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Anne Michaels's fiercely beautiful debut novel tells the interlocking stories of three men of different generations whose lives are transformed by the events and shifting effects of the same war. At its center is poet Jakob Beer: traumatically orphaned as a young boy during the Second World war, rescued from the mud of a buried Polish city and secreted to a Greek island by Athos Roussos, scientist, scholar, and, above all, humanist.
After the war, in Toronto, where Athos has accepted a teaching post at the University, Jakob is faced with the tangible, insistent nature of the recent past: his own surfacing in all its darkness and profundity, the question of his beloved sister's fate its harrowing focus. Yet this is also the time when he meets the woman who will become his first wife, and begins his life-long work as a translator and poet.
And in this layered process of reentering life, Jakob learns the power of language - to destroy, to omit, and to obliterate; but also to witness and tell, conjure and restore.
And it is in Toronto as well that, late in his life, Jakob will cross paths with Ben: a young professor, expert in the dramas of weather and biography but naive in the drama of his own life. The quiet elation Ben senses in the older man, and Ben's own connection to the wounding legacies of the war, kindle a fascination with Jakob and his writing, upsetting and then opening that part of himself long since shut down against his knowledge of the past.
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Subjects
World War, 1939-1945, Fiction, Literature, World War (1939-1945) fast (OCoLC)fst01180924, Poets, Intergenerational relations, Holocaust survivors, Roman canadien-anglais, Fiction, war & military, World war, 1939-1945, fiction, Large type books, Psychological fiction, War stories, New York Times reviewed, Fiction, generalShowing 8 featured editions. View all 18 editions?
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Fugitive pieces
1997, Thorndike Press, Chivers Press
in English
- A large print ed.
0786212004 9780786212002
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Fugitive pieces
1997, A.A. Knopf, Distributed by Random House
in English
- 1st U.S. ed.
067945439X 9780679454397
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Originally published McClelland & Stewart, 1996.
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- Created September 21, 2008
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November 11, 2022 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
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September 21, 2008 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from Talis record |