More Book Stuff: Fugitive Pieces by Ann Michaels

Being in a book club forces me to actually finish a book once in a while. Generally I have half a dozen lying around that I'm part way through. So Monday I was at my second book club meeting to discuss Fugitive Pieces by Ann Michaels.

I hate to give book plots - a key pleasure of a book is discovering a new world without preconceptions. There should be different book reviews for before you read the book for after. The first should tell you enough for you to decide whether you want to read it or not. Ideally, you find a friend or reviewer whose taste is exactly like yours or who knows you so well that you can trust her recommendation. The second would explore what the book was about and how it was written.

This book is less about plot than about how it is told. While it tends to move from the past to the present, it doesn't do it linearly. Jakob is trying to maintain some memory of his murdered-by-the-Nazis-before-his-seven-year-old-eyes family, creating an identity, trying to understand the world. The past is always coming back into the present. His unlikely Greek archeologist rescuer teaches him what he knows - which is a lot. Over and over Jakob learns about memory, maintaining records, clues to the past, whether it is in geography, archeology, poetry, languages, music, weather. And the reader, like Jakob, gets masses of information in no obvious order that constantly builds into - if you are patient and diligent - the story of Jakob. There is a lot of poetic language (Michaels' earlier work is poetry), lots of details, startling images, and pithy statements about life.

I wanted, often, to stop and ponder the meaning of the words. But the urgency of a deadline pushed me along, thinking I might walk this path again and spend more time looking at the remarkable sights along the way. Here's a sampling below. I didn't start writing down notes til I was half way through when I realized I needed to keep some notes.


To be proved true, violence need only occur once. But good is proved true by repetition. (162)

In the afternoons I search Michaela for fugitive scents. Basil on her fingers, garlic transferred from fingers to a stray hair; sweat from her forehead to her forearm. Following a path of tarragon as if carried by long division from one column to another, I trace her day, coconut oil on her shoulders, high grass sticking to her sea-damp feet. (191)

There's no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it's given a use. Or as Athos might have said, If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map. (193)

I know that the more one loves a man's words, the more one can assume he's put everything into his words that he couldn't put into his life. (206-7)

What is the true value of knowledge? That it makes our ignorance more precise. (210)

And while some are motivated by love (those who choose), most are motivated by fear (those who choose by not choosing.) (211)

The spirit is most evident at the point of extreme bodily humiliation. (214)

...history only goes into remission while it continues to grow in you until you're silted up and can't move. And you disappear into a piece of music, a chest of drawers, perhaps a hospital record or two, and you slip away, forsaken even by those who claimed to love you most. (243)

It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent. (250)

A house, more than a diary, is the intimate glimpse. A house is life interrupted. (265)

Sometimes Michaels pushes the imagery a bit too far and I don't think she succeeded as a male narrator.