Reading guide-- Fugitive Pieces
For Friday, read Ch. 2
Fugitive Pieces Reading Guide
Reading Group Guide
Fugitive Pieces
by Anne Michaels
About This Book
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces. We hope they will aid your understanding of the many rich themes that make up this radiant and lyrical first novel by one of Canada's foremost poets.
In Poland during World War II, seven-year-old Jakob Beer's parents are murdered by Nazi soldiers and his adored elder sister, Bella, is abducted. The mourning child flees and is miraculously rescued by Athos Roussos, a Greek geologist. Athos smuggles Jakob to his native island of Zakynthos, where he successfully hides him from the Nazi authorities and introduces him to a new world of geology, poetry, botany, and art. After the war the two move to Toronto, and Jakob embarks on marriage and a career as a poet. Through the experience of profound love, Jakob eventually transcends the tragedies of his youth; but his spirit remains forever linked with that of his lost sister. As Jakob gets older, his life and work provide inspiration and, eventually, spiritual regeneration, for Ben, a younger man whose own family has been blighted by the Holocaust.
Fugitive Pieces is an incandescent novel, heartbreaking and finally joyful. Its vivid images, its poetry and its wisdom will prove unforgettable.
1. Why is the first section of the novel entitled "The Drowned City?" Why is the title repeated for a later section?
2. Jakob says that Athos's fascination with Antarctica "was to become our azimuth. It was to direct the course of our lives" [33]. Why do you think Antarctica obsessed Athos? How does the story of the Scott expedition relate to that of Athos and Jakob? Do you agree with Jakob that Athos's fascination directed their lives?
3. "When the prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves, the dead entered them through their pores and were carried through their bloodstreams to their brains and hearts. And through their blood into another generation" [52], Jakob writes, and later, "It's no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world" [53]. How does the theme of the dead's influence on the living work itself out in the course of the novel?
4. The communist partisans in Greece, who had valiantly resisted the occupying Nazis, themselves committed terrible atrocities after the war, as Kostas and Daphne relate. Do you agree with their theory that violence is like an illness that can be caught, and that the Greeks caught it from the Germans [72]? What other explanations can be offered?
5. "I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate," says Jakob. "But poetry, the power of language to restore: this was what both Athos and Kostas were trying to teach me" [79]. What instances does the novel give of the destructive power of language? In what ways does writing--both the writing of poetry and of translations--help to heal and restore Jakob? Does silence--the cessation of language--have its own function, and if so, what might it be?
6. "We were a vine and a fence. But who was the vine? We would both have answered differently" [108]. Here Jakob is speaking of his relationship with Athos; of what other relationships in the novel might this metaphor be used? Does Michaels imply that dependence is an integral part of love?
7. What is it about Alex's character that attracts Jakob and makes him fall in love with her? Why does he eventually find life with her impossible? Do you find Alex a sympathetic character, or an unpleasant one?
8. "History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral" [138]. "Every moment is two moments" [161]. How does Jakob define and differentiate history and memory? Can you see Fugitive Pieces as a comparison of history and memory?
9. Music is an important element of Fugitive Pieces, and it is central to the lives of at least three of the characters, Bella, Alex, and Naomi. What does music mean to each of these characters? Why has Michaels given music such a prominent metaphoric role in the novel?
10. What does Fugitive Pieces say about the condition of being an immigrant? Jakob never feels truly at home anywhere, even in Greece. Ben's parents feel that their toehold in their new home is infinitely precarious, an emotion that communicates itself to Ben. Does Michaels imply that real integration is impossible?
11. Can you explain the very different reactions Ben's parents have had to their experience in the Holocaust? What in their characters has determined the differing ways they respond to grief and loss?
12. The relationship between Ben and Naomi is a troubled one. Why is he angry at her for her closeness to his parents and her attention to their graves? Why does he reject her by leaving for Greece without her? How can you explain his intense desire for Petra--is his need purely physical? How do Petra and Naomi differ? What is the significance of their names?
13. Science has as important a role in the novel as poetry and music. Why is geology so important to Athos, meteorology to Ben? Does science represent a standard of disinterested truth, or does it merely symbolize the world's terrifying contingency?
14. Why might Jakob have named his collection of poems Groundwork, and in what way does that title relate to his life? Jakob calls his young self a "bog-boy" [5]. Why does Ben take such an interest in the preserved bog people he reads about [221]?
15. The last line of the novel is Ben's: "I see that I must give what I most need." What does he mean by this? What does he most need, what will he give, and to whom?
16. What is the significance of the novel's title? What do "pieces," or "fragments," mean within Michaels's scheme? Where in the novel can you find references to fragments?
1. The main reason the section is called the Drowned City is because the Polish city where Jakob grew up flooded often and as a result left many artifacts preserved nearly perfectly in the mud so geologists like Athos were attracted to the area. The title is repeated in order emphasize the importance.
ReplyDelete2. Antarctica obsessed Athos because it is a place that has been virtually unexplored and it is a way to give his life a purpose. His voyage to Antarctica was similar to Scott's because Athos' men, like Scott's, were starving. Yes, it is very apparent that Athos' obsession directed their lives because they left their warm home for tents and a frozen tundra.
3. The theme of the dead's influence on the living works itself out mainly in Antarctica, where even though people have died, Athos wishes to visit because of his passion for geology. Also, when Jakob is speaking about how every living man carries the memories of all the people who have died.
4. Yes violence can be passed on like an illness because people will see that someone gets what they want using violence and the person viewing this will then turn to violence themselves to get what they want. Another explanation for this is that they were just violent in nature but only let it reveal itself when they saw others being violent, for fear of breaking out of conformity and being ridiculed.
5. The novel talks about how graffiti during the Nazi occupation was a way to fight oppression and "spit in the eye of the oppressors." The way writing healed Jakob through translation and poetry was because of the beauty and peaceful feeling that was created by poetry and the brotherly feeling that was present when something written in one language was translated into a different language without error. The translation sort of symbolized the coming together of two languages and accepting each for what it is.
1. The title "The Drowned CIty" can be interpreted several different ways. First, water is an important motif in the chapter, as Jakob falls in the river as he mourns the death of his family. Jakob ponders his connection with the water, "The river was the same blackness that was inside me; only the thin membrane of my skin kept me floating," (Michaels 7). Also, it refers to how Athos was excavating a city, a city that had been buried, had drowned, in time. In a way, Athos also saves Jakob from drowning, taking him to the safety of his home in Greece. Like many of the chapter titles in the novel, it is repeated later in the book.
ReplyDelete2. Athos's fascination with Antarctica does influence the way Jakob and Athos interact. Antarctica interested Athos because it represented the unknown and the beautiful to him. Later in the novel there is a chapter called "Terra Nullius" meaning the unknown land. This is what Antarctica was to Athos. It was the unknown and the inaccessible, but he had some window to it through the records of Wilson. Athos and Jakob empathized with the explorers. They both were perpetually hungry, thirsty for knowledge, and engaged in a grueling pursuit. The explorers were physically pushing themselves to their limit as they searched for the very limits of the planet, and Athos and Jakob were hiding from soldiers in a cramped house, waiting, waiting, waiting. Jakob describes their study of the explorers, "Athos relished that Wilson made watercolour sketches in the most perilous circumstances, then at night read the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and poetry in the tent" (33). Like the explorers, Athos and Jakob tempered their search for knowledge with artistic pursuits of poetry and drawing.
3. In the very first chapter Jakob has an experience in which he crosses the invisible but infuriatingly concrete line between the living and the dead. He feels his mother inhabit his body, but knows that he must release her. He describes this experience, "I knew suddenly that my mother was inside me. Moving along sinews, under my skin the way she used to move through the house at night...she was stopping to say goodbye and was caught in such pain, wanting to rise, wanting to stay" (8). Later Jakob's life is punctuated by visits and visions of memory of his sister, Bella. It is hard for him to accept Bella's death, because unlike his that of his parents, he never felt Bella's death for sure. When Jakob is with his wife Alex, he thinks of Bella. Jakob falls into a depression, confusing the past with the present, which hastens the continuously growing distance between Alex and himself. He muses,"Every moment is two moments. Alex's hairbrush propped on the sink: Bella's brush. Alex's bobby pins: Bella's hair clips turning up in strange places, a bookmarks, or holding open music on the piano," (140). In the end, it is Jakob's inability to sever the present from his past that causes his isolation from those he was once so close to.
ReplyDelete4. Daphne and Kostas are benevolent characters, and to Jakob they serve as the doting grandparents he so needs. After endless months of hiding, reading, never having enough to eat, Kostas and Daphne shower him with food, affection, and conversation. So one is inclined to agree with anything they say. And I do think that violence only perpetuates more violence. It's insightful, the way they describe violence as a disease that can be caught.
5. Language is incredibly important to Jakob and to him it can serve as a weapon or as a medicine. Silence can be terrifying. After his parents left him hiding at home, the silence indicated that they would never be returning for him. But with Athos he finds a comfortable silence, one in which they can sit together in thought and study. Poetry interests Jakob, and he dabbles in writing it when he is with Athos, even giving a poem to Kostas and Daphne upon his departure. After Athos's death, however, he doesn't write poetry anymore. He sticks to his translations, as if he cannot give up language entirely, but his own words are far too painful to dwell on. Jakob ponders language: "The moment when language at last surrenders to what it's describing: the subtlest differentials of light or temperature or sorrow" (162). Language is powerful to Jakob. But it can also be overwhelming, because with every English or Greek word he feels a stab of loss to his Hebrew.
1. The Polish city where Jakob grew up was constantly flooding, and people like Athos would find artifacts there which would be preserved in heavy mud due to flooding. The title is repeated to focus attention on where Jakob comes from.
ReplyDelete2.Antarctica obsessed Athos because of the new things he was able to experience there, such as the brilliant and scientifically accurate colors and the dried food rations and discovering fossils. Just as Athos admires Edward Wilson, Jakob admires Athos, and this did direct their lives because just as Wilson lead Athos, Athos lead Jakob.
3. The theme of the dead's influence on the living works itself out in the novel because the similarities between the dead and minerals and rocks in the ground. Athos is a geoligist and his love for such things is carried out along with the main theme of death. They are similar, just as minerals lay in the ground waiting to be dug up and recovered, the memory of the dead carry on and wait to be brought back to individuals.
4. Violence can indeed be an illness because violence can become normal to some, or necessary to others as an everyday norm. Besides the Greeks catching violence from the Germans, the Greeks may have feared kinds of persecution by the Germans and went to violence to fit in with the Nazis.
5. The destructive power of language, through writing or poetry or specifically graffiti can give power to those that became oppressed. To Jakob, poetry and translation healed Jakob because they brought him peace and a relaxing feeling when writing poetry and translating to another language and seeing similarities between the two.