Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #336221 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06-16
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Synopsis
The stories of two men from different generations whose lives have been transformed by war. A young boy, Jakob Beer, is rescued from the mud of a buried Polish city during World War II and taken to an island in Greece by an unlikely saviour, the scientist/humanist Athos Roussos.

From the Publisher
Prize Winner
Fugitive Pieces won the 1997 Orange prize for Fiction. John Berger said: 'The most important, beautifully important book I have read for forty years....'

Customer Reviews

Breathtaking piece of work.
This is an absolutely mesmerising novel. The language is beautiful and the emotions and bonds are expertly conveyed resulting in the sense that you are spiritually attached to the characters. The story is a reflection on the actions of humankind and as a result the myriad of emotions drawn to the surface by this book are delectable, abhorrent and everything in between.

Fugitive Pieces
Anne Michael's book is a highly evocative yet frustrating read. She is well-equipped with atmospheric language to describe the seasonal sights and smells from Poland to Greece and Canada. There are long and dreamy passages devoted to the sensations of time and place - the aromas and tastes rendered with real tactility and obvious pleasure in the writing. This is undermined, deliberately, when the reader is shocked out of reverie by explicit factual accounts of Nazi brutality - horrifying in their frankness. Despite these moments of jarring reality, much of the book is poetic in style, with a loose and unusually fragmented narrative. So far, so good.

Where she falls short is in the contextualisation of these swings of mood into a tangible reality for her characters. All such characters (from the orphan-poet Jakob, to the two women he married, his closest friends and his surrogate father Athos) are offputtingly brilliant. Uniformly erudite but witty, pensive but charming, their insouciant intellect quickly begins to grate. Descriptions of Arcadian nights spent in each other's company are interrupted by a character's off-the-cuff historical anecdote, or aesthetic observation, or (early in the book) precocious comment, so pregnant with significance that the chapter is often ended immediately to allow the reader to wallow in the light of its pure and generous insight. Not a person inhabiting the pages of this book deigns to entertain a prosaic thought or action, so immersed they are in their numerous talents and eclectic intellectual pursuits. Literary and historical references surface with such frequency that it is hard to know who's thinking them, let alone why they are meant to matter. We are led to believe that both the principle character and his adopted father are prone to depressions but never see the raw materials. Depression in 'Fugitive Pieces' seems to amount to a character spending a lot of time awe-struck by the weight of their own ideas. I pitied Jakob for his childhood, but was alienated from identifying with his emotions when the author seems to be at pains to convince us that he is equally crippled by the gravity of his intellect. Despite the sustained use of geology and archeology as metaphors, the only people getting their hands dirty are the Nazis. The characters in this book are evidently vehicles for the authors philosophical preoccupations and a long way from tangible human beings. For this reason there is little for the reader to empathise with here, being a mere mortal intellectually. Its just too showy, too smugly self-congratulating, to be a good novel.

Beautiful, but...
I will not presume to denigrate the quality of the writing, it is undeniably good, but the style, mixed with the mournful nature of the story, makes for very heavy going. Neither will I ridicule the plot. It has an unusual plot line, yes, but that is fine and comparisons with Finnegans Wake are very, very wide of the mark and highly unfair on Michaels.

I do have slight concerns about the characters. Not that they aren't human, they are, startling so, but their thoughts and 'dialogue' (such as it is) elevate them away from the everyday which makes it harder for the reader to relate to them. No one really speaks or thinks like this in real life, and, more importantly, the characters all have the same voice. This is odd because they have such varied backgrounds and languages. This results in the voices blending into one until they become indistinct. This seriously damages their credibility.

My other concern is the sheer bleakness and hopelessness of plot. Whenever a brief shoot of hope appears, Michaels stamps on it as if afraid it might take over. I know there are few subjects so lugubrious as The Holocaust but the lack of any humour to break up the perpetual gloom desensitizes the reader which is a shame.

Beyond the beauty of some of the lines, I did not enjoy this book at all and was glad to finish it. Sorry.