A review by sampena16
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
5.0
"Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful."
"Alone on the roof those nights, it's not surprising that, of all the characters in Athos's tales of geologists and explorers, cartographers and navigators, I felt compassion for the stars themselves. Aching towards us for millennia though we are blind to their signals until it's too late, starlight only the white breath of an old cry. Sending their white messages millions of years, only to be crumpled up by the waves."
Filled with beautiful and profound statements like the above quotes, Anne Michaels's highly lyrical prose brings the reader into Jakob Beer's world of stories that are shaped by loss, trauma, and displacement. However, Michaels proves that redemption can be found in language and poetry, that memory staves of absence and preserves lives, and that people can be saved from the horror of the past by the people and places surrounding them.
"Alone on the roof those nights, it's not surprising that, of all the characters in Athos's tales of geologists and explorers, cartographers and navigators, I felt compassion for the stars themselves. Aching towards us for millennia though we are blind to their signals until it's too late, starlight only the white breath of an old cry. Sending their white messages millions of years, only to be crumpled up by the waves."
Filled with beautiful and profound statements like the above quotes, Anne Michaels's highly lyrical prose brings the reader into Jakob Beer's world of stories that are shaped by loss, trauma, and displacement. However, Michaels proves that redemption can be found in language and poetry, that memory staves of absence and preserves lives, and that people can be saved from the horror of the past by the people and places surrounding them.