Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels Literary ambrosia. This gets at least six stars from me. I stubbornly avoided this book for a long time because the promotional blurb just didn't make it sound appealing to me. I finally gave it a try so I could stop wondering why it won half a dozen awards and shows up on "must read" lists everywhere I look. I'm so glad I did! The blurb doesn't even begin to tell you about the book as you'll experience it while reading. If you're the left-brain dominant sort who needs everything spelled out in flat little rows and columns, you may not appreciate this one. However, if you enjoy encountering profound little pockets of prose to be read slowly and savored and then re-read, you'll love this book the way I do. The author is a poet, and it shows here in her first novel. Many of the best passages were sort of like a combination of Lawrence Thornton and Per Petterson, beautifully descriptive and ethereal. And yet Anne Michaels has her own distinctive style, which I don't mean to diminish by comparing her with others. For the first 200 pages, the narrator is Jakob Beer. He tells the story of his life, being rescued in Poland by a geologist named Athos and secretly taken to Greece, then emigrating with Athos to Canada after the war. This is interspersed with his contemplations on life, loss, beauty, love, hatred, forgiveness, and remembrance. The final 100 pages are narrated by Ben, a young man who briefly met Jakob Beer before his death, and now tells his own story as if he were speaking to Jakob. I found it quite jarring to have a sudden change of narrator without being told anything about Ben, so if you're reading this review, I'm saving you from that disorientation. Although not as compelling as the first 2/3 of the book, I did appreciate Ben's story from the perspective of someone who grew up as the child of Holocaust survivors. He absorbed their fears and their silences and their losses without ever being made to understand that he was not inadequate as their child. It was their history, too painful for them to share with him, that shaped his life. I strongly suggest that everyone at least give this a try. The first few pages are somewhat fragmented and hard to follow, but it smooths out and finds its footing by about page 20 or so.