Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"
Jan. 25th, 2012 07:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stapsreadsAnother BookCrossing roundabout: this one is Favourites of 2011. And I can see why Fugitive Pieces is somebody's favourite. I'm not sure yet that it will be my favourite of 2012, but it is certainly a striking work.
The narrator for the most part is Jakob Beer, a small boy who escapes the Holocaust with a Greek geologist and grows up to be a poet. Geology is used as a metaphor again and again, and Michaels does an evocative and convincing job of it. At times I found the writing rather too dense and wandering towards the pretentious; at others I was completely immersed.
I was disappointed by the absence of deep women characters. While I appreciate the fact that this is largely an artefact of the first person narration, and the restrictions associated with that convention, it did feel rather dismissive of the female experience, given the importance in the plot of relationships between men. It also seemed to me that the last section didn't really add much, and was simply the geology metaphor re-imagined as meteorology.
Well worth a read, though.
http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/10367298/
The narrator for the most part is Jakob Beer, a small boy who escapes the Holocaust with a Greek geologist and grows up to be a poet. Geology is used as a metaphor again and again, and Michaels does an evocative and convincing job of it. At times I found the writing rather too dense and wandering towards the pretentious; at others I was completely immersed.
I was disappointed by the absence of deep women characters. While I appreciate the fact that this is largely an artefact of the first person narration, and the restrictions associated with that convention, it did feel rather dismissive of the female experience, given the importance in the plot of relationships between men. It also seemed to me that the last section didn't really add much, and was simply the geology metaphor re-imagined as meteorology.
Well worth a read, though.
http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/10367298/
