![]() ![]() ![]() Athos, the Greek, a gentle man and a scholar, does his best to rear and protect Jakob Beer, his young “godson.” But he cannot rid him of his nightmares, his memories. In so doing she makes it clear that survival and happiness are far from synonymous. Michaels, through her protagonists, digs deep in the soil of memory and loss, and exposes the layers of emotion surrounding traumatic events. The two eventually reach post-war Toronto. Orphaned boy emerges like Tollund Man and is adopted by kind academic. ![]() On the surface this is a miraculous story. A man working on excavating the site, a Greek geologist, rescues the boy, whose family has been killed, and together they return to Greece to wait out the war. In its opening scene, set in Poland during World War II, a little Jewish boy emerges from “the miry streets of a drowned city” where he has been hiding from the Nazis. Fugitive Pieces, a first novel from poet Anne Michaels, is a curious hybrid of fiction and threnody. ![]()
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