Anne Michaels

Some books sit on our shelves for years before we pick them up. That was the case recently with Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels' somber tale of war, dislocation, and love. 

Fugitive Pieces was given to me in 2006, a gift from an acquaintance in Philadelphia. And now, for reasons unknown, I've picked it up and read it: the timing just seemed right. 

But wow: what a grim book, one that traces the life of a boy displaced by the Second World War; who ends up in Greece, and then later in Canada; and who spends much of his life tracing the sorrowful contours of the poetry that sustains him. 

Michaels begins the book in a bog, her character emerging from the mud and water, to be saved and transported to Greece. The book ends with the same boy returning to Greece, to retrace his steps, to move closer to his moment of loss. This is a novel of silence, of life's fragments slowly melding into one. 

Michaels is a poet, and the book, while not perfect, is suffused with memorable passages that have a way of seeping deep into the experience of reading. Michaels is not Sebald, though her quest is similar. And that's, I think, why I admire her work: in the face of immeasurable loss, she asserts the role of imagination, and demands space for love. 

Michael's book is about inheritance, really: and it's about that moment when your life becomes your own, and your sorrow is reflection less of what you've inherited from the past, and more about your ability to will it away, to construct a future of your own, one tinged with something foreign and remote: that is, happiness. 

I'll leave the last few words for Michaels:

"Murder steals from a man his future. It steals from him his own death. But it must not steal from him his life."

"What is the smallest act of kindness that is considered heroic?"

"Complicity is not sudden, though it occurs in an instant."

"Before our son was born, I also thought I believed in death. But it was only being a father that convinced me." 

"Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful." 

That last passage, in particular, remains with me. It is an ethic to which I aspire.