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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.
Books in Canada
In
Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels alchemizes anger into art. She tells the story of Jakob Beer who survived the Nazi massacre of his family in Poland when he was seven but, at the age of sixty, he is struck and killed by a car in Athens. Before his death, he had begun to write his memoirs, and these make up the first two-thirds of the book. The last sections are narrated by Ben, a young man who was introduced to Jacob by Maurice Salman, Jacob's oldest and dearest friend. Maurice has asked Ben to travel to the Greek island of Idhra to retrieve Jakob's journals. What he finds is much more than what he goes for.
Fugitive Pieces is about many things: the redemptive power of poetry, the complexity of a single life, the irrevocable fist-print of brutality on human consciousness. It's about love, both its failure and its success. It's about gut-wrenching events depicted without the slightest trace of sensationalism. But perhaps, most of all, it is about every person's own inevitable connection with humanity.
The book is beautifully written, Michaels the poet being everywhere evident, and it is unsettling in the best possible way-like turbulent water disturbing what lies in the depths. Eva Tihanyi(Books in Canada)
--Ce texte provient de la
Paperback
édition.
de David Grossman
de Aharon Appelfeld
de Imre Kertész
de Jonathan Safran Foer
