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Summary: Fugitive Pieces
Review: Overall, Fugitive Pieces is a well written novel, but if you do not like poetry or flowery language I would not recommend it. However, it does provide many insights into the life of a man who has survived the Holocaust. Silence, harsh memories and the discovery of the English language are just a few of the themes that constantly occur in this book. The reader is able to watch Jakob Beer, the main character, evolve from a sad,scared "bog boy" to a well-adjusted and content man. Jakob is able to complete this evolution with the help of the English language, time and most of all love. The text is mostly the story of Jakob's past with an occasional reflection on how it is affecting his present state. But, as Jakob tell us his story he has personal revelations. He is healed by being able to tell us his story and makes discoveries through out it. This constsant story telling atmosphere can get tedious, but stick with it. It is a very effective way for the author to show us Jakob's perspective and complex personality, thus we discover more about him. So, yes I recommend "Fugitive Pieces," especially if you need a book that you can write a paper about; there are so many themes chosing a paper topic would be easy.
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Summary: Fugitive Pieces, is it worth reading?
Review: After reading this book for an English assignment, I would and would not reccomend this book to people. If you are a slow reader and it is hard for you to understand complicated situations, then I would not suggest you read this book. However if you really enjoy reading and have the ability to become involved in the book and with the characters, then this is the book for you. Something that made this book interesting was tracing imagery through all the chapters. My group traced silence and found some interesting things about silence. I wont tell you what we found, because I don't want to spoil the book for anyone. I will tell you, however, to look for a pattern in the movement of imagery as the book goes on. Look for places when imagery has a bad meaning or a good meaning. Look also for when imagery affects the main characters life.
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Summary: Language, Love, and Loss
Review: I found this book such a poetic, moving surprise that I have encouraged many others to read it. Among the pleasures the novel offers are unusual paradoxes ("Every moment is two moments"), geographical and geological imagery of water and stone, and narrative voices of characters who struggle to redeem the past. I enjoyed the relationship between Athos and Jakob, who need and love each other as though father and son; I loved the process of discovery that runs through the novel, as characters who have been seeking for truth must find it in hidden places of the earth and the soul, buried for a time. It is one of those novels which asks "questions which do not have answers," demanding that I confront the existence both of evil and of beauty, through grotesque juxtapositions of Brahms intermezzos and freezing death camps. At times emotionally involving, at others distancing and analytic, the book returns repeatedly to the power of language, especially poetry, to express hope, loss, and love.
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Summary: A CAUSE FOR REJOICING; A REASON FOR REFLECTION
Review: An exaltation of life, the most terrible death - both are seared across the pages of a remarkable debut novel by Canadian author Anne Michaels. No, let's not call it a novel. More accurately it is an artistic achievement which weds poetry and prose, unites history and science to create metaphors that illumine human nature. The story of three men whose psyches are scarred begins when a Polish village is sacked during World War II. Seven-year-old Jakob Beer witnesses his parents' murder and the abduction of his dear sister, Bella. Fleeing from the ghastly scene, Jakob runs into the night forest where he hides himself: "I knew what to do. I took a stick and dug. I planted myself like a turnip and hid my face with leaves." Traumatized and seemingly without hope, Jakob is rescued by a Greek geologist, Athos, who takes the boy to his home on a small island. Jakob describes the learning of a shared language, "A little of my Yiddish, with smatterings of mutual Polish. His Greek and English. We took new words into our mouths like foreign foods, suspicious, acquired tastes." High above the Ionian Sea, Jakob listens as Athos tells stories and reads aloud - books on animal navigation, on icons, on insects, on Greek independence, botany, and poetry by Masefield and Keats. In the sharing of a hiding place, the two formed a bond of love. "I will be your koumbaros, your godfather," Ahtos said. "We must carry each other. If we don't have this, what are we?" Following the war, Athos accepts a position at the University of Toronto. Although still haunted by past horror and inextricably tied to his lost sister it is here that Jakob searches for meaning. He becomes a translator and poet. Having learned "the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate," he now sought in poetry "the power of language to restore." Later, there is a glimmer of peace for Jakob in Michaela, a woman 25 years his junior. He remembers a poem: "...in two lines, the poet shakes her fists then closes her hands in prayer. 'You're many years late/how happy I am to see you.'" Before Jakob and Michaela die, he speaks to the children they do not have, "Child I long for...You, my son, Bela, living in an old city...Or you, Bella, my daughter. May you never be deaf to love..." Part two of the novel is devoted to a younger man, Ben. He, too, is a blemished soul, the son of Holocaust survivors who cannot bear the weight of their travail. Fearful, he believes, "My parents' past is mine molecularly." Yet, he has been so touched by Jakob's writing that he leaves his wife, Naomi, and goes to the Greek island of Idhra in the hopes of finding Jakob's notebooks. Ben finds the journals, and poems Jakob had written during his few years with Michaela, "...poems of a man who feels, for the first time, a future." Thus, through the example of Jakob's life, Ben finds a tomorrow for himself. Preparing to return to his wife, he remembers what she once said, "Sometimes we need both hands to climb out of a place. Sometimes there are steep places, where one has to walk ahead of the other. If I can't find you, I'll look deeper in myself. If I can't keep up, if you're far ahead, look back. Look back." Anne Michaels writes with heart-stopping perception, with a purity of phrase that compels attention. This is an exquisite book about the acknowledgement of love. It heals; it cleanses. Fugitive Pieces speaks of the redemption of the spirit through remembrance. Read it, reflect, and rejoice.
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Summary: Great poetry, but the story and characters don't match it
Review: There are soaring passages of poetic beauty in this novel, times where I actually highlighted the text to be able to refer to it again and again, like a treasured poem. Like great poetry, there are images that bring you up short with incredible juxtapositions. For example, you never would have described a cloud like that, but reading how Michaels did, it seems natural--a new way of seeing clouds. And the simple but profound image at the beginning of a child rising from the mud to be preserved by a Chardin-like paleantologist is breathtaking. But as a novel, it is lacking the pace and character development required. By the two-thirds mark of the book, the beautiful writing and imagery begin to pale and you want more grist to the story, more complexity to the characters. By the end, it simply floats away with no anchor. As a former student of Terence DePres and well-read in Holocaust literature, I found the Holocaust-related themes in the book somewhat underplayed and not well developed--there are many books that have plumbed the horror with more grit and depth than Fugitive Pieces. Like another great Canadian poet who turned to novels, Michaels' writing is gorgeous. But unlike In the Skin of a Lion or The English Patient, the characters and the story do not rise to the level of the writing. But I am going to buy Michaels' first book of poetry!
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Summary: The magnitude of Michaels's achievement is awe-inspiring!
Review: Lovers of poetry will thrill at the dense images in Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces, its obliquities, its visions from the inside, its view of time as a "gradual instant," and its intensity of focus. Even non-lovers of poetry may find themselves engrossed for an hour, or more, while "covering" just ten pages, as this reader did, at one point. There have been many Holocaust books, all of them stories of horror, but none have accomplished what this author has in engaging the mind while, at the same time, emotionally exhausting the reader with passion. Within the linear framework of a novel, she describes the events that occur in Jakob Beer's life, but she presents these events through his tormented mind-a mind which does not operate, of course, in linear time. The events are compressed and embedded in poetic language which requires the reader to bring his/her own mind to bear on them, and as the reader participates in the imagery and "decodes" the language, the events and their horror truly become the reader's, too. Michaels also employs musical themes which she develops symphonically throughout the novel when Jakob thinks of his missing sister, further engaging the reader's emotions. In the Greek settings we experience what are essentially one- or two-character Greek dramas, which both involve the reader and allow the events to achieve grand scope and universality. While some may carp about the extent of the self-analysis or about the less than taut organization of the last part of the book, I cannot imagine any reader who will not be overwhelmed by the magnitude of Michaels's achievement here.
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Summary: The Power of Language
Review: This is a magically written, achingly beautiful novel. Jacob is symbolically reborn several times, each time in a new landscape with a new language. This places him always as the outsider, forced beyond communal bonds of language and culture to define himself.
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Summary: THE WISDOM OF COMPASSION
Review: A boy is rescued from the mud of a buried Polish city during the Nazi Occupation in WWII and taken to an island in Greece by an unlikely saviour, the scientist and humanist Athos Roussos. There, in the seclusion and tenderness of Athos's house, they spend the last years of the Occupation in a precarious refuge made lavish with poetry and cartography, botany and art. And the story goes on... through time and space in a lyrical, vivid manner with a rich poetic insight. A very impressive book, profound in thought and beautifully written: you can see that the author is a poet first and foremost, and her work can be read many times with the same emotions and compulsions being evoked by her taut and elegant style. Through the voice I hear - and Michaels heard - this passing story I enter reality two ways, through poetry and narration; and at the centre meet my richer self. Cherish the poet: there seemed many great auks till the last one died.
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Summary: Beautifully lyrical and poetic first novel
Review: Anne Michael's multi-award winning first novel, "Fugitive Pieces" is a beautifully lyrical and poetic account of the memory of loss sustained during the Holocaust years. The two stories that run in parallel to one another (Jakob's and Ben's) are inextricably bound by the common source they draw upon. Jakob Beer, poet and translator, is rescued by Greek geologist, Athos, but cannot escape his memories which haunt him throughout his life. He is a damaged soul and irredeemably lost to the past. Alex, his first wife, couldn't save him, so she left him. He finds redemption in Michaela and is released from the prison of his memory by his dead sister, Bella, who relaunches him to the land of the living. Ben, whose parents are survivors of the Holocaust, seeks therapy from the writings of Jakob, and eventually comes to terms with their own damaged lives. "Fugitive Pieces" is essentially a novel of interiors. There is a barely recognisable plot and hardly any dialogue. Dazzlingly colourful images fly across the pages of descriptive prose which approximate poetry. To savour all of its rich linguistic qualities, readers are advised to proceed slowly and allow the images to build in your mind. You will be richly rewarded.
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Summary: Her first novel.
Review: This book is not about any one person, but about the way people touch and affect each other's lives. And it's not about Jews or the Holocaust, it's about the hurdles that all of us must overcome. We each have our own. Most importantly, this book is beautifully written. It's easy to see Anne Michaels has a passion for poetry, and as her first novel, this is story is heartwrenchingly well done. I've read it three times. The words written have had a profound effect on my life. While some have found this book to be sad and depressing, I can honestly say it's one of the most uplifting books I've ever read. It spells out with so much hope that we all travel a varied and often weary path, and we all get through it, and we do it because of those who love us, and we become those who love. It taught me that I must find a way to give that which I need most.
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