A fundamental consideration Anne Michaels puts forth in her novel is this: Can Jakob Beer, a 7-year-old Jewish boy who escapes death in Poland by hiding in closet while German soldiers kill his ...father, mother and sister, ever explain why he has survived, and why they have perished? "When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window," Michaels writes when Athos Roussos, the geologist who rescues young Jakob and raises him on an island off the Greek coast as his own son, dies in Toronto, where the two had moved after the war: "His last breath obscures the past." "History and memory appear in all of my writing," Michaels made clear. Her first collection of poems, "The Weight of Oranges," was published in 1985; her second, "Miner's Pond," was short-listed in 1992 for the Governor General's Award, one of Canada's most distinguished literary prizes.
A brief procession through a room piled with the belongings of migrants and another with forest loam underfoot, in which a videoed Anne Michaels spoke of childhood memories of northern Ontario, took ...us back to the main space. At last, live performance. Sort of. John Berger sat at a table and read (with surprisingly poor microphone technique), joined gradually by Michaels and a cast including Simon McBurney, Juliet Stevenson, Paul Rhys and Susan Lynch. The text became a kind of vocal music; the actors, typescripts in hand, moved around a little, again unspecifically but evocatively. Finally a couple of aerial rope-dancers descended from the roof. Did Berger's and Michaels' words gain anything from such presentation? Not that I could discern.
Fugitive Pieces beat out novels by such established writers as Australia's Peter Carey (nominated for Jack Maggs), Britain's Ian MacEwan (Enduring Love) and fellow Canadian Carol Shields (Larry's ...Party) to take the award, which was open to works of fiction from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth. It was Anne Michaels' second major prize for the novel in Britain. In June, she won the 30,000-pound ($70,000 Cdn) Orange Prize, awarded for what is judged to be the best English novel, written by a woman and published in Britain. Michaels professed Wednesday to being "totally surprised" by the Guardian prize and bowled over by the reception given to Fugitive Pieces.
Anne Michaels Metcalfe, Anna
The Financial times (London ed.),
05/2009
Newspaper Article
One of Richmal Crompton's Ju st William books, which I'm reading to my children; Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by McDonough and Braungart; The Last Neanderthal by Ian Tattersall; ...From A to X by John Berger.
Fugitive places Gurria-Quintana, Angel
The Financial times (London ed.),
05/2009
Newspaper Article
When we are introduced to the couple it is 1964, and they are living on a houseboat on the Nile. He is Avery Escher, an engineer; she is Jean Shaw, an amateur botanist.
Canadian writer Anne Michaels has spent the last decade or so honing this generality into a particular of penetrating point and poetic reflection. ... although the angle of sunrise into the Great ...Temple would be the same and the same sun would enter the sanctuary at dawn, Avery knew that once the last temple stone had been cut and hoisted sixty metres higher, each block replaced, each seam filled with sand so there was not a grain of space between the blocks to reveal where they'd been sliced, each kingly visage slotted into place, that the perfection of the illusion -- the perfection itself -- would be the betrayal.
