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This first novel from an award-winning poet -- a #1 best-seller in Canada -- is certain to propel her into the front ranks of our very best practitioners of contemporary fiction.It is a story of World War II as remembered and imagined by one of its survivors: a poet named Jakob Beer, traumatically orphaned as a young child and smuggled out of Poland, first to a Greek island (where he will return as an adult), and later to Toronto. It is the story of how, over his lifetime, Jakob learns the power of language -- to destroy, to omit, to obliterate, but also to restore and to conjure, witness and tell -- as he comes to understand and experience what was lost to him and of what is possible for him to regain.Profoundly moving, brilliantly written -- as sensual and lyric as it is emotionally resonant -- Fugitive Pieces delves into the most difficult workings of the human heart and mind: the grief and healing of remembrance. It is a first novel of astonishing achievement.From the Hardcover edition.
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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, A.A. Knopf, Distributed by Random House
in English
- 1st U.S. ed.
067945439X 9780679454397
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Fugitive pieces
1997, Thorndike Press, Chivers Press
in English
- A large print ed.
0786212004 9780786212002
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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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December 13, 2012 | Edited by VacuumBot | Updated format 'eBook' to 'E-book'; Removed author from Edition (author found in Work) |
April 28, 2011 | Edited by OCLC Bot | Added OCLC numbers. |
June 22, 2010 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from marc_overdrive MARC record |