Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #897043 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

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

Love's Perpetual Thrist
Fugitive Pieces is Canadian poet Anne Michaels' first novel and it is beautiful in the extreme. At the heart of this lovely and moving book is the struggle to understand the despair of loss and the solace of love and, most of all, the difficulty of reconciling the two. The protagonists are two Jewish men, one a Holocaust survivor, the other the son of Holocaust survivor parents.
Material such as that explored in Fugitive Pieces could very easily become trite and cliched, but in Michaels' extraordinarily gifted hands suffering, loss and grief become nothing less than transcendent. An extraordinarily gifted writer, Michaels creates wonderful characters and tells an engrossing story through the use of gorgeous, but spare, dialogue and subtle metaphor.

The plot is a rather simple one (this is definitely a character driven story) but it is profound and also a profoundly moving meditation on the nature of grief and the redemptive power of love. The first line in the book, "Time is a blind guide," is haunting, but it is also ironic, for the story will prove that time is anything but blind.

One of the protagonists, Jakob Beer, was orphaned as a seven-year old boy in Poland. Although the death of his parents affects Jakob most greviously, it is his sorrow at the death of his beloved older sister, Bella, that will remain with him for a lifetime. Jakob, himself, escapes the Nazis and flees into the forests of Poland where he is rescued by a Greek geologist, Athos Roussos, who eventually smuggles the boy to the Greek island of Zakynthos.

On Zakynthos, Jakob can finally begin to put his life back together again. He is, however, haunted by memories of Bella, a gifted pianist. It is Bella who ultimately becomes Jakob's Beatrice as he begins his fascination with the poetry that will play a central role in the balance of his life.

Athos, himself a widower, and Jakob, an orphan, seem to find in each other what they thought they had forever lost: a sense of family and abiding love and trust. As Athos finds joy in raising Jakob, Jakob finds joy in the values Athos seeks to instill in him: the love of language, scholarship and ethics.

Although Athos seeks to heal Jakob, he does not attempt to obliterate his past. Ïnstead, Athos encourages Jakob to learn his Hebrew alphabet, telling him it is the future he is remembering rather than the past. As Jakob practices both the twisting and ornate letters of Hebrew and Greek, Athos tells him that both languages contain the "ancient loneliness of ruins."

The narrative eventually moves from Greece to Toronto where Jakob becomes the product of his love for the late Bella and the teachings of Athos. The love given him so freely by both will serve as a continuum for the rest of Jakob's life as he realizes that the best teachers encourage, not the mind, but the heart. Jakob comes to know that Athos instilled in him the necessity of love and, that, to honor both Athos and Bella he must resolve a "perpetual thirst."

The story closes with the character of Ben, a young professor who has become fascinated by both Jakob and his work. Their relationship is reminiscent of the relationship of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses. Ben's family was the very antithesis of the relationship shared by Athos and Jakob. In Ben's family there was no energy, no love, no sadness. Ben seeks strength and purpose in Jakob's life and in his words, words that have the ability to transmute the horror of war and the loss of family. Words that have the power to speak that which, heretofore, has remained unspoken.

Fugitive Pieces is a beautiful novel, a meditation on love and loss and grief and solace. It is a quiet book but one that is immensely profound. Anne Michaels is a gifted poet and with Fugitive Pieces she proves that she is an extraordinary gifted writer of prose as well.

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 of 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.

You are so wrong!
Fugitive pieces is one of the best books I have ever read. It is beautiful not just because of the poetic language but because it addresses so many fundamental human issues that affect all of us. Jacob's journey through life covers many aspects that will affect all of us at some time like loss, living with the uncertainty of knowing what happened to people who died, the struggle to cope with a normal existence after trauma, finding happiness late in life, I could go on. Michaels tackles bigger issues too like what happened to the children of survivors, how our parents' often had a life that we knew nothing about and how we often have to forgive ourselves for having a poor relationship with our parents. Essentially it is about the fragile web that binds us all and makes us human. It is not a 'sequential' novel as such. It moves along at its own pace and almost appears to be the thought of the narrator. it does not have a 'plot' (most good novels don't, you might notice) and it is not essentially a book ABOUT the holocaust. I agree, if you want to read a book about the Holocaust, buy Primo Levi. If you want to read a beautiful, provocative book about humanity and the fragility of life, buy this one. I wish I could have written it!