Author chooses words carefully

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/04/2009 (6328 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

So what the heck took her so long?

Toronto writer Anne Michaels has no problem fielding questions about the 13-year gap between her landmark debut novel, Fugitive Pieces, and her newly released followup.

“I have a rather insane patience,” says Michaels, who will be in Winnipeg 2 p.m. Sunday at McNally Robinson Grant Park to sign and read from her new effort, The Winter Vault.

“I was very committed to making sure I did exactly what needed to be done. I had to research engineering, botany, architecture.”

Like Fugitive Pieces, a Holocaust-themed effort that became an international sensation after its Canadian release in 1996, The Winter Vault spans decades and continents.

Its central characters, a British engineer and his Canadian botanist wife, play out their relationship against the backdrop of the dismantling of an Egyptian temple on the Nile River and the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway in Quebec.

Also like Fugitive Pieces, the language is sombre, poetic and freighted with philosophic and intellectual ideas.

“I’ve chosen each word for a specific reason,” says Michaels, who has also published three volumes of poetry. “Everything in this novel is an argument against the loss of memory.”

According to Ellen Seligman, Michaels’ publisher and editor at McClelland & Stewart in Toronto, Fugitives Pieces has enjoyed sales of almost one million copies in 31 countries. About 200,000 of those copies have been sold in Canada. It was adapted into a movie in 2007.

“It’s a great piece of literature about war and loss,” Seligman says. “Its themes are universal.”

To compare, Winnipeg writer Miriam Toews’ 2004 bestseller A Complicated Kindness has sold a reported 350,000 copies worldwide.

As a result of Michaels’ success, the CanLit establishment has been waiting eagerly for The Winter Vault.

Last weekend, in a breach of arts journalism etiquette, two newspapers jumped the publisher’s April 4 embargo date for reviews.

The Ottawa Citizen said the novel was “as ambitious, original and startling” as Fugitive Pieces.

Said critic Janice Kennedy: “Michaels’ writing is sumptuous the way the morning sun on a garden is sumptuous, luminously, timelessly.”

The Toronto Star, however, weighed in with a pan by book columnist Geoff Pevere:

“By the time I finished The Winter Vault —- as aptly named a book as any I can think of,” Pevere wrote, “it seemed to fall to the floor like the lid sliding off a coffin.”

Michaels was ready with her response.

“I weep over the futility of my labours when people can say these things as if I just tossed the book off,” says Michaels, 51, a single mother of a 10-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy.

“At least they could give me the dignity of trying to understand what my intention was.”

The Free Press will publish its review of The Winter Vault, by University of Winnipeg literature scholar Neil Besner, on Sunday.

How does she want her fans to approach the book?

“I want so much for the reader to trust me and to come along with me,” she says. “No choice has been made lightly. I’ve thought everything out to the best of my ability.”

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca