Held – Anne Michaels

READ FOR BOOKERTHON

Beginning with a soldier injured in the WWI trenches and observing three subsequent generations of family, Held is a kaleidoscopic narrative of memories, dreams and the supernatural. Held together by symbols, metaphors and motifs rather than a traditional linear narrative, Michaels asks the reader to surrender to a looser and more poetic structural form than we are used to in novels.

There are so many ways the dead show us they are with us. Sometimes they stay deliberately absent, in order to prove themselves by returning. Sometimes they stay close and then leave in order to prove they were with us. Sometimes they bring a stag to a graveyard, a cardinal to a fence, a song on the wireless as soon as you turn it on. Sometimes they bring a snowfall.

● There were many moments throughout Held where I was very engaged and feeling quite desperate to find out what was ahead for the characters. Increasingly though, it became hard to follow what exactly was happening and how the different chapters were meant to link with each other. This took the novel from enjoyable to frustrating for me. I don’t mind a challenging read, but this was too much for me and my brain. – Suzy

● Held is told in fragments that are sometimes pages long and sometimes only one sentence. Whatever their length they are poignant and poetic and powerful. The book starts with a man in the trenches in WWI, injured and hoping not to die. Spoiler alert, he doesn’t die and in chapter two he is photographing portraits and somehow capturing ghosts of the past. This becomes a theme of the book, which despite it’s brevity manages to encapsulate four generations of one family, their internal struggles and how each is moving through life and death. The book does have a loose structure and this did hinder the flow for me. While I thought every word was beautiful, I spent a lot of time trying to understand the novel’s meaning. – Rachel

Published 2023
McClelland & Stewart
240 pages