Word: jakob
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...reigning prince of sensitive-guy pop may be Jakob Dylan, lead singer for the folk-rock band the Wallflowers. The band's latest CD, Bringing Down the Horse, has sold 3 million copies and is still going strong. The album is actually a weary affair, but it has taken radio by storm with its Top 40 guitar hooks and introspective lyrics, and with Dylan's shadowy, intimate vocals. Does Dylan consider himself sensitive? "I think people like myself feel the same thing everyone else feels," he says. "But sometimes [people] focus on one aspect of their feelings, like anger...
This extraordinarily compressed passage, appearing early in the novel, sets the tone for much that follows. Michaels not only creates an imaginary poet, she also examines the ways in which a poetic imagination can arise out of horror. That Jakob survives at all is a miracle. After days of hiding, he is finally driven by hunger to risk his fate by approaching a stranger. "I screamed into the silence the only phrase I knew in more than one language, I screamed it in Polish and German and Yiddish, thumping my fists on my own chest: dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty...
Instead of being shot, he is rescued by Athos Roussos, a Greek geologist working on a nearby archaeological project. Athos smuggles the boy out of Poland back to Athos' ancestral island. Although the Nazis arrive there too, Jakob later realizes that he, having experienced the worst, was also spared much more of the same. "While I was living with Athos on Zakynthos, learning Greek and English, learning geology, geography, and poetry, Jews were filling the corners and cracks of Europe, every available space...I didn't know that while I was on Zakynthos, a Jew could be purchased...
With such knowledge, and haunted by the memory of the sister he lost, how will Jakob Beer develop into a distinguished poet and, late in his life, a husband besottedly in love with his young wife? These are the questions that Fugitive Pieces addresses through Jakob's own words: "I try to set down the past in the cramped space of a prayer...
...goes to Anne Michaels, who created him. The author, 38, a Canadian poet who has published two volumes of verse, will try the patience of readers who expect brisk forward momentum in their novels. Her prose does not race; it hovers, insinuating its way in and around timeless mysteries. Jakob Beer never lived, but thanks to Michaels, he does now. --By Paul Gray...