MEMORY

While traveling last week I also finished Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces and have been trying to collect my thoughts about it since. For lack of a better way to put it, this is simply a beautiful and stirring book. I am not sure, though, that I made complete sense of it and that is disappointing for me. It is a novel of the Holocaust, but that is far too inadequate a description, for it is about so many things. The plot follows the life of a Polish boy whose family is murdered before his eyes. He is discovered as he is hiding in the woods by a Greek geologist named Athos who then takes him in and raises him. The book charts his life and their relationship, but it focuses mostly on his quest to make sense of the great tragedy of his life and of the world. Michaels' book is really about memory, a favorite subject or ours here, of course, but one that is difficult to sufficiently encapsulate.

There is no doubt that the prose in Michael's work is lyrical and poetic, more so than just about anything else I can name right now, but probably makes this book one that deserves and requires more than just one reading. She piles on one metaphor after another, and while I generally favor this kind of literary writing, I did find it a bit tiresome in spots. Then I would be struck by an absolutely stunning passage and would be pulled in again. One in particular has stayed with me.

There's no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it's given a use. Or as Athos might have said: If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map.

My own head is cluttered with memories of land, hills mostly, the way the earth seems to roll across itself in the landscape I call home, gathering here and there in bunches. But I also remember the stark and flat, windswept landscapes I have seen and find myself drawn to just as much. There is something for me about terrain, the long history that the world holds for itself beneath our feet and that will outlast us all, the way the earth is continually shaped and molded and sculpted as if our presence here really makes no difference in the end. We are simply swallowed into the strata that make up the memory of the world, sandwiched into the many layers that have already been stacked beneath us.

In spite of that, I still believe in hope, as does Jakob, the main character in the book. It is difficult to imagine trudging over the ground he carries in his own memory, but he must if it is, as Michael's writes, to be given a use. Digging into geological layers to piece together a story of the past is the central metaphor running throughout the book and it is well-crafted for sure. Jakob does make a map of the land he has walked upon, following it slowly to a place where he can discover sense in the senselessness and meaning in the meaninglessness.