Fugitive Pieces

Fugitive Pieces, the Anne Michaels novel I bought last week, is fantastic.

No really, I am going to rave about this book for months. And months. And months.

I was spellbound.

Michaels is a poet and composer mostly, and it shows in her work. Her language is unbearably lyrical. Her themes include music and language and cadence and pace. Her themes are exposed through music and language and cadence and pace of course too.

Unfortunately this is her only novel; but it's published by Bloomsbury and by Knopff, so people who are not in Canada can get it. The novel is about remembering. And about being able to fall in love alongside the heavy burden of remembering.

Set in Toronto and Zykynthos and drawing on themes from geology, the first part of the book is a description of the lifetime of remembering undertaken by Jakob, a young Polish Jew who is rescued and brought to Greece by Athos, a geologist. The second part of the book is the story of Ben, the adult child of Holocaust survivors who lives in Toronto and who meets Jakob. The elder man's poetry helps Ben to recover from/ recover the memories of his parents and the impact of their experience on their new lives in Canada and on him.

Here's an excerpt from one of her poems, Memoriam, which I have reprinted from her website

I have nothing to give you, nothing to carry,
some words to make me less afraid, to say
you gave me this.
Memory insists with its sea voice,
muttering from its bone cave.
Memory wraps us
like the shell wraps the sea.
Nothing to carry,
some stones to fill our pockets,
to give weight to what we have.