I have just finished reading a paperback book Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. The Boston Globe said ” Word by blessed word it is a gorgeously written book….” And that it is but so much more. The fact that the author is also an accomplished poet is evident from the book’s first line “Time is a blind guide”. Michaels evokes empathy, horror, a sense of the boy’s unspeakable enduring sadness, his fear, his loss, his love, in the reader with small tight haunting sentences such as this one.
“Each time we stopped, I was numb against his solid body, a blister tight with fear.”
Or these, “When I first encountered the Jewish market I felt grief. Casually, out of the mouths of the cheese-seller and the baker came the ardent tongue of my child hood. Consonants and vowels: fear and love intertwined.”
This is an epochal love story , born in the Holocaust between a boy buried in the Polish bog at Biskupin and the geologist who rescued him. I did not race through this book, slim as it is, but stumbled often, as Stephen Crane said, ”because it is bitter and because it is my heart” . I will be reading it again. Maybe with a cup of Yuqian Dragonwell.
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