Fugitive Pieces - Softcover

Anne Michaels

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771058853 ISBN 13: 9780771058851

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 1999

Synopsis

Anne Michaels’ spellbinding début novel has quickly become one of the most beloved and talked-about books of the decade. As a young boy during the Second World War, Jakob Beer is rescued from the mud in Poland by an unlikely saviour, the scientist Athos Roussos, and he is taken to Greece, then, at war’s end, to Toronto. It is here that his loss gradually surfaces, as does the haunting question of his sister’s fate. Later in life, as a translator and a poet, and now with the glorious Michaela, Jakob meets Ben, a young professor whose own legacies of the war kindle within him a fascination with the older man and his writing. Fugitive Pieces is a work of rare vision that is at once lyrical, sensual, profound. With its vivid evocation of landscape and character, its unique excavation of memory and time, it is a wholly unforgettable novel that draws us into the lives of its characters with compassion and recognition.

About this title

Review

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.

From the Publisher

"This extraordinarily beautiful novel is a world. A book miraculously created because it mends the hopeless and dances with loss. Trust and read it."
-John Berger

"Anne Michaels has created a world of stunning, heartbreaking clarity where even the unspeakable is captured in the light-web of her words. She is a superb poet, a breath-stopping storyteller."
-Cristina Garcia

"Fugitive Pieces is an utterly mesmerizing novel told from the core of a poet's soul focusing upon our very prosaic world. It does what all great novels do: illuminate through the lights of language and intelligence the heart of a hitherto hidden human landscape."
-Chaim Potok

"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. The novel will make readers yearn to share it with others, to read sentences and entire passages out loud, to debate its message, to acknowledge its wisdom."
-Publisher's Weekly

"A stunning work, quite beautifully written. A moving tale of survival becomes a grave and stately hymn to the revivifying qualities of language and learning."
-Kirkus Review

"There are times when the novel's reflections become as piercing and unsettling as the deep wisdom of saints and visionaries ... Moments like this -- and they are frequent -- imbue the novel with a rare and strange and sometimes eerie power."
-Toronto Star

Edition details

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0771058853
• ISBN 13: 9780771058851
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312