Anne Michaels (2009) The Winter Vault.

Posted by celticman on Mon, 24 Mar 2014

Anne Michaels’ collections of poetry have won a shedload of international prizes, but as any literary agent knows, there’s no money in poetry. Poets that write prose tend to be good at the small things that make the larger things. This is quite a simple story of love lost and found. Jean loves Avery. Avery loves Jean. They have a baby, but it’s stillborn. They drift apart. Jean has this thing with Lucjan. He’s Polish an orphan from the Warsaw uprising. They get naked and talk. The Winter Vault is full of echoes, an extended backstory of people’s lives. It’s more a meditation than a book. The empty vault of Jean’s womb is mirrored by moving the Abu Simbel temple block by block from the path of the proposed Aswan Dam.  ‘At night, Avery, sat on the dock of the houseboat and re-calculated the increasing tension in the remaining rock, re-evaluated the wisdom of each cut, the zones of weakness and new stress forces as, tonne by tonne, the temple disappeared.’ It also charts the loss of the Nubians of their beloved land to the rising Nile. It’s not an easy book to read. Pages grow one after the other filled with Jean, for example, remembering or recalling a particular incident from her childhood, her botanical plans or what kind of foods taste best, with the whens and the whys folded inside that kind of knowledge. Wisdom lurks among the mundane. Listen to Lucjan’s friend Ranger addressing Jean: ‘You still believe you will be loved, truly loved, past all frailty, and misjudgement and betrayal. I’ve seen a man say goodbye to his wife with a look of such penetrating trust between them you could smell the breakfasts and promises, the sitting up with the sick child, the love-making after the child has fallen asleep, the candy smell of the children’s medicine still  sticky on their hands—and then that same man drives straight from that bedroom drives straight from that bedroom to his lover, who opens her legs like a hallelujah while the wife scrubs the pots from last night’s dinner…’ It’s the kind of book that can be read more than once and should be, but I know I never will.

 

Comments

Submitted by VeraClark on

This is the kind of review that anyone would prefer to read than the usual bull in the broadsheets. Sharp as a tack, analytical and had me howling laughing at 'opens her legs like a hallelujah.'  Your reviews would rake in goldness, am positive of it. I know you don't give a monkey's about my new career choice for you, but all these need reading far and wide. I've missed you on here, you know. 

 

Submitted by celticman on

hallelujah Vera. I did like that line. It sounded like a bitter truth, perhaps a woman's bitter truth. She's certainly a very wise woman. I'll be looking at 'Fugitive Pieces'.

 

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

Poets who write prose tend to be good. Yes. If you and the rest have time I highly recommend the English translations of Roberto Bolano (no doubt the Spanish is better still for those who know Spanish). I have only yet got round to some of the prose. The best whodunnit ever is The Skating Rink and it's short. Three first person narrators lure you into their strange homeless and semi-homeless worlds on a rundown holiday campsite in Barcelona. The murder of an old and charismatic lady who squats there with the blind eye permission of the management happens. There are densely brilliant stories going on woven into the crazily real fabric of life, and if you guess who dunnit you are smarter than me even though on a second reading it is obvious. And every word, every line every paragraph had been worked on and perfected, the poet inside the novelist is evident. Longer and equally brilliant is The Savage Detectives, a multi-narrative ramble of homeless Chilean folks and others with no direction home. Bolano writes about the world that he himself is from; accomodation that is insecure at best,casual jobs taken on the fly as the workers have no legal paperwork to be in the countries they fetch up in, friendship groups that are here today and combust tomorrow, only  too rarely to regroup with maybe two of the individuals alive and well enough to move and speak and find one another again. And beneath all the collective mayhem the need to express oneself creatively.

Bolano died of drink and exhaustion when 50 in 2003. He was born in Chile three years before I was born in North London. I am 57 and alive and well enough and he has shown me how very fortunate I am.    

I shall order The Winter Vault from my library pronto          Elsie

Submitted by celticman on

Bolano sounds like my kind of man. I'll look out for him.