Held by Anne Michaels: A profound literary experience

Canadian author Anne Michaels is perhaps best known for her award-winning debut novel, Fugitive Pieces, published to international acclaim in 2009, and later adapted as a feature film. Michaels, however, has continued to spellbind readers across the globe with her poetry and prose in the ensuing years. Held, her third novel, begins on a French battlefield in 1917 but ultimately spans four generations as it traverses time and space before reaching the Gulf of Finland in 2025: “A field becomes a battlefield; becomes a field again.”

Across 12 sections, the reader experiences flashes from different moments in a family’s history that sometimes also feature historical figures such as Charles Darwin and Marie and Pierre Curie. These fragments are both disconnected and not – echoes of the past haunt the present and future with consequences erupting from moments of connection decades later.

That Michaels is a poet is evident in almost every line of her prose, through both the construction of the text on the page, but also in the tone and expression of the language itself: “The snow falls, inventing its own silence.” A daughter is “long, like a pine marten, a single pure muscle”. There is an intense, mysterious beauty that infuses Michael’s precise prose with a compelling power that is exquisite.

What bonds the seemingly disparate episodes in the novel is the connective tissue of hope. Against the backdrop of epic world events and advances in technology and science, Michaels illuminates how the internal life of one person can transcend all external influence. How the interiority of an individual – their capacity for love, empathy and desire for connection – can be an invisible force of agency that effects change in almost unfathomable ways. That there is great power in surrendering to the unknown, that “perhaps the most important things we know cannot be proven”.

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Held is not a narrative with a conventional plot that the reader can explicitly identify but, rather, an experience of slow gradual comprehension as the threads continue to knot, unravel and tighten. Michaels offers a profound literary experience that is executed with subtlety, grace and an exquisite intuition for the secret burning pulses of humanity that thrum beyond time. As John asks in the very first line: “We know life is finite. Why should we believe that death lasts forever?”