A dark story, a masterpiece of prose.

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Fugitive Pieces is a book about the holocaust and how it affected the survivors. However, it is not by any means a straight forward look at the devastation but is rather an oblique look through the eyes of a Jewish boy, Jakob, who was rescued from a Polish city during the war and taken to a Greek island by Athos, a geologist and scholar. After the war, Athos and Jakob move to Toronto where Jakob marries, divorces, and falls in love again. He often thinks of his sister Bella who disappeared during the war and dwells upon her memory. Jakob and his wife, Michaela, move back to Greece into the former house of Athos where he is able to focus on his poetry and try to forget the horrors of the war. The last part of the novel is told from the perspective of Ben, whose parents escaped the holocaust. He is an expert on weather and an admirer of Jakob's poetry. It is hard for him to cope with the horrors his parents went through, especially how it affected his father. Towards the end of the novel, Ben goes to Greece to try to recover Jakob's lost journals.

The novel is told through the use of lyrical and rhythmic language including relationships to the earth through history, geology and the weather. Anne Michaels is a poet and it definitely shows in her writing that can be quite compelling. However, she doesn't let the reader forget the nightmare of the holocaust by including some rather graphic descriptions of what could have happened to both Jakob's and Ben's family.

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Gorgeous! Devastating!
The best book I have ever read.

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If you enjoyed The English Patient, you may enjoy this book as well.

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