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Resumen
In 1964, a newly married Canadian couple settle into a houseboat on the Nile just below Abu Simbel. Avery is one of the engineers responsible for the dismantling and reconstruction of the temple, a "machine-worshipper" who is nonetheless sensitive to their destructive power. Jean is a botanist by vocation, passionately interested in everything that grows. They met on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, witnessing the construction of the Seaway as it swallowed towns, homes, and lives. Now, at the edge of another world about to be inundated, they create their own world, exchanging "the innocent memories we don't know we hold until given the gift of the eagerness of another." But when tragedy strikes, they return to separate lives in Toronto: Avery to school to study architecture; and Jean into the orbit of Lucjan, a Polish emigre artist whose haunting tales of occupied Warsaw pull her further from Avery but offer her the chance to assume her most essential life. Stunning in its explorations of both the physical and emotional worlds of its characters, intensely moving and lyrical, The Winter Vault is a radiant work of fiction.
Reseñas (6)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
Profound loss, desolation and rebuilding are the literal and metaphoric themes of Michaels's exquisite second novel (after Fugitive Pieces). Avery Escher is a Canadian engineer recently moved to a houseboat on the Nile with his new wife, Jean, in 1964. Avery's part of a team of engineers trying to salvage Abu Simbel, which is about to be flooded by the new Aswan dam. His wife, Jean, meanwhile, carries with her childhood memories of flooded villages and the heavy absence of her mother, who died when she was young. Now, the sight of the entire Nubian nation being evacuated from their native land before it's flooded affects both Avery and Jean intensely. Jean's pregnancy seems a possible redemption, but their daughter is stillborn, and Jean falls into despair, shunning the former intimacy of her marriage. When the couple returns to Canada, they set up separate lives and another man enters the picture. Michaels is especially impressive at making a rundown of construction materials or the contents of a market as evocative as the shared moments between two young lovers. A tender love story set against an intriguing bit of history is handled with uncommon skill. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Reseña de Booklist
The long-awaited second novel by an award-winning Canadian poet and novelist explores the most intimate thoughts and longings of Avery and Jean Escher. Avery, a practical and pragmatic engineer, is assigned to the project to remove and relocate the Great Temple of Abu Simbel, about to be inundated by the construction of the Aswan Dam. Avery's wife, Jean, lives with him on the Nile and collects flowers and seeds to nurture life and the continued existence of these fragile elements of the environment. Flashing back to their first encounters along the banks of the St. Lawrence Seaway and to stories of their childhood, the reader is swept along in the current of these two lonely souls reaching out to one another. Driven apart by grief over a tragic pregnancy, Jean and Avery return to Canada and live separate lives. While Avery buries himself in the study of architecture, Jean encounters Warsaw ghetto survivor and artist Lucjean, who teaches her that regret is not the end of a relationship. Michaels' skill is showcased in every well-chosen word of this luminous novel.--Sundborg, Laurie Copyright 2009 Booklist
Reseña de New York Review of Books
HOW does a novelist stop time? How, that is, does a novel forestall its own closure - the end of the story, the evaporation of characters into memory -not to mention the unpleasant closures of time itself: the end of childhood, the dissolution of a marriage, the carrying out of an assassination, the beginning of a war? One might use the backward pull of memory through a sensory image (Proust) or the endless niggling details of a police report (Danilo Kis, "Hourglass"); narrate backward (Charles Baxter, "First Light") or refuse to allow the story to progress in time at all (Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Jealousy"). Or, in Anne Michaels's case, begin a novel with an image that stops time all by itself: "Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone." That sentence - an arresting thought, specific in detail but universal in application, meditating on the past but resolutely of the present - is a model of Michaels's novelistic aesthetic, which she shares with her contemporary and fellow Torontonian Michael Ondaatje. These two writers began their careers as poets, and their fiction might be described as an attempt to bring together the practice of the lyric poem - density of language, intense sensory observation, a willed suspension of time - with the novelist's brick-by-brick construction of drama in time, and, more important, in history. Michaels and Ondaatje are not novelists of contemporary life but archivists and re-enactors who use poetic immediacy to make the past present - not as an orderly narrative but as a series of fragments or snapshots linked by a kind of dream logic, a hallucination that is neither entirely past nor present. When Michaels's first novel, "Fugitive Pieces," appeared in 1996, this technique - "lyric fiction" is an absurd term, but is there a better one? - still had an afterglow of magic around it, thanks to the extraordinary success of "The English Patient" four years earlier. Now lyric fiction is something like an institution: we can see more clearly its antecedents (Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, Paul Bowles, John Berger) and the trajectory of its influence over younger writers - to choose one example out of a hundred, consider Nadeem Aslam's "Wasted Vigil," published last year. Lyric fiction has become, inevitably, a style, a manner, and the pitfalls of its mannerisms became clear with the publication of Ondaatje's "Divisadero" in 2007, a book whose rather thin narrative thread all but disappeared in a fog of self-conscious artistry. "The Winter Vault" is not exempt from that same self-consciousness. A friend of mine once described Don DeLillo's "Underworld" as a book in which every sentence seems burdened by the weight of its own genius, and the same critique applies here: this novel is too systematic, too perfectly self-contained, too precious. Too often its characters sound like voices in a wispy philosophical dialogue, or a fragment of Kahlil Gibran: "'To define space,' Avery continued, and then he stopped. 'No. Not to give shape to space, but to give shape to . . . emptiness.'" (Ellipsis in the original). But beware: the reader who bites blissfully through these layers of frosting, expecting to find a soft, spongy filling, is going to wind up with a mouthful of shrapnel, sand and broken glass. By the end of "The Winter Vault" - hallelujah! - Anne Michaels has pulled off the ultimate trick of making us forget we've ever read a book like this before. A large part of what sustains this novel through its vaporous early pages is Michaels's concentration on the historical facts of her two parallel stories: the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway between Montreal and Lake Ontario, completed in 1959, and of the Aswan Dam in Egypt, begun only a few years later (finished in 1970). Avery and Jean, the couple at the center of the novel, meet during the St. Lawrence project; he's a young engineer, brought up to believe in the necessity and inevitability of such enormous public works, and she an amateur botanist, gathering the seeds of plants about to be submerged. Together they witness the callous and arbitrary treatment of the townspeople whose homes and communities lie in the path of the seaway - and, later, of the Nubian villagers whose entire civilization was buried beneath Lake Nasser when the Aswan Dam was built. "Witness" is the key word; the strongest voices throughout this novel are those of the subsidiary characters, like the woman who, when Avery suggests moving her husband's body to a new grave away from the seaway, says: "You'll have to move the hill. You'll have to move the fields around him. . . . You'll have to move the sun because it sets among those trees." That intertwining of the novel's style and content - the impossibility of rescuing the past from the ravages of time, balanced with the unlikelihood, even the absurdity, of using this poetic language to document those ravages - is ultimately the great theme of "The Winter Vault," as it was, for example, in Ondaatje's "Coming Through Slaughter," which attempts to resurrect the life and music of Buddy Bolden, whose cornet playing was never recorded. What these novels can't do (and Michaels never seems entirely reconciled to this fact) is create much of a texture of ordinary lived experience. No one comes down with sand rash or dysentery; no one pumps gas or orders French fries. Every gesture is freighted; every remark a bon mot. But what they can do is leave us with a sequence of indelible images: the displaced villagers rowing out to drift where they used to live; the Nubian women having to exchange their traditional dresses - a flowing black cloak called a gargara - for plain white saris more suited to the savannah around their new villages; the temple of Ramses at Abu Simbel cut into pieces with diamond saws and painstakingly reassembled miles from its original home on the Nile. AND occasionally, in the midst of all this careful composition, these lovingly burnished surfaces, the howl of a very different kind of novel comes through in "The Winter Vault." Avery and Jean conceive a child in Egypt, but the baby is still-born; they return to Canada and separate without quite falling out of love. Jean takes up with a Polish émigré artist, Lucjan, and becomes enmeshed in his circle of friends, and it is their voices that disrupt the last pages of the novel, like Cecil Taylor bashing his way through the middle of a prelude by Chopin. "You still believe in a sacred bond sealed during a night of soul-searching love," says one of them, speaking to Jean - and through her to the reader, and perhaps to Michaels herself. "I believe in taking what I want until there is nothing left. . . . Men honor promises out of fear - the fear of crossing a line that will rip up their lives. Then we call this fear love or fidelity, or religion or loyalty to principles. . . . Poles stepped over dead Jews in the street on the way to lunch." To her credit, Michaels lets this speech linger in our minds without attempting to disprove it; just as she never pretends there's a simple answer to the question of whether dams ought to be built, or temples and the ruins of cities reconstructed. In this way, "The Winter Vault" becomes more than a simulacrum of "Fugitive Pieces" or "The English Patient"; it shatters its own dreamlike stillness, and literature is all the better for it. Jess Row is the author of "The Train to Lo Wu," a collection of stories. He teaches at the College of New Jersey.
Guardian Review
At the heart of Anne Michaels's graceful, melancholy new novel is not so much a story as an argument. Set in 1964, The Winter Vault chronicles two great mid-century displacements caused by massive engineering projects - the building of the Aswan dam in Egypt and the St Lawrence seaway in Canada - likening these, in emotional and political terms, to upheavals caused by war. "Unprecedented in history, masses of humanity do not live, nor will they be buried, in the land where they were born," reflects the protagonist, Jean, toward the book's end. "War did this first . . . and then water." It is a case made with the humane intelligence and lush language one might expect from the author of Fugitive Pieces, Michaels's prize-winning bestseller of 1997. In The Winter Vault , with an art and precision like that of the builders she describes, Michaels constructs a bridge between two very different men: Avery, a sensitive engineer from England, and Lucjan, a Polish Jew who survived the war in Warsaw and later emigrated to Toronto, where he lives as a renegade artist. The powerful but delicate force connecting these two men is Jean, wife of Avery, lover of Lucjan; a quiet botanist whose chief gift to the men in her life is her capacity to listen. There is much to listen to. Michaels's characters tend to establish themselves through long passages of (largely uninterrupted) narration. Lying next to one another on a bed in a woodland cabin, or in Jean's Toronto apartment, or on a houseboat along the Nile, Jean and Avery unspool stories of their childhoods, of their parents' meeting, of the deaths that have shaped them. Later, in Lucjan's studio flat, Jean will spend even more time simply listening, to the lacerating stories of a man and a people devastated by war. The first, more emotionally involving half of the novel tells of Avery and Jean: their sweet courtship in and around Quebec; their move to the desert, where Avery is involved in the huge, extraordinary project of rescuing the temple at Abu Simbel from encroaching inundation; and finally the shocking stillbirth of the couple's baby girl. Michaels interweaves vividly textured scenes of Jean and Avery's life in the international community gathered around Abu Simbel with a moving account of an earlier water diversion project that, ironically, brought the two together - the building of the St Lawrence seaway, on which Avery also worked. He first discovered Jean, who knew the abandoned riverside communities as a child, mournfully walking along the drained Long Sault riverbed. Michaels is at her didactic best drawing parallels between the thousands of displaced Canadians and the Nubian population permanently uprooted by the building of the Aswan dam. She compresses a good deal of historical research into these passages, so that at times it is hard to separate one's wonder at the author's descriptive powers from basic wonder at the feats she describes. That houses, and peoples, and an entire 1,000-year-old temple could all be moved (the latter in "sandstone blocks, the smallest weighing 20 tonnes") is both astonishing and, as Michaels shows us, heartbreaking - and wrong. Eventually, even after his intense labours, and fully aware of the engineering triumph of its completion, Avery will feel that the temple's "reconstruction was a further desecration, as false as redemption without repentance". As readers of Fugitive Pieces know, Michaels is a great poet of loss, and the challenges of memory in the face of it. In a lovely touch, Michaels conveys the emotional freight of place names - a trope that recurs later in Lucjan's bitter Polish history - by placing a list of soon-to-be-lost Nubian villages (Abri, Kosh Dakki, Semna) next to those lost to the St Lawrence Seaway (Farran's Point, Aultsville, Maple Grove). Another powerful point is the heartbreak of a community being separated from the graves of its cherished dead. The "winter vault" of the novel's title refers to places in cold climates built to house corpses when the ground is too hard for digging graves. Michaels, and by extension Jean, worry frequently over how to honour the innumerable dead. Michaels produces passages of lyrical beauty, and eloquently expresses her horror at human violence inflicted on the land and its inhabitants. Yet the novel's emotional impact remains subdued, in part because Michaels at times allows her lessons - of botany, history, architecture - to overwhelm her story; and in part because of the abrupt narrative shift halfway through. After the stillbirth, the couple return to Canada, Avery determined to become an architect; unable to navigate their grief together, they separate. Jean meets Lucjan, the two become lovers, and much of the novel's second half is concerned with Lucjan's tales of Warsaw through the war and after, and of his bohemian Polish friends in Toronto. While the couple's separation is emotionally plausible, Michaels's willingness, along with Jean's, to abandon Avery (we have just glimpses of him throughout the second half) cheats us of experiencing the grief of a character we have come to care about. It also makes us rather suspicious of Jean, who seems to give little thought to whether her relationship with Lucjan constitutes any sort of betrayal. In the end, coming to terms with her and Avery's loss, Jean will have to find a way to move beyond her initial question ("What was personal loss in the face of universal devastation - the loss of Nubia, the destruction of cities") and learn to accept, for herself too, that "to mourn is to honour. Not to surrender to this keening, to this absence - a dishonouring." Sylvia Brownrigg's novel Morality Tale is published by Picador. Caption: article-brownriggmichaels.1 As readers of Fugitive Pieces know, [Anne Michaels] is a great poet of loss, and the challenges of memory in the face of it. In a lovely touch, Michaels conveys the emotional freight of place names - a trope that recurs later in [Lucjan]'s bitter Polish history - by placing a list of soon-to-be-lost Nubian villages (Abri, Kosh Dakki, Semna) next to those lost to the St Lawrence Seaway (Farran's Point, Aultsville, Maple Grove). Another powerful point is the heartbreak of a community being separated from the graves of its cherished dead. The "winter vault" of the novel's title refers to places in cold climates built to house corpses when the ground is too hard for digging graves. Michaels, and by extension [Jean], worry frequently over how to honour the innumerable dead. While the couple's separation is emotionally plausible, Michaels's willingness, along with Jean's, to abandon [Avery] (we have just glimpses of him throughout the second half) cheats us of experiencing the grief of a character we have come to care about. It also makes us rather suspicious of Jean, who seems to give little thought to whether her relationship with Lucjan constitutes any sort of betrayal. In the end, coming to terms with her and Avery's loss, Jean will have to find a way to move beyond her initial question ("What was personal loss in the face of universal devastation - the loss of Nubia, the destruction of cities") and learn to accept, for herself too, that "to mourn is to honour. Not to surrender to this keening, to this absence - a dishonouring." - Sylvia Brownrigg.
Kirkus Review
Canadian poet and novelist Michaels (Fugitive Pieces, 1997) offers a deeply felt novel of ideas that explores loss, displacement, human connection and the "one or two organizing principles" that inform an individual life. Avery, an engineer whose mother's family died in the Holocaust, and Jean, a botanist who still mourns her mother's early death, meet during the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which obliterates a community Jean has visited and loved since childhood. Married and living on a houseboat in the Nile while Avery works on dismantling and reassembling Temples during the construction of the Aswan Dam in 1964, they witness the destruction of another entire way of life. After the child that Jean is carrying dies in the womb, she is devastated by the loss and pulls away from Avery. On their return to Canada he suggests they separate. He hopes that giving her freedom will make returning to him possible. Broken hearted, he throws himself into studying architecture while she falls into an affair with an artist. Lucjan, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, is tender but damaged. And although his passion energizes her, he does not attempt to replace Avery in Jean's affection. Jean and Avery reunite on the anniversary of their baby's stillbirth. The heightened dialogue is brilliant but longwinded, and Jean and Avery's finely tuned sensitivities can grow cloying. Lucjan, meanwhile, is almost a romantic clich. What matters is the painfully beautiful prose with which Michaels brings lost worlds to life. Readers passionate about history, philosophy and the power of words to bend meaning will swoon for Michaels' rarefied if oddly impersonal fiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Canadian poet/novelist's second work of fiction (after Fugitive Pieces) will likely be one of the more beautiful and startlingly written works you'll read this year-and one of the more infuriating. It's a meditation on loss, as exemplified by the flooding that obliterated towns and cemeteries, flora and fauna when the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Aswan Dam were created. Jean met Avery while trying to rescue plants that will be drowned by the St. Lawrence floodwaters; Avery was one of the seaway's engineers. Soon they are married and living on a houseboat on the Nile as Avery works to save Abu Simbel. What can't be saved is a millennia-old culture whose devastation is chronicled in eye-opening detail. It's heartbreaking but also frustrating. Michaels keeps a distance, weaving through time in a drily lyrical tone that creates an appropriate sense of dislocation but can leave the reader stranded; in the end, this story is not animated by story. A challenge but definitely worth pondering. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/08.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
