New York Times Book Review
Extraordinarily magical. . .fierce, deeply unsettling.
Boston Globe
Word by blessed word, it is a gorgeously written book.
Kate Moses
Elegiac and redemptive, Fugitive Pieces, the first novel by Canadian poet Anne Michaels, is a beautifully written, quietly forceful reminder of "the large human values." A story of decency, compassion and hope under extraordinary duress, it is above all an argument for the healing power of words.
"I did not witness the most important events of my life," says Jakob Beer, the book's central character. While hiding in a cupboard in his family's home in Poland, the 7-year-old overhears the brutal murder of his parents by Nazi soldiers. Jakob escapes, terrified and wild with grief, into the forest. Caked with the mud he uses to camouflage himself, he is discovered by a Greek geologist, Athos Roussos, who smuggles him to Greece under his coat.
The scholarly, gentle Athos hides Jakob through the war years in the sun-drenched, book-lined rooms of his island house and later raises the boy to manhood in Toronto. From Athos, Jakob learns the consoling language of geology: "To go back a year or two was impossible, absurd. To go back millennia -- ah! that was ... nothing." Athos' stories of buried cities, the bravery of Antarctic explorers who perished while sledging fossils back from the South Pole, Bronze Age safety pins and salt cakes used as money are tonic to Jakob's scarred imagination. Haunted by his own terrible history, Jakob is burdened by "images rising in me like bruises": of his parents' murder, of the likely death of his sister, of the suffering of the victims of the war.
The same imagination that tortures Jakob is the instrument of his salvation. Michaels describes Jakob's slow rebirth in evocative, tactile language that recalls Michael Ondaatje. While thinking of the Nazis' mass graves, the bodies covered with only a dusting of soil, he remembers the discovery, in 1942, of the cave paintings of Lascaux: "twenty-six feet below they burst to life in lamplight: the swimming deer, floating horses, rhinos, ibex ... their hides sweating iron oxide and manganese." Fragments of memory, conversations, details from Athos' stories accrete into a richly depicted psychological landscape that lends credibility not only to Jakob as a character but also to his decision to become a poet. "Write to save yourself," Athos had advised him, "and someday you'll write because you've been saved."
Michaels stumbles only when, in her account of Jakob's second marriage, she insists too much on the healing power of sexual love. Overall, however, Fugitive Pieces moves compellingly toward Jakob's final realization: that a survivor's job is not to remain with the dead, but to survive them. -- Salon
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
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. It speaks about loss, about the urgency, pain and ultimate healing power of memory, and about the redemptive power of love. Its characters come to understand the implacability of the natural world, the impartial perfection of science, the heartbreak of history. The narrative is permeated with insights about language itself, its power to distort and destroy meaning, and to restore it again to those with stalwart hearts. During WWII, when Jakob Beer is seven, his parents are murdered by Nazi soldiers who invade their Polish village, and his beloved, musically talented 15-year-old sister, Bella, is abducted. Fleeing from the blood-drenched scene, he is magically saved by Greek geologist Athos Roussos, who secretly transports the traumatized boy to his home on the island of Zakynthos, where they live through the Nazi occupation, suffering privations but escaping the atrocities that decimate Greece's Jewish community. Jakob is haunted by the moment of his parents' death-the burst door, buttons spilling out of a saucer onto the floor, darkness-and his spirit remains sorrowfully linked with that of his lost sister, whose fate anguishes him. But he travels in his imagination to the places that Athos describes and the books that this kindly scholar provides. At war's end, Athos accepts a university post in Toronto, and Jakob begins a new life. Yet he remains disoriented and unmoored, trapped by memory and grief, "a damaged chromosome"-the more so after Athos' premature death. By then, however, Jakob has discovered his mtier as poet and essayist and strives to find in language the meaning of his life. The miraculous gift of a soul mate in his second wife, "voluptuous scholar" Michaela, comes late for Jakob. Their marriage is brief, and ends in stunning irony. The second part of the novel concerns a younger man, Ben, who is profoundly influenced by Jakob's poetry and goes to the Greek island of Idhra in an attempt to find the writer's notebooks after his death. Ben is another damaged soul. The son of Holocaust survivors, he carries their sorrow like a heavy stone. Emotionally maimed and fearful, Ben feels that he was "born into absence... a hiding place, rotted out by grief.'' Yet when it seems that the past will go on wreaking destruction, Jakob's writings, and the example of his life, show Ben the way to acknowledge love and to accept a future. These intertwined stories are related by Canadian poet Michaels in incandescent prose, dark and tender and poetically lyrical. A bestseller in Canada, the novel will make readers yearn to share it with others, to read sentences and entire passages aloud, to debate its message, to acknowledge its wisdom.
Library Journal
Peter Marinker's haunting recording about a Holocaust survivor captures the listener's attention with its melancholy ambiance. Ben, a young professor with his own Holocaust heritage, finds a poetic account of Jakob Beer's recollections of his life since the time his parents were murdered by Nazis when he was only seven years old. These pieces tell how Jakob was found, adopted, and taken to Greece by Athos Roussos, a scientist, scholar, and humanist. After the occupation, they move to Toronto, where Jakob learns the power of language, meets both his wives, and struggles with his memories. Michaels's tale reads like a true survivor story; highly recommended for all audio collections.--Sandy Glover, West Linn P.L., OR
School Library Journal
YA-A survivor of his family's annihilation by the Nazis, young Jakob Beer hides in a Polish forest alone and traumatized, longing for his parents and sister Bella. He stumbles upon a Greek scientist, Athos Roussos, and is smuggled to the Greek island of Zakynthos. The novel, written like a memoir, weaves together Jakob's memories of his family and his life with Athos into a tapestry of pain and eventual healing. Reminiscent of Elie Wiesel's Night (Bantam, 1982), Michaels's language creates haunting images of sorrow, pain, loss, and self-discovery. Jakob becomes a poet and survives both Athos's death and an ill-conceived marriage before he finds love and peace. Ben, a professor who is the child of deeply wounded Holocaust survivors, meets Beer before his death and, through the man's poetry and notes, confronts his own family horrors and finds reconciliation. The memoirs flow back and forth freely and may be difficult for some YAs to follow. However, this is a stunning first novel that attests to the strength of the human spirit.Carol DeAngelo, formerly at Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Kirkus Reviews
A moving tale of survival becomes a grave and stately hymn to the revivifying qualities of language and learning in this impressive debut by a Canadian poet.
The main narrator, Jakob Beer, who tells his story at age 60 in 1992, was a Polish survivor of the Holocaust who, after losing his entire family in 1939, was rescued by Antanasios Roussos, a middle-aged scholar and polymath, who took Jakob to safety and raised him on the Greek island of Zakynthos. Jakob's narrative is a rich chronicle of intellectual hungers generously satisfied, as "Athos's tales of geologists and explorers, cartographers and navigators" stimulate his young disciple's active imaginationan imagination also possessed by vivid memories of Jakob's dead parents and sister Bella, who appear to him as both vocal and visible presences. The pair travel to Athens, where Jakob's own insistent memories jostle against stories of that city's wartime sufferings, and thence to Toronto, where "Athos" has been invited to teach, and where he diesleaving Jakob to complete his mentor's masterwork, a study of how the Nazis distorted archaeology to alter the past and "prove" Aryan supremacy. Jakob's life thereafter is devoted to his own writing (he is a gifted poet), to a search for love he never seems quite able to fulfill, and, centrally, to his progression from experiencing "the power of language to destroy to omit to obliterate" to discovering in `"poetry, the power of language to restore." Then, in an only partially successful shift, the novel's last third observes Jakob's later life and his legacy from the viewpoint of a younger friend and admirer, who is himself the child of Holocaust survivors and whose sensitivity to what Jakob's life signifies is aided by his own realization that "Every moment is two moments" (that is, the past is always present in the present).
A stunning work, quite beautifully written, and a lovely homage to the imperiled yet indomitable culture and individuals it celebrates.
From the Publisher
"Extraordinarily magical." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Lovely...musical and magical.... Put this book alongside The English Patient." Chicago Tribune
"Word by blessed word, it is a gorgeously written book: aflame with the subzero cold of history and the passions of emotional comprehension." Boston Globe
"Fugitive Pieces deserves to become a classic." San Francisco Chronicle
Quill & Quire
"Features fine performances by actor/directors Neil Munro and Diego Matamoros, whose resonant voices suit the book's emotional themes and Michaels' inner world."
AudioFile
"The dual narration of Munro and Matamoros lends a surprisingly deep sense of truth to Fugitive Pieces. A child's life is saved by a Greek geologist, who rescues him from hiding during WWII. Decades later, as an adult, he revisits the past by chance, when he meets a young professor whose parents survived the Holocaust. Listeners will be at once intrigued and deeply moved by individual voices that play off each other with a dialogue that seems almost operatic. There's a solid story here too, which makes listening even more fulfilling."