Fugitive Pieces

Fugitive Pieces, the debut novel of Canadian poet Anne Michaels, interweaves the stories of three men from different generations whose lives are reshaped by the same war and its lingering effects. At the center is Jakob Beer, a poet who as a young boy is orphaned in the Second World War. He is rescued from the mud of a buried Polish city and smuggled to a Greek island by Athos Roussos, a scientist, scholar and, above all, humanist.

After the war, Athos takes a teaching post at the University in Toronto, and Jakob finds himself confronting the stubborn, tangible presence of the recent past. His own history rises up in all its darkness and depth, and the fate of his beloved sister haunts him. This is also the period when he meets the woman who becomes his first wife and begins his lifelong work as a translator and poet. As he re-enters life, Jakob learns what language can do: it can destroy, omit and obliterate, but it can also witness, tell, conjure and restore.

Late in Jakob's life, again in Toronto, his path crosses with that of Ben, a young professor who is an expert on the drama of weather and of biography but naive about the drama of his own life. Ben senses a quiet elation in the older man, and his own tie to the wounding legacies of the war sparks a fascination with Jakob and his writing. It unsettles, and then opens, a part of himself that he long ago closed off against what he knew of the past.