How long does it take to read Fugitive Pieces?
Anne Michaels
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels takes about 5 hours 43 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 43 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1996. 312 pages, about 85,800 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 32 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 43 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 35 minutes |
The page count is the median across 40 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Anne Michaels's fiercely beautiful debut novel tells the interlocking stories of three men of different generations whose lives are transformed by the events and shifting effects of the same war. At its center is poet Jakob Beer: traumatically orphaned as a young boy during the Second World war, rescued from the mud of a buried Polish city and secreted to a Greek island by Athos Roussos, scientist, scholar, and, above all, humanist. After the war, in Toronto, where Athos has accepted a teaching post at the University, Jakob is faced with the tangible, insistent nature of the recent past: his own surfacing in all its darkness and profundity, the question of his beloved sister's fate its harrowing focus. Yet this is also the time when he meets the woman who will become his first wife, and begins his life-long work as a translator and poet. And in this layered process of reentering life, Jakob learns the power of language - to destroy, to omit, and to obliterate; but also to witness and tell, conjure and restore. And it is in Toronto as well that, late in his life, Jakob will cross paths with Ben: a young professor, expert in the dramas of weather and biography but naive in the drama of his own life. The quiet elation Ben senses in the older man, and Ben's own connection to the wounding legacies of the war, kindle a fascination with Jakob and his writing, upsetting and then opening that part of himself long since shut down against his knowledge of the past.
Subjects: Fiction, Poets, Intergenerational relations, Holocaust survivors, Roman canadien-anglais, Fiction, war & military
