Rating: 
Summary: Touching
Review: The novel Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels is brilliantly written. This is novel that it not read, but felt. The characters are so deep and so dimensional that that the reader will begin to believe in their existence. This book contains so much passion and longing that the reader will learn a new lesson for life each time it is read. This is one of the greatest books I have ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: extremely heavy-handed and needlessly grim
Review: Subtle and restrained are not words one would use to describe this first novel by Canadian Anne Michaels. Flowery, pretentious, boring and disturbing are words that spring to mind. The novel has 2 protagonists, each one thoroughly annoying and committed to misery. Jakob Beer, a Polish Jew, and Ben, a young professor influenced by Beer, beat their tale into your head metaphor by metaphor.The novel actually starts with promise, then the narrative stops and the metaphors begin - and don't stop. Anne Michaels has written a long poem and disguised it as a novel, and in the process of doing so pays great injustice to those whom she hopes to serve: the misery of the characters is so entrenched, it's as if the Nazis actually won the war. One group does not have a monopoly on suffering, Michaels focuses on the Jews in this tale and makes no mention of the millions of Russians, Poles, and others to suffer greatly at the hands of the Nazis. Sulky Jakob and sulky Ben sound far too similar to think they are individual characters, also their moodiness and self-pity really makes one question the resiliance of the human spirit. Car accidents, suicide, affairs, and disasters are thrown on top of the Holocaust, making for an unnecessarily grim story - this is not a novel of the triumph of the soul. Rounding out this distasteful tale is some really horrible incestuous imagery from Jakob towards his sister Bella - ewww! As a six year old Jakob is unbelievable, and the mish-mash of interests Michaels piles on round out the disbelief in and of the character. The breadth of subjects she speaks of is very wide, but equally as thin - historical accuracy has been sacrificed for the sake of a flowery yarn. I can see why the book would be popular amongst certain types - it's verbose and chock full of imagery. But Michaels is too self-indulgent and her editor let her get away with it. Give this one a miss, if you want to read on this subject Wiesenthal and Rosner provide much stronger books.
Rating:
Summary: the weight and lightness of being
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Mawk and Hooey
Review: Not one believeable gesture of honest writing can be found in this novel filled with supposed lyric pyrotechnics. The "creative writing" here is all stagecraft and no substance--a sort of Andrew Lloyd Webber play about the Holocaust and its aftereffects. This is the kind of drivel mediocre poets generate when they can't write poems. But if you are interested in the study of poetry, this book does provide a valuable resource. It may very well be the world's largest compendium of decorative imagery and metaphor. Too bad Alexander Pope didn't have this book around to use as an exemplar of bad writing in one of his essays. If you want to read serious fiction that skirts the line between poetry and prose without having your ear accosted by a legion of maudlin fiddlers, then try "Jesus' Son" by Denis Johnson.
Rating:
Summary: Drenching Imagery
Review: I found this book to be so extraordinary that I felt I had to encourage others to read it. Fugitive Pieces is one of those books that harbors the reader in its pages. What I mean is that it engages you on every level of your selfhood: mind, body, heart, and soul. I believe this book could touch anyone with its universality. Anne Michaels' imagery, her poetry intermingled with her prose, is a rare achievement. As a reader, it felt so good to FEEL something, to feel stricken by its power and its beauty. I literally felt drenched by the dance of her words on the page. If you are like me and you feel that great literature is rarely ever written anymore, please read this book. This is one of those books that I will have in my library at the end of my days. I plan on rereading it many times.
Rating:
Summary: Poetry in Motion
Review: I enjoyed this book primarily because of the images and emotions that it invoked in me. It is disjoint in many ways but I believe this characteristic adds to the dreamlike, lurking surreal qualities that haunt the characters and pervade the prose of this wonderful literary accomplishment. I wish Anne Michaels had more literary contributions that I could enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: ice water
Review: the book is like nothing i have ever read- i can only compare the beauty of her writing to the pain of jumping into a freezing cold pond, except the shock of the cold didnt wear off for me- throughout the book i was stunned, by the story,by her imagery, and by her words. i read parts of it out to my parents- crying all the while, im not ashamed to say- only so they could share it with me. i still think about it, even though i havent read it for a while, and i dont know when i will again- just because its so wrenching to go through it, and yet its so compelling i know i will , and recommend it as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Another cry against hyper-lyricism
Review: This book seems already to have been amply reviewed on Amazon.com and so I will be brief: I fully concur with those reviewers who found the lyricism excessive, the poet virtually bullying the novelist right off the page. The concept was strong - the successive and only partially interlaced lives of a holocaust survivor and his protege. But Ms. Michaels seems always to have to remind us of her poetic gifts, page by increasingly tedious page. I began to feel the way one does having to watch a parlour performance by a child whose parents have told her too often how talented she is. If you want a book by another Canadian Anne who can match Michael's lyricism stride for stride but also spin a captivating tale of how history insinuates ordinary lives, go instead to Anne Marie MacDonald's "Fall on Your Knees".
Rating:
Summary: overrated
Review: As many reviewers have already pointed out, Michaels is a wonderful poet, but not a great fiction writer. The descriptions overwhelm, but the plot is virtually non-existent. The only thing I have to add is that Micahels invests much of her energy in depicting a highly idealized world of epicures, scholars, intellectuals: they go for quaint strolls around the city, ruminate upon history and memory, talk about poetry, geography, jazz, coffee shops, and food even in the midst of war and trauma. The main character is a literary savant, and receives the classic, one-on-one mentor-apprentice type of education from Athos that you only read about in hagiographic literary biographies. He and others speak in implasuibly ponderous statements that are weighty and pretentious. Perhaps, given the tremendous gravity of the topic, Michaels intended to be reverent to the history/memory of the Holocaust; but the Leonard Cohen-esque emphasis on the life of the mind, of the somber poet wrapped in shrouds of sorrow, does not make for a compelling story. There are a few times where Michaels seems able to pull it off (e.g. the heart is the size of a handful of earth, says Athos), but on the whole I was bored and frustrated throughout much of the reading of this tedious book. A stronger plot and less emphasis on the deep, oh-so-profound world of pensive, reflective intellectuals engaged in sollipsistic self-musings about the mysteries of life would have made this a better book.
Rating:
Summary: Love's Perpetual Thirst
Review: Fugitive Pieces is Canadian poet Anne Michaels' first novel and it is beautiful in the extreme. At the heart of this lovely and moving book is the struggle to understand the despair of loss and the solace of love and, most of all, the difficulty of reconciling the two. The protagonists are two Jewish men, one a Holocaust survivor, the other the son of Holocaust survivor parents. Material such as that explored in Fugitive Pieces could very easily become trite and cliched, but in Michaels' extraordinarily gifted hands suffering, loss and grief become nothing less than transcendent. An extraordinarily gifted writer, Michaels creates wonderful characters and tells an engrossing story through the use of gorgeous, but spare, dialogue and subtle metaphor. The plot is a rather simple one (this is definitely a character driven story) but it is profound and also a profoundly moving meditation on the nature of grief and the redemptive power of love. The first line in the book, "Time is a blind guide," is haunting, but it is also ironic, for the story will prove that time is anything but blind. One of the protagonists, Jakob Beer, was orphaned as a seven-year old boy in Poland. Although the death of his parents affects Jakob most greviously, it is his sorrow at the death of his beloved older sister, Bella, that will remain with him for a lifetime. Jakob, himself, escapes the Nazis and flees into the forests of Poland where he is rescued by a Greek geologist, Athos Roussos, who eventually smuggles the boy to the Greek island of Zakynthos. On Zakynthos, Jakob can finally begin to put his life back together again. He is, however, haunted by memories of Bella, a gifted pianist. It is Bella who ultimately becomes Jakob's Beatrice as he begins his fascination with the poetry that will play a central role in the balance of his life. Athos, himself a widower, and Jakob, an orphan, seem to find in each other what they thought they had forever lost: a sense of family and abiding love and trust. As Athos finds joy in raising Jakob, Jakob finds joy in the values Athos seeks to instill in him: the love of language, scholarship and ethics. Although Athos seeks to heal Jakob, he does not attempt to obliterate his past. Ïnstead, Athos encourages Jakob to learn his Hebrew alphabet, telling him it is the future he is remembering rather than the past. As Jakob practices both the twisting and ornate letters of Hebrew and Greek, Athos tells him that both languages contain the "ancient loneliness of ruins." The narrative eventually moves from Greece to Toronto where Jakob becomes the product of his love for the late Bella and the teachings of Athos. The love given him so freely by both will serve as a continuum for the rest of Jakob's life as he realizes that the best teachers encourage, not the mind, but the heart. Jakob comes to know that Athos instilled in him the necessity of love and, that, to honor both Athos and Bella he must resolve a "perpetual thirst." The story closes with the character of Ben, a young professor who has become fascinated by both Jakob and his work. Their relationship is reminiscent of the relationship of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses. Ben's family was the very antithesis of the relationship shared by Athos and Jakob. In Ben's family there was no energy, no love, no sadness. Ben seeks strength and purpose in Jakob's life and in his words, words that have the ability to transmute the horror of war and the loss of family. Words that have the power to speak that which, heretofore, has remained unspoken. Fugitive Pieces is a beautiful novel, a meditation on love and loss and grief and solace. It is a quiet book but one that is immensely profound. Anne Michaels is a gifted poet and with Fugitive Pieces she proves that she is an extraordinary gifted writer of prose as well.
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