“Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them.”
About Anne
Anne Michael is a Canadian writer based in Toronto city in 1958. Her famous works include Fugitive Pieces, The Winter Vault, Skin Divers, Miner’s Pond, etc. Anne’s works explore the themes of power, Elegance, and integrity. She opines that what you offer shall undoubtedly be received. Fugitive Pieces was Anne’s first novel, which nominated her for Giller prize, and many others.
Fugitive Pieces Summary
This novel is a memoir by the poet Jakob Beer. Jakob was a holocaust survivor, and this also reflects his poetry. He was struggling to cope with the past. The novel has two parts. In the first part, Jakob escapes from death at the hands of Nazis. Only he survived after the end of his whole family during World War II. Jakob wants to write poetry, but cannot produce fruit until his second wife, Michaela, puts love in his soul. At the end of part I, Jacob and his second wife went to Greece, where he began writing in the Roussos family.
In the second part, a young boy, Ben, meets Jakob and Michaela at a party. There Ben’s second wife Naomi gets attracted to Jakob. After Jakob’s death, Ben edited his writings for publications. In search of Jakob’s journal, Ben went to Roussos’s ancestral home. There he came to know why Jacob can quickly write about horrors. At the end of the story, Ben returned to his betrayed wife.
Genre: Psychological fiction
Tone: Dark and Gloomy
Type: Novel
Year of publication: 1996
Fugitive Pieces Famous Quotes
- Look carefully; record what you see
- Find a way to make beauty necessary
- Find a way to make necessity beautiful
- Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life
- Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil
- Time is a blind guide
- Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again
Fugitive Pieces Main Characters
Jakob Beer
- An intelligent fellow who becomes a poet
- Only survival in the town after the Holocaust
Athos Roussos
- A geologist by profession and rescuer of Jakob
- He is obsessed with the beauty of science and the universe
Ben
- The sole admirer of Jakob and his poetries
- His obsession with Jakob’s journal helps him travel to Greece.
