''Fugitive Pieces,'' which was published to enormous critical and popular acclaim in Canada last year, often reads like a long prose poem, which is no surprise given that its creator is the author of two award-winning volumes of verse. The second story concerns Ben, the son of two Holocaust survivors, a man haunted by his parents' pain, a man who finds solace in Jakob's poems. Two overlapping stories illustrating this aphorism are laid out in the pages of ''Fugitive Pieces.'' The first concerns Jakob, a poet who at the age of 7, during World War II, lost his parents and his beloved sister to the Nazis. In other words: To live in the past, to allow ghosts and nightmares to blind you to the pleasures and possibilities of the present, is to dishonor the memory of the dead. ''To remain with the dead is to abandon them'' - that is the lesson of Anne Michaels's lapidary debut novel.
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