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Summary: Is writing poetry after Auschwitz barbaric?
Review: Or is it the poetic prose of this book that's barbaric? Actually, the language might be considered the only good thing about _Fugitive Pieces_. Personally, I found it amazingly distracting (does anyone want to read a page-long sentence of a dozen or so metaphors all describing someone's hair or the wind?). And unfortunately, if you like a plot or a sense of narrative drive, sentences that are remotely grammatical, semi-colons that are used correctly on occasion, or developed female characters, this book is not for you.
I was very disappointed with this book, which was apparently all the rage in Toronto and elsewhere a few years ago. I was bored, and I almost stopped about 15 pages from the end--just to make a statement (albeit to myself). I decided to finish it as not to miss some kind of saving grace should one be waiting for me (there was none). A book like Jonathan Safran Foer's _Everything is Illuminated_ takes the topic of the Holocaust and breathes life and myth into the people who look back on it, the people who preceded it, and those who lived through it. This book does the opposite. The focus on the poetry makes the book a meditation on words; emotions are essentially absent.
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Summary: glocktopus69's review
Review: Essentially, Jakob and Ben are the same person, but from different worlds. Jakob, from a small Polish town, and Ben from a more modern city. The concept of giving to receive is
discovered first by Jakob through his rescue by Athos, and then by Ben by way of Jakob's journal entries. Through giving their own feelings to others, both receive the knowledge of receiving
from others. This reception is not only physical, but more emotional to the extent that by having all of the feelings necessary to live, both can actually live by giving their own feelings to others and receiving feelings from others. Without the concept of feelings, neither character would have changed throughout the course of this novel. When the reader discovers the true connection between the two characters in both halves of the novel is when the story can be completed. Some portions of each half are purposely left out to leave the reader to connect the two characters for themself. This style of writing is more interactive and can give the reader the ability to actually become part of the novel. To connect the characters is to give the reader an important role in the story. This is accomplished in this novel to bring the reader's personal thoughts and feelings into the world of Jakob and Ben so at the end, both Jakob and Ben have the affection of other characters in the novel as well as the affection of the reader. When Jakob and Ben are finally recognized as one and the same person, the story is more understandable and the foreshadowing becomes obvious.
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Summary: Putting the Pieces Together
Review: Anne Michael's FUGITIVE PIECES is the most impressive novel I have read for a long time - beautiful, powerful, and the product of a finely honed intelligence. It is also a peculiar book, radically bifurcated, and demanding that the reader put its fugitive pieces together. The novel is grounded in the events of the Holocaust but it cannot be reduced to either a book about the Holocaust or a book about its consequences. Michaels is interested in the connections between the high drama of those events and the ordinary drama of our own lives.
The first half of the book is wonderful Homeric stuff. Its protagonists, Jakob, Athos, Kostas, and Daphne are godlike in both their goodness and the power of their insights. Michaels imagery is dazzling. The dark bog of Biskupin and perhaps all of Poland is sharply set apart from the Greek light of Zakynthos. The people of Zakynthos save theslves from disaster by being attuned to their surrounding but there is no salvation in Poland. For Michaels, Greece is the power of light and reflection. Poland is tragedy remembered. It is not returned to. Jakob who we first encounter as a boy emerging from the Polish mud becomes a learned old man. His library of poetry is in English, Hebrew, Greek, and Spanish but he does not read either Yiddish or Polish.
Ben, the central protagonist of the second half of the book, is not a heroic character. His father has had tragic losses but unlike Jakob's losses, they are crippling. He cannot transcend them and he cannot give much to anyone. Ben cannot accept the love he needs because he cannot escape believing that his father was right in denying him. He leaves his magically accepting wife, Naomi, and takes up with Petra, almost a fantasy, precisely because she is not interested in probing very deeply into who he is. Petra is an indulgence for him as he is one for her. Nothing intimate is going on and he has no occasion to be reminded of his own emptiness. The book ends with Ben seeing the need to give. That may be read as opening the door to a kind of rebirth for Ben but Michaels leaves that as no more than a possibility.
The question is what brings the two parts together. There is a connection between Ben and Jakob but it is only symbolically affirmed in Ben's recognition that something sacred is invoked by the house and books Jakob has left. The wounds Ben has suffered can be traced back to the Holocaust - to events which took place before he was born - but they are also like the wounds generally inflicted in the modern world. Ben's father is, like many fathers, a surrogate for the world. His judgments are surrogates for the harsh judgments the world can make. Ben regards them as a reality principle. Any love anyone expresses for him has then to be discounted by that reality. Mother is almost an embarrassment - held often at arm's length. Part of that is the boy's need to separate from his mother - the stuff of Magic Flute. Part of it is the malaise of modernity. Michaels seems to me to suggest that the special trauma of the Holocaust edges into the general trauma of the way we live. I don't know if that is true - don't know how I could know. I do know this is a powerful and beautiful book.
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Summary: A BOOK IN WHICH TO IMMERSE YOURSELF?
Review: I read a quote somewhere to the effect that this was a book not so much to enter into, but to which the reader should surrender - and that's a very apt observation. There is beauty and depth in Michaels' writing - it's clearly an advantage to the years she's put in writing poetry. There are breathtaking passages on nearly every page - her prose is almost liquid in its richness. There's a rather negative review below that states `Lyrical writing does not of itself make a great book or a great work of art' - this is a true statement, but there is SO much more to be experienced in this novel. Michaels' characters are vivid and alive - both those who are `simple' and those who are deeper in their thought. Jakob's character permeates the entire book - even in the second part, which is narrated by Ben, after Jakob's death.Despite the fact that the Holocaust by its horrific nature plays a huge role in this story, this is not `just another Holocaust novel'. Without bypassing the obscenities committed by the Nazis against the Jews (and anyone else they considered to be `inferior'), Michaels has given the reader a story of survival and rebuilding - not so much the rebuilding of bridges and cities, but the rebuilding of lives and spirits. When Jakob witnesses - without seeing, hearing only peripheral sounds - the death of his parents and the abduction of his beloved sister, his heart is broken. Nothing breaks like the heart of a child - and it takes immense effort, support and time for it to heal again. Not only does Jakob manage, over the course of his life, to `get past' the unimaginable atrocities he has experienced and seen - he grows in sprit in an incredible way, making leaps beyond what he might have accomplished if his childhood had never been `interrupted' by the Nazis. There's another quote on the back of the book that notes that readers will feel compelled to quote sentences and entire passages of it to others, to read it aloud, to discuss its meanings and insights - I've already found this to be true. There is wisdom on every single page, and - despite some of the horrors depicted - an uplifting power that touches the spirit very deeply. FUGITIVE PIECES is an astounding work - I found it intelligent, illuminating, breathing, and above all, moving.
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Summary: Unbearably Beautiful
Review: Fugitive Pieces is a visionary work of literature that contains some of the most sublime prose written in the English language. At its core, Fugitive Pieces conveys the deep and everlasting scars that come from having survived extreme loss and horror. The images of grief and the subtle stories of how this grief unfolds in the lives of those who have survived are compelling and genuine, and in this poetic novel we are given a portrait of survivors: their wounds and the possibility of their healing. When I consider this single line, I am reminded anew of regeneration in the face of despair: "Every cell in my body has been replaced, suffused with peace." I recommend this book most highly.
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Summary: Life Through War
Review: This entertaining page-turner was a pure joy to experience. Rarely does a novel come along that perfectly incorporates history with fiction to produce a piece of literature that not only grasps the reader's entire attention, but also does not let go. During the early stages of the Second World War Athos Russos discovers the runaway boy Jakob Beer, from Poland, and adopts him into his life on Zakynthos, a small island in Greece. They developed a love and a trust for one another over their years of isolation together in their small home. These experiences create an impenetrable bond between them. After the war, Athos accepts a job in Canada and the twosome moves to Toronto. It is here where Jakob is emerged in change yet again and his ever-evident boyish curiosity begins to flourish once more. Jakob matures and begins to have broader experiences while they begin their new lives in Toronto. Part two of the novel focuses on a professor named Ben who meets an aged Jakob and his second wife, Michaela, and begins to see in Jakob many of the qualities that Jakob had seen in Athos. Anne Michaels has composed a great piece of literature that beautifully integrates love, curiosity, danger, loss, grief and change into a very complete, entertaining, and award-winning novel.
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