewish boy, hiding in Poland during World War II after his parents and older sister were taken by the Nazis--and a possible place, the Greek poet's island home where the boy grows up and the poet grows old. Jakob himself becomes a poet, and moves to Canada. The book traces a second story as well, one of Jakob's readers, who meets Jakob and eventually travels to the island.Woven into the story are reflections on memory and knowledge: and many concrete references. Perhaps that is the great link between poetry and the novel, that both can turn to concrete things--lemons on a Greek island, a river in Canada in flood, objects that are real in themselves, that can be metaphors, and that reveal the fragile precious quality of human existence and human connection. And this concreteness, like the immediacy of Jakob and the poet and the other characters, has remained with me since I've read this book, making me in some small but significant way more tender and appreciative, more alive.
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