A Booker Shortlist Author On The Ways Language Fails

Anne Michaels, 66, is the author of five collections of poetry and three novels, including her debut, Fugitive Pieces, a post-Holocaust narrative cited as “a novel that goes to the heart of any disaster” when it won the Orange (now Women’s) prize in 1997. Her latest novel, Held, now out in paperback, is on the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize, whose winner is announced on 12 November. Praised by the New York Times as “a lyrical jigsaw of impressions and observations”, it moves between 1902 and 2025 in the company of a large cast of characters both fictitious and historical. Michaels spoke from Toronto, her birthplace, where she teaches creative writing.

How does a novel begin life for you?
With an image or a character for whom I feel an immediate compassion – like love at first sight, you know, when it then takes you 50 years to understand that person! I never imagine it’s going to be a short process.

So what was on your mind when you were writing Held?
Whether there is any consolation to be found in our mortality. Also: the very significant historical moment when science begins to displace our ancient relationship to what cannot be seen. The book argues there’s a value to that relationship – a value to what cannot be proven.

At what point did you alight on the book’s fragmentary structure?
I knew instantly that it was going to be told in various moments – I didn’t know how they were connected, but I knew that they were, and that it was going to take me a long time to understand how.

What led you to the style, both vivid and vague at once? I’m thinking, for example, of the startling glimpses of life in unspecified war zones during a segment set in the 1980s, or the way the novel introduces real-life figures to the action so subtly that we may wonder who is and isn’t invented.
I wanted the history to be under the surface. There’s a different measure for history that has to do with the agency of our inner lives: whether we turn our eyes a micrometre in one direction or another is crucial. And choosing what to be specific about or not to be specific about also has to do with wanting us to be jolted into really feeling an experience. You can use brutal language to describe brutality, but that’s a lie; language can’t represent brutality. It’s exactly the same when I’m trying to get at the most beautiful, profoundly intense experience of intimacy. Those moments may be indescribable but they’re ordinarily perceivable – we all know what they are. So I’m also trying to write in such a way that the reader has a place on the page.

This is your third novel; your first was published in 1996 and your second, The Winter Vault, came out in 2009.
A book, for me, takes as long as it takes. I think you only have one chance at a book and I’d rather write the book that needs to be written – and write fewer. It sometimes requires patience because I don’t know how to compromise. It’s hard to know there’s no shortcut; you can have your intellect aroused but wait years for connections to emerge. I console myself by saying, well, when you think of the writers you love, how many books do you mention? Two, three, four? So it’s all right to write fewer if I can reach the place I’m hoping to get to – but as a means to an economy, it’s not exactly something I’d recommend!

In a review of Fugitive Pieces, John Berger quoted Adorno’s famous remark that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” before concluding that, because of your novel, “finally, that statement is untrue”. What did you think when you saw that?
We were friends for decades, but at the time he wrote that review, we had not yet met. I was tremendously moved. We understood each other – deeply – and it meant a great deal that he said that. My relationship to that phrase of Adorno’s is that one could think of the silence at a funeral. In historical terms, that moment of silence could be years; how long it might be, and the distinction between silence and muteness, is something to think about. Muteness is cessation; silence isn’t. Silence is generative. Something happens in silence.

You’re currently on the shortlist for Canada’s Giller prize and the Prix Femina Étranger in France, as well as the Booker. How does it feel?
I never imagine that any of my novels will be understood – in the sense of being experienced – so it’s incredibly important to me; because the books take a long time, it’s storing up courage for what’s next.

When did you first feel that the stakes of writing were so high?
Part of me always had that conviction. Because Fugitive Pieces was my first novel, it was a tremendous testing of that resolve. We cannot speak on behalf of the dead, we cannot forgive on behalf of the dead, so how one writes about certain events carries tremendous responsibility. That responsibility to history, to the dead, to the core of what it means to be alive… I take it seriously. One never stops asking: from when do you begin to count the dead?

What’s Toronto like as a place to write?
I’ve lived here a long time and I have watched the literary culture of this city change dramatically. In the late 1940s, there were only 14 Canadian books published in Canada. A federal report in the early 50s said: “We’re supposed to be reporting on the state of our culture – we don’t have one!” From that moment, remarkably, there was a tremendous birth of culture across the board and an explosion of small presses in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Poets responded with most poignant alacrity, because [the idea that] there could be a community [of poets] across the country was something inconceivable!

Tell us about the last book you gave as a gift.
I gave to a student a very slender book called Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, because that’s a book where there’s hardly a breath on the surface of it – everything is in the depths – so, for this particular student, it was exactly the right thing.

Are you reading the other novels on the Booker shortlist?
Absolutely, out of solidarity.