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Jul 18, 2011

K.D. rated it:

Together, my 75-y/o mother and her 82-y/o sister, spent a whole month (last month) vacation here in the Philippines mostly in my house. For few days, they went to our province, the town they were born. When they came back, my mother showed me a bunch of old photographs. Included in those were the pictures of her parents. My grandparents.

It was amazing how they could still tell the stories behind each of the photograph as if they were only taken a few years ago. When we came to those More...

15 comments like (14 people liked it)

Nov 07, 2011

Jeanette rated it:

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 s More...

2 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jan 31, 2009

Julia rated it:

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 chi More...

3 comments like (4 people liked it)

May 29, 2011

Julie rated it:

“I did not witness the most important events of my life. My deepest story must be told by a blind man, a prisoner of sound. From behind a wall, from underground. From the corner of a small house on a small island that juts like a bone from the skin of sea.”

Early in her brooding, shadowy, aching novel, Anne Michaels sets out the central conflict of her principal character, Jakob Beer. Jakob’s family is slaughtered one winter night in 1940; the seven-year-old boy hides in a hollow in t More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 23, 2010

Sherry rated it:

I've never had a complaint like this about a book I've read: the language was too beautiful. I would come across a line like: "I ran until the first light wrung the last greyness out of the stars, dripping dirty light between the trees" and stop and marvel over it, and in doing so, I would lose track of what was going on. Each sentence is crafted like that. Each sentence is like a part of a poem, which makes sense, because Anne Michaels is a poet. But sometimes I just wanted the story More...

6 comments like (3 people liked it)

Aug 29, 2008

Andrew rated it:

I had very high expectations for “Fugitive Pieces”, probably higher than I should have had, after it was highly recommended to me by my mother recently. I should have known better, since our tastes in books are not always the same. While I thought “Fugitive Pieces” was a nice book, I certainly did not find it to be exceptional.

“Fugitive Pieces” tries too hard to be beautiful. Trying to make her prose feel like poetry, Michaels' story is overly lyrical and tedious. Hundreds of s More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Nov 30, 2011

Mary rated it:

There are so many books on the holocaust that it has almost dulled the magnitude of the atrocity. But this novel, written by Canadian poet, Ann Michaels, is phenomenal. Her lyrical sentence structure will capture you right away and the story line is profound. A young Jewish boy is the only one to escape a raid by the Gestapo on the family because he has hidden in a secret place in the pantry. After hiding in the woods (this is Poland) for many days, he finds and is found by a Greek archaeolo More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 19, 2007

Dorian rated it:

Smug, self-serving twaddle.

Yes, Michaels has a way with metaphor. But metaphor also gets away from her. This book is relentless in its "poetic manner"--if I want that sort of thing I'll read Ondaatje (and frankly I'm amazed his lawyers didn't sue for plagiarism...). Michaels, primarily, I'm told, a poet, has no sense of narrative pacing (witness the late intrusion of another story) and no sense of narrative voice (witness the fact that this second voice sounds exactly like More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Nov 24, 2008

Diane rated it:

The story opens with a heart wrenching scene told through the eyes of a young boy he witnesses the death of his parents. The descriptive prose used by Michaels leaves you with a sense that you have witnessed the tragedy first hand.

I was really spell bound in the beginning of the book, but as the boy grows to man I had difficulty with how his life suddenly becomes resolved by finding a woman that fills the void he feels so deeply. I guess I'm being a bit of a negative N More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jul 26, 2008

Maggie-Kate rated it:

I seldom enjoy – enjoy is probably the wrong word – I seldom have much interest in Holocaust related fiction (exception: The Book Thief). It might sound terrible to say, but I usually find novels set during the Holocaust somewhat melodramatic or seemingly emotionally manipulative in a way that sets me at odds with the author. I also tend to become easily disenchanted with extremely poetic or lyrical writing, at least from contemporary authors. Neither was the case with Fugitive Pieces. I fou More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

May 30, 2009

Rachael rated it:

This was incredibly good -- I was recommended Michael's newest book, but picked this one up to start with. If I had to compare her to other writers, it was a beautiful blend of Marilynne Robinson and Michael Ondaatje (two of my all-time favorite writers).

The story was gripping -- a boy escapes after Nazis murder his family and is found by a Greek geologist who smuggles him back and hides him on a small Greek island -- and the language was just amazing. I really recommend it!

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

Barbara rated it:

I hate this book. A friend said it was the best book she has ever read, and I hate this book. First of all, I don’t get it. I can’t figure out when who died, what happened next, etc. Or the importance of the characters, or much about their characters, except the “first person” Second, I feel completely inadequate, because I don’t see the world through ancient eyes, or poetic words that don’t go together.. This thing is so poetic, I can’t find anything to relate to. There are beautiful passa More...

0 comments like

Jun 08, 2011

Paul rated it:

This is a reflection on love and loss in the context of the holocaust and those who survived. Jakob is rescued when seven years old (his family has been arrested by the Nazis)by Athos, a Greek archealogist; who takes him home and brings him up. You are told about Jakob's death at the very beginning of the book, aged 60 with his young wife. The story begins in Poland, then to Greece, Canada and back to Greece where Jakob meets the love of his life.
Anne Michaels is a poet and the language and More...

0 comments like

Apr 03, 2011

CaterinaAnna rated it:

In the same way as one eats chocolate for pleasure rather than nutrition (usually), this is a book to read in order to experience the words rather than for the story. There really is little more to the plot than in the summary, and we know the characters through their swirling thoughts rather than their actions. The writing is almost entirely an extended prose poem celebrating family, exploring perception and memory, mourning loss. Yet there was no one particular bit that stood out: if you'll fo More...

0 comments like

Feb 09, 2011

Ofa rated it:

Beautifully written. It was gorgeous. It is another post-modern work- fragmented. Full of ideas of the livings' responsibility to history. I felt that there was a good time to stop the novel, and then the author took it farther. She developed one character for over 200 pages and then abandoned his story to enter the mind of a character whose name may have been mentioned once before in the first 50 pages. It was a frustrating switch, one that made trusting this author very difficult. Her style More...

0 comments like

Jan 31, 2011

Leah rated it:

Finally, I have finished this one. I loved the cover and a quick flick through excited me because the writing was poetic and lyrical and the prologue about lost manuscripts from people who wrote about the holocaust was tantalising.
The story is about a young Jewish boy, Jacob Beer who, while hiding, witnesses the slaughter of his parents and the abduction of his sister, presumably for the death camps, by the Nazi police in Poland. He survives living in the marshland outside the town until h More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 08, 2010

Joselito rated it:

One day you wake up and find all the pieces of your chess set gone. They have fled and implanted themselves in a board of another game. It can't be, you protest, it makes no sense. Chess pieces belong to the chess board. Their meaning is dictated by its board of sixty-four squares. Outside of it they are but an aberration. These rooks, knights, bishops, pawns, kings and queens had always been with this sixty-four square board for at least two thousand years.

The wayward chess pieces, More...

6 comments like (5 people liked it)

Oct 14, 2010

Maia rated it:

There are few words to describe how annoying I found this book. I just don't seem to be either an Orange Prize reader or a good target audience for novels penned by authors who are, as Michaels is described, 'primarily poets.' I love poetry--it was actually my first love, and novels came later. I've also loved quite a few great novels written by first-class poets. However, this isn't a rule of thumb and is actually very often simply an exception. Poetry and narrative writing are just not the sam More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jul 26, 2010

theduckthief rated it:

"The burst door. Wood ripped from hinges, cracking like ice under the shouts. Noises never heard before, torn from my father’s mouth. Then silence. My mother had been sewing a button on my shirt. She kept her buttons in a chipped saucer. I heard the rim of the saucer in circles on the floor. I heard the spray of buttons, little white teeth.”

Jakob Beer is seven when soldiers break into his home, killing his family while he hides behind a wall. Disoriented and afraid, he travels t More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 17, 2009

Susan rated it:

I struggled getting through the first half of this book. The imagery and emotions were oppressively descriptive. The last part of the book, with Ben giving his perspective, I found to be quite beautiful. It makes you ponder the ramifications of all of our life experiences and how they hardwire our thought processes. And then, those experiences have effects that trickle downward to our children and outward to those around us. I loved Ben's metaphor of a person being a folded-up map, folded in More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 01, 2009

Kim rated it:

Wow!!!

What an amazingly well crafted book this is.

This book is valuable in two levels, each of which alone would be enough to read the book and love it.

The book is divided into two stories, related but not simultaneous.

The first story is the rescue of a little Jewish boy, Jakob Beer, from Poland, by a Greek geologist. The Greek man, Athos, takes Jakob back to his home, a Greek island, hidden in his clothing. The story follows and examines Jakob’s l More...

2 comments like

Jun 20, 2009

Kathy rated it:

"Just as earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant." 77

"Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can learn to love another." 82

"What is a man... who has no landscape? Nothing but mirrors and tides." 86
More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 08, 2010

marie rated it:

This is an exquisite book, stunning in its haunting and lyrical prose ands its strong, many-layered plot. It is original, inventive, informed in its many references to science (particularly geology), history, music (she knows her music) and literature, especially Greek literature. I speak in superlatives because that's how beautiful it is.

(See Joselito's review).

It is a Holocaust novel,and while I usually recoil from Holocaust novels because it takes me days to shake off my More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jun 11, 2009

Becky rated it:

I'm a bit fed up now of the splurge of sensible, pretty average books I've hit on the list recently. Fugitive Pieces is another of these, a rather earnest look at the life of a young Jewish refugee, Jakob who is adopted by a Greek archaelogist as he flees the terror of the Nazis. It describes how his loss affects his journey to adulthood, and damages his relationships until he finally receives redemption in the shape of a young woman in Toronto.

Jakob grows to become a writer, to More...

0 comments like

Aug 28, 2010

Emilie rated it:

I didn’t pick a good time to read this, and so read the first half in tiny pieces because it was too intense and often overwhelming to me and I was already feeling overwhelmed. There are also bits that felt too detailed, and a bit dull, though I understand the reason for the focus on all details…

Today I read the second half straight through; and it made a big difference, this is a book that really needs to be read like this, it has a way of building in intensity, flowing. I felt muc More...

11 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jun 11, 2009

Cindie rated it:

Perhaps my favorite book of all time, for SURE in my lifetime top 5. The person who recommended it had initially bought it because she liked the cover. Who knows why things attract us, or why people do (and then don't) for that matter. I should go back and copy some of the many many great lines from it that I love and put it into the quotes section of this website, but that seems like a lot of work to me right now. If you like a book that uses words as a paintbrush, read this book. If you li More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

kabir rated it:

Anne Michaels is Canadian, and a really good poet. If you've ever wondered what a novel would be like were it painstakingly sculpted as if it were poetry, read this. It's a beautiful, haunting story surrounding, but not detailing the Holocaust. Each word seems like it was oh-so-carefully chosen, and were Michaels not such a gifted writer, it might feel agonized in that way. As it is, it's almost perfect.

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jun 09, 2009

Bill rated it:

What an astonishing novel. You can tell it was written by a poet because it is so dreamlike and light at the same time that it tell huge truths with a particular word choice or sentence.

The main stories are of people seeking to live life while grappling with trauma. The most obvious are the traumas from the holocaust, or from growing up with parents who survived the holocaust. But there are other people with stories, the Greek archeologist recovering from his wife's death, the passio More...

0 comments like

Apr 18, 2010

Kristel rated it:

It is written in two sections, called Book I and Book II. The first follows the story of Jakob Beer, who as a Jewish child in Poland narrowly escapes being killed by the Nazis. He is rescued by a Greek geologist, Athos Roussos, who adopts him and takes him to live on Zakynthos in Greece. After the war the pair immigrate to Toronto. The novel follows Jakob's life as he marries and goes through life. The second book is written from the perspective of an admirer of Jakob's poetry, Ben.

The novel is More...

0 comments like

Jan 08, 2008

EK rated it:

The jaw-dropping poetry of the opening which she carries throughout the book with the themes of cartography and loss defines the entire read. The first half is nearly flawless, so many lines which are like meditation when you read them, and yet disturbing in their facts; the second half of the book lossens and stretches and makes less of an impact.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

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