Fugitive Pieces
by Anne Michaels
Summary
Jakob Beer is seven when the Nazis come to his Polish village. He hides, hears what happens to his parents, and never learns what happened to his sister Bella, whose absence becomes the organising grief of his life. Digging himself out of the mud like something excavated, he is found by Athos Roussos, a Greek archaeologist working nearby, who smuggles the boy home to his island and hides him through the occupation in a house full of fossils, maps and languages.
That rescue sets the book's method: Athos teaches Jakob geology and botany as a way of teaching him time, and Michaels writes the Holocaust the same way, through sediment, weather and buried things rather than through scenes of atrocity. After the war the two emigrate to Toronto, where Jakob slowly becomes a poet, and the first two thirds of the novel are his notebooks: grief, two marriages, and the long work of turning what he heard from his hiding place into language.
The last third belongs to Ben, a Toronto professor born to camp survivors, raised inside their silence, who reveres Jakob's poetry and travels to Greece after Jakob's death to find his journals, which are the book in the reader's hands.
The prose is the point of the novel: dense, aphoristic, closer to poetry than to narrative, and it asks to be read slowly.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want Holocaust literature at one deliberate remove, memory geology rather than testimony, and who will trade plot for sentences worth copying out.
Historical Context & Significance
Fugitive Pieces won the Orange Prize in 1997, its second year, and the Guardian Fiction Prize as well, a rare double for a first novel. Anne Michaels came to fiction from poetry, and the book behaved commercially like nothing so interior usually does: more than two years on the Canadian bestseller lists and translation into over twenty languages, arriving in the same mid nineties moment as Ondaatje's The English Patient, with which it shares a sensibility.
The reception hardened into a genuine critical argument that has never quite closed: admirers rank it with the essential Holocaust fiction, while dissenters have asked whether prose this beautiful is the right instrument for this subject at all. That argument is worth having, and the novel is the text it gets had over.
Jeremy Podeswa filmed it in 2007 with Stephen Dillane as Jakob and Rade Šerbedžija as Athos. Michaels returned to fiction only sparingly afterwards, and remains far better known for this book than for anything since.