The Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels is still best known for her 1996 first novel, the multi-award-winning Fugitive Pieces. That title could serve as a description of this new book, a novel made up of scraps of storytelling and essayistic fragments.
Towards the end of Held in terms of pages, but near the beginning in terms of chronology, we find ourselves in Paris in 1908, in very distinguished company. Ernest Rutherford, pioneer of nuclear physics, is dining with Marie and Pierre Curie. It is a hot summer night. The party moves out into the garden to take coffee by the light of a new-fangled lantern – an irradiated copper tube. Talk turns to Madame Palladino, the celebrated medium. Pierre Curie, who has been unable to prove Palladino is a fraud, says: “Science must never foreclose what it does not understand.” There seems to be a correspondence between the eerie light and the equally strange idea that the dead might coexist with the living, remembering us as we remember them.
