Book Review: Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

One perk of being at home more (read: all the time) is having more time to read, and so I'm getting through my TBR pile a lot more quickly than I usually would! Continuing with the Women's Prize #ReadWomen challenge, Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels is the second on the list and won the prize in 1997. This year is the 25th Anniversary of the Women's Prize for Fiction and they're challenging readers to read all previous 24 winners of the prize; I've read a few already, but thought I'd take up the challenge nonetheless!

Fugitive Pieces is written from the perspective of Jakob Beer, a young boy who is rescued from the ruins of his war-torn Polish village by a Greek geologist after his family have been killed. Athos takes Jakob back to his home in Greece and, years later, to Toronto; we get to see Jakob grow from a frightened Holocaust victim, to scholar and poet. 

I enjoyed this book, but did find it a bit self-consciously dramatic and overly poetic at times. Some reviews have compared it to the writing of Virginia Woolf, and while I do see the similarities, this narrative seemed slightly disjointed at times with no clear timeline or structure. I appreciate that by its very name, Fugitive Pieces is just that, a collection of almost fragmented narrative pieces that don't always form a cohesive whole, but the vivid descriptions and overly poetic language seem to mask the plot for me. The narrator also changes about two thirds of the way through, but I almost didn't notice because the narrative voice is almost exactly the same.

The language in the book is beautiful; such rich and evocative descriptions of the Greek landscape and the cramped Toronto apartment Jakob and Athos share that you almost feel that you're there. I love books that transport you to a different place like this, and the only other author I can think of whose language has that power is Joanne Harris. However I just didn't fully gel with this book; I finished it quite happily but it probably isn't one that I'd pick up again. 

3 out of 5 stars for me!