Fugitive Pieces Blog Entry (Chapter 2)

Jakob resides in Athos's house in Zakynthos, Greece to escape and hide from the Nazi and Fascist regime, where, "we lived close to the sky." (Fugitive Pieces, page 17). Here, Jakob tries to live a normal life. Jakob realizes that there are many Jewish people who live in Greece, and that the Germans generally leave them alone. He is still haunted by what had happened. His family was just murdered by the Nazis in front of his own eyes, and the images have stuck in his mind the entire time he's been with Athos. Athos is an archaeologist and a geologist, and has many books in his library. When Athos isn't wandering about, looking for people he knows that have been affected by the war, he reads to Jakob and tells him about his life. He tells him of his father, who shipped valuable red dyes for shoes and cloth. Athos learned a lot of his knowledge from his father, and passed along the stories to Jakob. At first, Jakob does not follow the new found languages of both Greek and English. But as he spends more time with Athos, English and Greek become his new languages. However, the more he uses his new found language, he realizes that they are also erasing his memory of his past. When Athos first rescued him, Jakob relied heavily on the memories of his family, particularly of his sister, Bella, to get through every day life.

But as the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into years, and all the while Jakob read more and more, he not only lived in his broken world, but he lived in other worlds. "Because of Athos, our little house became a crow's nest, a Vinland peathouse. Inside the cave of my skull oceans swayed with monstrous ice-floes, navigated by skin-boats. Mariners hung from mizzen-masts and ropes made from walrus hide. Vikings rowed down the mighty rivers of Russia." (Fugitive Pieces, page 29).
As time moves on, the Italian and German armies start to invade Greece, and more specifically, Zakynthos. Athos makes Jakob spend most of the days up on the roof top, just so that if the military did enter the house, Jakob would not be found. "Alone on the roof those nights, it's not surprising that, of all the characters in Athos' tales of geologists and explorers, cartographers and navigators, I felt compassion for the stars themselves." (Fugitive Pieces, page 54).
So far the novel is picking up. There is more dialogue, and as I have started Chapter 3, "Vertical Time", we learn more of the characters themselves.

Survey of Authors & Secondary Sources

1. Author: Anne Michaels      Title: Fugitive Pieces

2. Before this book, I had never heard of Anne Michaels. It was only in Grade 11 English that I heard of her, and it was then that we read the excerpt of "Fugitive Pieces". Reading that excerpt made me want more, as it "left me hanging", and the opportunity to read it for this ISU was perfect.

3. Anne Michaels is the author of three highly acclaimed poetry collections: The Weight of Oranges (1986),  Miner's Pond (1991), Skin Divers (1999), her first novel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), and her latest novel, The Winter Vault (2009). She was born in Toronto, Canada in 1958. She attended Vaughan Road Academy, then later attended the University of Toronto, where she earned a B.A. degree in English. She has won many awards due to her literature in both poetry writing, and novel writing. Michaels currently resides in Toronto, working on her next novel.

4. As previously stated before, Anne Michaels is the author of several pieces of literature; her highly acclaimed poetry collections: The Weight of Oranges (1986),  Miner's Pond (1991), and  Skin Divers (1999), as well as her only two novels Fugitive Pieces (1996), and, The Winter Vault (2009).

5. Anne Michaels writes very in depth, and adds a human element to her literature. She always adds elements that the reader can connect to, and makes her novels come to life with realistic settings and plots. She spent 9 years developing Fugitive Pieces into the multi-award winning novel it is, by incorporating real life stories.

6. Themes that Anne Michaels visits in the novel are grief, finding strength in tough situations, and remembering better times. Throughout the novel, Jakob and characters he meets all deal with grief differently. In Jakob's case, the theme of grief and how he deals with it also includes the other two themes listed. He deals with his grief by remembering the better times when he was with his family, and carries the happy memories of his sister to get him through daily life. He finds strength in small things, such as listening to Athos tell stories. This gives him the strength he needs to continue to try to live the best life possible in the circumstances that surround him.

7. Anne Michaels writes with a very poetic, narrative style. Authors that come to mind that she reminds me of are of course Shakespeare, for his poetic style of writing, and J.R.R. Tolkien. She reminds me of J.R.R. Tolkien simply because he used a very different style of writing from other authors, where his novels were more of a very long, descriptive poem. All three authors use imagery as well, to help give the readers a vivid image of the stories in their heads.