Fugitive PiecesReport on "Fugitive Pieces"Inflaming the mind with stunning images while seducing with radiant prose, this brilliant debut novel is a story of damaged lives and the indestructibility of human mind. It speaks of loss, urgency, pain and the ultimate healing power of memory, as well as the redemptive power of love. Its characters come to understand the implacability of the natural world, the dispassionate perfection of science, the heartbreak of history. The narrative is infused with ideas about language itself, its power to distort and destroy meaning, and to restore it to those of stout heart. During World War II, when Jakob Beer was seven years old, his parents were murdered by Nazi soldiers who invaded their Polish village. , and her beloved and musically talented 15-year-old sister, Bella, is kidnapped. Fleeing the bloody scene, he is magically saved by Greek geologist Athos Roussos, who secretly transports the traumatized boy to his home on the island of Zakynthos, where they live during the Nazi occupation, suffering deprivation but escaping to the atrocities that are decimating Greece. Jewish community. Jakob is haunted by the moment of his parents' death, the burst door, the buttons spilling out of a saucer onto the floor, the darkness and his spirit remains sadly linked to that of his lost sister, whose fate anguishes him . But he travels in his imagination to the places that Athos describes and the books that this kind scholar offers him. At the end of the war, Athos accepts a university position in Toronto and Jakob begins a new life. Yet he remains disoriented and unanchored, trapped by memory and grief, “a damaged chromosome,” even more so after the premature death of Athos. But Jakob has now discovered his profession as a poet and essayist and strives to find the meaning of his life in language. The miraculous gift of his second wife's soul mate, the "voluptuous scholar" Michaela, comes late for Jakob. Their marriage is brief and ends in astonishing irony. The second part of the novel concerns a young man, Ben, deeply influenced by Jakob's poetry and who travels to the Greek island of Idhra to try to find the writer's notebooks after his death. Ben is another damaged soul. Son of Holocaust survivors, he carries their grief like a heavy stone. Emotionally mutilated and fearful, Ben feels like he was "born into the absence ».