Fiction: The Winter Vault

The Age

Anne Michaels' long-anticipated second novel grew from a striking Egyptian image, writes Ben Naparstek. . . .

With Fugitive Pieces, the opening image occurred to her in 1980: a boy digging a hole in the ground to hide from the Nazis.

The idea germinated for nearly two decades, as Michaels supported herself by teaching creative writing and composing musical scores.

Spare and lyrically intense, Fugitive Pieces traces the life of PolishJew Jakob Beer; rescued by a Greek archaeologist as a child in 1940, he becomes a writer in Toronto struggling with memories of his slaughtered family.

The Winter Vault also grew from a mental image — of structural engineer Avery Escher painting the back of his new wife, botanist Jean, in a houseboat on the Nile.

The novel opens in 1964, as the Great Temple at Abu Simbel is being dismantled and reconstructed to salvage it from the flooding waters of the new Aswan dam. The attempt to save a historical monument through replicating it troubles the couple.

"With that single image, of the two on the houseboat by the temple being taken apart, came this notion of destruction and rebuilding," says Michaels, 50, in her softly insistent voice. "Perfection is a kind of deceit; the way we commemorate is a kind of remembering, but it is also definitely a kind of forgetting."