Anne Michaels
Autor/a de Fugitive Pieces
Sobre l'autor
Anne Michaels was born in 1958 in Toronto, Canada. Her poetry and fiction has earned her several awards. "The Weight of Oranges," a collection of poetry, won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas. Another collection of poetry, "Miner's Pond," won the Canadian Authors Association Award and was she mostra'n més shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Award. "Fugitive Pieces," her first work of fiction won her the Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year Award, the Trillium Prize, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, The Beatrice and Martin Fischer Award and the Orange Prize. She was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize. She is also a recipient of the National Magazine Award, for poetry, gold medal. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra'n menys
Crèdit de la imatge: (c) Caroline J McElwee
Sèrie
Obres de Anne Michaels
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Nom normalitzat
- Michaels, Anne
- Data de naixement
- 1958-04-15
- Gènere
- female
- Nacionalitat
- Canada
- Lloc de naixement
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Llocs de residència
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Educació
- University of Toronto (B.A. English)
- Professions
- academic
poet - Organitzacions
- Lannan Literary Award (Fiction, 1997)
- Biografia breu
- Anne Michaels, (b at Toronto 1958) the daughter of a Jewish-Polish immigrant, grew up in Toronto, and earned a BA in Honours English at the University of Toronto. Michaels's first novel, FUGITIVE PIECES (1996), brought her national recognition and awards, including the Trillium Prize and the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. The novel also garnered international acclaim, winning Britain's Orange Prize for Fiction and America's Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Robert FULFORD observed that Fugitive Pieces "attracted more international praise than any first novel by a serious writer in Canadian history." A film version of Fugitive Pieces, directed by Jeremy Podeswa, was produced in 2006.
Like Fugitive Pieces' protagonist Jakob Beer, Anne Michaels is also a poet. Her first collection, The Weight of Oranges, won the 1986 Commonwealth Prize for the Americas. Miner's Pond (1991) was short-listed for a GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD and won a Canadian Authors Association Award. Skin Divers was published in 1991. The poems from these three collections were published together, under the title Poems, in 2001.
Membres
Converses
Group Read, December 2017: Fugitive Pieces a 1001 Books to read before you die (desembre 2017)
Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels a World Reading Circle (gener 2014)
Ressenyes
Llistes
Premis
Potser també t'agrada
Autors associats
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 14
- Membres
- 4,342
- Popularitat
- #5,776
- Valoració
- 3.7
- Ressenyes
- 161
- ISBN
- 154
- Llengües
- 12
- Preferit
- 20
One world next to another and the invisible boundary between them. Other than the mystic, suspect to science and the modern rational world, who is most attuned this locality? The lover, perhaps. The one left behind in grief, seems likely. Persons occupying these roles are the characters of Held, and they move in and out of the novel, related through family over time and space, their absence in one chapter proving their existence in another.
For “it is absence that proves what was once present,” Michaels writes, chapter 1. Here's a mystical experience: “He felt a presence, a thermal current, a tremor across the entire surface of things, like a heat mirage. A deepening, not a darkening. He knew he’d felt it because immediately he felt something even more certain and powerful: its dousing.”
That’s how it goes with mystical experiences. Often a brief flash and then gone. Unprovable to anyone. Unmeasurable. Unbidden by extremity likely to be regarded as suspect, delusion; and indeed, we have to be aware of this possibility, of tricks played on the mind. In other circumstances, in love and grief, we have more sympathy, at least, no?
A bereaved son in chapter 6: “I walked down to the water. I felt an overwhelming presence, the place itself seemed alive with strangeness. I watched the lake take in the darkness of the sky. No stars. The sense of a presence grew almost overpowering. Then, suddenly, the place was destitute. The presence was gone, though nothing outward had changed.” The son concludes: “If my father could have chosen any way to convince me of the soul, it would have been exactly this way - not by a sensed presence, but by its sudden absence.”
Can science uncover the truth of these experiences or is there a boundary line not to be crossed in this novel that is thinking about crossed boundaries, both of the mystical and of parallels to it in the natural world? A chemist muses on periodic table element 85, astatine: “We don’t know much about it, because the instant a sample is large enough to see, it vanishes. It appears when uranium decays, its most stable isotopes exist for less than a second - just long enough to detect its existence.” Interesting, but still dealing with something scientifically measurable, however brief its presence. An analogy, at least.
Back to Paavo/Pärt:
“When we are moved, Paavo thought, when we feel something beyond us, it is the boundary, the limit of the body that allows us to recognise it. Limit is proof of the beyond. Not the self, but what lies beyond the self. He would not be surprised if physics made sense of it someday; but only because science is bent on proving it doesn’t exist. Scientists will rip us to shreds looking for it, but it will not be found where they are looking. He remembered a joke, about someone who’d lost something and was searching across the street, under a street lamp. Why are you looking for it there? Because the light is better.”
The science/faith dichotomy and relationship is an interesting topic, but now I'm perhaps suggesting it to be more of a focus of the novel than it actually is. This is not [b:Transcendent Kingdom|48570454|Transcendent Kingdom|Yaa Gyasi|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1571925550l/48570454._SY75_.jpg|73528567]. It is more poetic and mystical, perhaps broaching science simply because it can be a blockage to accepting certain experiences, and one may need to find a way around. “When we grew eyes did others of our kind believe us mad for what we saw?” Michaels, chapter 11, verse 3.
“Our machines govern our behaviour, thought Hertha, but they will never teach us meaning.”
This novel is a mystical novel.… (més)