it seems to be something of a goodreads sin to give this book any fewer than four stars. and were i rating it solely on the beauty of its language, it would be an easy five-star book. but as a novel, it missed the mark for me somewhat, so it is really just a high-three for me. i know - blasphemer!the poetry-as-novel thing can be a truly wonderful beast, or it can leave the reader wanting more - more story, more impact, more cohesion. reading this book made me long to re-read Justine, which is an example of this style done perfectly. durrell's enviable mastery of language turns alexandria into a paradisiacal blend of the natural, the erotic,and the cerebral, but he never sacrifices story despite his emphasis on lyrical language.fugitive pieces, while it all but accidentally tells a story, remains that - pieces; offhand musings that sparkle beautifully but fail to make connections that would bind this into a solid and emphatic novel.the strongest parts of this book, to me, are when she is describing the women in the two narrator's lives: each has two life-altering lovers; one failed, and one lasting, and the four of them are prismatic in their allure and their vivid realization on the page. they remind me of the women in jonathan carroll, or leonard cohen: perfectly self-sustaining and generous, selfish and regretful.but another, and bigger, problem is that at one point in the book, there is a shift in narrators, and yet the voice is exactly the same as what has come before; the same fragmented, desperately lovely poetic musings, doling out the story in brief paragraphs. it is frustrating that there is no change in tone with the change in character. it is all well and good to have a personal style, and it is difficult to cut portions that are pleasing to you-as-writer, but sometimes you have to sacrifice beauty for craft.having gotten all the negative out of the way, i did enjoy reading this book. there are shockingly gorgeous passages, many of which are recounting the horrors of the holocaust, and so are even more potently beautiful for the darkness that undercuts the words. it's a lot of this:t-Nothing is sudden. Not an explosion - planned, timed, wired carefully - not the burst door. Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant.t-Gradually Athos and I learned each other's languages. 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.tAthos didn't want me to forget. He made me review my Hebrew alphabet. He said the same thing every day: "It is your future you are remembering." He taught me the ornate Greek script, like the twisting twin of Hebrew. Both Hebrew and Greek, Athos liked to say, contain the ancient loneliness of ruins, "like a flute heard distantly down a hillside of olives, or a voice calling to a boat from shore."t-How many centuries before the spirit forgets the body? How long will we feel our phantom skin buckling over rockface, our pulse in magnetic lines of force? How many years pass before the difference between murder and death erodes?tGrief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are their screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy, moving forever towards the psalms.so. lovely passages of filler-bits that please the mind and the ear, but they just lack that driving force that is supposed to sustain a narrative. and while there are echoes and pockets of repetition throughout, there is never a sense of solidifying these observations into a unifying statement. it is mysticism without religion.and i am probably being overly-critical here, because i did enjoy it, and it does tell a story, despite my grumblings, i just think that it had more potential than it ultimately delivered, and it sacrificed substance for style.hiding now.
Literary ambrosia. This gets at least six stars from me. I stubbornly avoided this book for a long time because the promotional blurb just didn't make it sound appealing to me. I finally gave it a try so I could stop wondering why it won half a dozen awards and shows up on "must read" lists everywhere I look. I'm so glad I did! The blurb doesn't even begin to tell you about the book as you'll experience it while reading. If you're the left-brain dominant sort who needs everything spelled out in flat little rows and columns, you may not appreciate this one. However, if you enjoy encountering profound little pockets of prose to be read slowly and savored and then re-read, you'll love this book the way I do. The author is a poet, and it shows here in her first novel. Many of the best passages were sort of like a combination of Lawrence Thornton and Per Petterson, beautifully descriptive and ethereal. And yet Anne Michaels has her own distinctive style, which I don't mean to diminish by comparing her with others. For the first 200 pages, the narrator is Jakob Beer. He tells the story of his life, being rescued in Poland by a geologist named Athos and secretly taken to Greece, then emigrating with Athos to Canada after the war. This is interspersed with his contemplations on life, loss, beauty, love, hatred, forgiveness, and remembrance. The final 100 pages are narrated by Ben, a young man who briefly met Jakob Beer before his death, and now tells his own story as if he were speaking to Jakob. I found it quite jarring to have a sudden change of narrator without being told anything about Ben, so if you're reading this review, I'm saving you from that disorientation. Although not as compelling as the first 2/3 of the book, I did appreciate Ben's story from the perspective of someone who grew up as the child of Holocaust survivors. He absorbed their fears and their silences and their losses without ever being made to understand that he was not inadequate as their child. It was their history, too painful for them to share with him, that shaped his life. I strongly suggest that everyone at least give this a try. The first few pages are somewhat fragmented and hard to follow, but it smooths out and finds its footing by about page 20 or so.
What do You think about Fugitive Pieces (1998)?
This is such an unusual book that I hardly know how to rate it. It is a disturbing theme but beautifully written. It is like reading a poem about a horrible event. It is about a young Jewish boy hidden away whose family are all killed as the Nazis pass through his village in Poland. He wanders into a place where a Greek geologist is studying a submerged city hundreds of years old. The man recognizes the plight of the child and carries him hidden into Greece. There they live together with the child remaining hidden until the end of the war. The boy is so traumatized by the events that his whole life and expecially his relationships are colored by his memories. His rescuer trys to help him by opening up his mind to the wonders of the world around him. The book explores his life into adulthood and even his influence on others after his death. It is hard to believe people can behave in such brutal and inhuman ways as is described, but I know that similar things are happening all over the world today. There are hopeful things in the book, but I don't recommend it unless you are willing to be disturbed and saddened.
—Julia
This is a very different kind of novel. It is almost at times a stream of consciousness where the character's thoughts and memories simply flow out. This makes for some exceptional writing but not a particularly easy or gripping read.We start off with our main character, Jakob Beer, as a young Jewish boy. Jakob's town is attacked and he is rescued by a Greek man who takes him back to a Greek island. Athos raised Jakob and protects him through the war. The relationship between Jakob and Athos is stark but beautiful, there is little sentimentality but a great deal of devotion. Athos finally moves with Jakob to Canada for a new life. We then follow Jakob through his loves and losses as he is never able to move away from the past.The book is slow paced. The thoughts of characters are expressed over many pages. The scenery, the geology, the layers of life are all described - in detail. It is an unusual book but possibly not for all tastes.
—Penny
Honestly speaking, I was a little busy with life and when i wanted to go back to reading I decided to alter my taste by picking a book that is a little above my standard reading level which is Fantasy usually. I thought to myself that is a more adult/grown-ups book with the story of a boy who lived through the events of the holocaust and how he grieved. The thing that motivated me the most to continue reading is my curiosity about the way he grieved (you know, the way people remain silent and as
—Jay BlackGate
