The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Brian Evenson

Anne Michaels. Fugitive Pieces. Knopf, 1996. 304pp. $23.00.

In Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels offers the story of the poet Jakob Beer, a Jewish survivor of World War II. Instead of exploring the places and routes that have normally come to be associated with the Holocaust, however, she explores the difficulties that Jews experienced in Greece during the occupation, tracing Beer’s life from a mud-covered and hiding child, through his rescue by a geologist named Athos, to his transplantation to Toronto, to his final return to Athens with his second wife. In addition to Athos’s own story, Michaels offers in the second half of the book the story of Ben a young professor obsessed by Jakob who attempts to use the poet’s life and death as a way of figuring out his parents’ experience in the war and his own heritage.
The language of Fugitive Pieces is often quite lyrical, at times almost revelatory, despite there being a few rare moments which are so lyrical and unrestrained as to seem sentimental or overwritten. Jakob’s narrative voice, present for the first two hundred pages of the book, is quite well drawn, at once smart, mildly philosophical, informed by geology, and carefully defined. Michaels’s ability to talk about the atrocities Jews experienced is quite impressive, particularly when supported by her ability to speak about geology in a way that seems convincing, original, and carefully researched. The combination of geology, Holocaust, and Greece does much to create an original space for Michaels. Her ability to manipulate and combine aspects of life that most people see as separate is startling and intelligent.
While the second part of the book, Ben’s section, is slightly less convincing than the first, and the connections between the halves seem a little too easy at times, Fugitive Pieces shows Anne Michaels to be a skilled conflater and gilder of worlds. [Brian Evenson]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels Brian Evenson Anne Michaels. Fugitive Pieces. Knopf, 1996. 304pp. $23.00. In Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels offers the story of the poet Jakob Beer, a Jewish survivor of World War II. Instead of exploring the places and routes that have normally come to be associated with the Holocaust, however, she explores the difficulties that Jews experienced in Greece during the occupation, tracing Beer’s life from a mud-covered and hiding child, through his rescue by a geologist named Athos, to his transplantation to Toronto, to his final return to Athens with his second wife. In addition to Athos’s own story, Michaels offers in the second half of the book the story of Ben a young professor obsessed by Jakob who attempts to use the poet’s life and death as a way of figuring out his parents’ experience in the war and his own heritage. The language of Fugitive Pieces is often quite lyrical, at times almost revelatory, despite there being a few rare moments which are so lyrical and unrestrained as to seem sentimental or overwritten. Jakob’s narrative voice, present for the first two hundred pages of the book, is quite well drawn, at once smart, mildly philosophical, informed by geology, and carefully defined. Michaels’s ability to talk about the atrocities Jews experienced is quite impressive, particularly when supported by her ability to speak about geology in a way that seems convincing, original, and carefully researched. The combination of geology, Holocaust, and Greece does much to create an original space for Michaels. Her ability to manipulate and combine aspects of life that most people see as separate is startling and intelligent. While the second part of the book, Ben’s section, is slightly less convincing than the first, and the connections between the halves seem a little too easy at times, Fugitive Pieces shows Anne Michaels to be a skilled conflater and gilder of worlds. [Brian Evenson]

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