Fugitive Pieces :: Essays Papers

evanescent PiecesReport on Fugitive PiecesSearing the mind with stunning images while seducing with radiant prose, this brilliant first novel is a story of damaged lives and the indestructibility of the valet de chambre spirit. It speaks about loss, about the urgency, pain and ultimate healing power of memory, andabout the redemptory power of love. Its characters come to understand the implacability of the natural world, the im fiberial perfection ofscience, the grief of history. The narrative is permeated with insights about language itself, its power to distort and destroy meaning, and to determine it again to those with stalwart hearts.During WWII, when Jakob Beer is seven, his parents are murdered by Nazi soldiers who well over their Polish village, and his beloved, musically talented 15-year-old sister, Bella, is abducted. Fleeing from the blood-drenched scene, he is magically saved by classic geologist Athos Roussos, who secretly transports the traumatized boy to his home on the island of Zakynthos, where they live through with(predicate) the Nazi occupation, suffering privations but escaping the atrocities that decimate Greeces Jewish community. Jakob is haunted by the moment of his parents death the burst door, buttons spilling out of a saucer onto the floor, vileness and his spirit clay sorrowfully linked with that of his lost sister, whose fate anguishes him. scarcely he travels in his imagination to the places that Athos describes and the books that this kindly scholar provides. At wars end, Athos accepts a university post in Toronto, and Jakob begins a new life. Yet he remains disoriented and unmoored, trapped by memory and grief, a damaged chromosome the more(prenominal) so after Athos premature death. By then, however, Jakob has discovered his m form as poet and essayist and strives to find in language the meaning of his life. The marvellous gift of a soul mate in his second wife, riotous scholar Michaela, comes late for Jakob. Thei r marriage is brief, and ends in stunning irony. The second part of the novel concerns a younger man, Ben, who is profoundly influenced by Jakobs poetry and goes to the Greek island of Idhra in an attempt to find the writers notebooks after his death. Ben is another damaged soul. The intelligence of Holocaust survivors, he carries their sorrow like a heavy stone. emotionally maimed and fearful, Ben feels that he was born into absence.