Fugitive Pieces (1996) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

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Characters/People edit see section history

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• Jakob Beer: Main character; orphaned in Poland
• Athos Roussos: Greek geologist; raises Jakob
• Ben: Canadian professor and admirer of Jakob's poetry; main character of Part II
• Alex: Add a description of this character.
• Michaela
• Bella: Jakob's older sister; very close relationship with Jakob. She is musically talented; very good at piano and loves the classical composers.
• Naomi: Ben's wife.
• Kostas: A friend of Athos; married to Daphne.
• Maurice Salman: Jakob's best friend. Lives in Toronto; married to Irena.
• Daphne: Athos friend; married to Kostas. She becomes a mother figure to Jakob.
• Irena: Married to Maurice; a friend of Jakob.
• Old Martin
• Wilson
• Mones: A childhood friend of Jakob's.
• Zdena
• Ioannis
• Bettina
• Tomas
• Beethoven
• Yosha
• Palamas
• Mrs. Karouzos: An elderly lady who takes care of Athos' family house.
• Weston

Quotes edit see section history

• “The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its moth before calling a name.”

• “Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are ther screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy, moving forever towards the psalms.”

• “It's no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it's no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old. (Like the faint thump from behind the womb wall.) It is no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediments. Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted.”

• “That they were torn from mistakes they had no chance to fix; everything unfinished. All the sins of love without detail, detail without love. The regret of having spoken, of having run out of time to speak. Of hoarding oneself. Of turning one's back too often in favour of sleep.I tried to imagine their physical needs, the indignity of human needs grown so extreme they equal your longing for wife child, sister, parent, friend. but truthfully I could not even begin to imagine the trauma of their hearts,of being taken in the middle of their lives. Those with young children. Or those newly in love, wrenched from that state of grace. Or those who had lived invisibly, who were never known.”

• “Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.”

• “This unsettled innocence was like iron filings to a magnet; she was everywhere on my heart, spiky and charged, itch and there to stay.”

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• And whether you live by a lie or live by a truth makes no difference, as long as you get past the wall. And while some are motivated by love (those who choose), most are motivated by fear (those who choose by not choosing). Then Jakob said: ‘Perhaps the electron is neither particle nor wave but something else instead, much less simple—a dissonance—like grief, whose pain is love.’”

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• Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

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• No matter the age of the face, at the moment of death a lifetime of emotion still unused turns a face young again.

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• Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility.

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• “Murder steals from a man his future. It steals from him his own death. But it must not steal from him his life.”

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• ‘The great mystery of wood is not that it burns, but that it floats.’”

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• When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.

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• To remain with the dead is to abandon them. All the years I felt Bella entreating me, filled with her loneliness, I was mistaken. I have misunderstood her signals. Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I’m close enough, she can push me back into the world.

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• I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate. But poetry, the power of language to restore: this was what both Athos and Kostas were trying to teach me.

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• And later, when I began to write down the events of my childhood in a language foreign to their happening, it was a revelation. English could protect me; an alphabet without memory.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Zakynthos, Greece: Ionian - Greek Island
• Biskupin, Poland: Biskupin is an archaeological site and a life-size model of an Iron Age fortified settlement in north-central Poland
• Athens
• Idhra
• Toronto
• Zalcynthos
• Canada
• Europe
• Salonika

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by Hallucinating Foucault, and followed by The Ghost Road.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Anne Michaels (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Orange Prize for Fiction (1997)
• Books in Canada First Novel Award
• Trillium Book Award
• Guardian Fiction Prize (1997)
• Giller Prize (Finalist, 1996, Shortlist)
• Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year (Finalist, Shortlist)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813.54

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( M ) › Michaels, Anne
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary