Held is a difficult book to review and I'm not sure that I'm clever enough to do so.

The prose is very atmospheric and poetic, but there's not really a plot and it's difficult to follow who, where and when you are. But it's wonderful at evoking emotions, sensations and feelings.

Four stars for me, but I might need to read it again.

I enjoyed this book and like how it was told in a fragmentary style. There was a big theme of nostalgia to it which was good and I enjoyed how all the threads of the book weaved together. It wasn’t the.most exciting book but I still thought it was written well and it was a book which makes you slow down and think rather than a fast paced one.

There is writing of genius in this book, but also, I'm sorry to say, a lot of trying too hard to be 'literary'. The early episodes were really compelling but I just couldn't be bothered with the later ones which seemed deliberately divergent from the threads that the reader really wants to find out about. I know there is a fashion for obliquely-linked short stories but sometimes the writers of novels like these are determined avoid anything as down-market as a plot. It would have taken so little to give this book a powerful narrative thread, and this could have transformed it into a masterpiece. A sadly wasted opportunity.

I
An interesting and challenging read . It was a struggle to get into but it was worth sticking with.

I was drawn to this novel upon learning that it was longlisted for the Booker. Since I read it, it has now been shortlisted, proof that I’m not only reader struck by this relatively brief yet poetic book.

The narrative is made up of segments whose setting and subject vary from a soldier injured in a battlefield in WW1, to contemporary Finland. The opening chapter, possibly the most poignant of the book shows the soldier, clearly suffering from PTSD induced by horrific wartime experiences, trying to adapt to normal life as a portrait photographer. Incredibly, ghosts start to appear on his photographs – a sign of hope in the aftermath of the butchery of the war. But not all is what it seems. Figurative ghosts feature in the other segments, as the characters are haunted by their past and by their feelings and desires. Michaels teases out links between her protagonists, hinting at the sometimes unlikely events and connections which mark the history of each and every family.

While the structure of the book is quite innovative, and it merits attentive reading, Held is also, at its heart, a “traditional” novel in the best sense of the word, reflecting the stories and emotions of ordinary human beings to whom readers can relate.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2024/09/held-by-anne-michaels.html

Achingly sad.
Her prose is magnificent and the stories entrancing. Each is linked to the others in a fragile chain of lives, and loves. The sadness and intensity of emotion is sometimes overwhelming.
It was not a comfortable read although beautiful, and I found myself torn between sadness and to balance this by trying to find each link. A stronger thread would have turned this into a magnificent novel rather than one that was as fragile as the individuals in the stories.

Now Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
From the trenches of WW I into the future, Anne Michaels gives us a montage of connected story lines centering on characters dealing with memory and grief - and if you're like me, you'll now say: "Wait, what? World war, history, and memory? Like the masterpiece that is Austerlitz? Like this other experimental gem the Booker nominated, The Long Take??" And the answer is: Yes, but if these were written by Paulo Coelho. And I hate Paulo Coelho.

The multiple characters we meet in the text are connected, some closer, some only vaguely, and we jump not only through time, but also change place, from England, to France, to what's today Belarus (Brest-Litovsk) to the Gulf of Finland. The conviction that the power of love and human connection can maybe not conquer everything, but stand strong in the face brutality, is an important narrative thread. And it all comes together in the most cutesy way imaginable: Calendar sayings, sentences screaming "hello, I'm deep" mixed with the most obvious metaphors. We also get various diary entries and dreams, all in the same tone, and love stories that heavily rely on the descriptions of optic details and touch, the latter actually very well done.

But no, I don't want to read about a soldier coming home from war and then working as a photographer, and then suddenly the subjects' dead loved ones appear in the images, and then some somber lines, and that's it for that vignette. That's lazy, and it's boring: The dead are never really dead, blah blah, blah. And there is so much more in that vein. Make something more of it, Anne! Give us a surprising angle, a new insight, a crisp, less self-involved sentence! Also, the way trauma is represented in the characters is very poor. Every episode of "Babylon Berlin" tells you more about the specific psychological trauma caused on the battlefields than this. And then, Ernest Rutherford shows sup. *Sigh* And "history is a continual convergence of stories" - you don't say.

This ain't it for me. Thanks for The Long Take though, Booker: What a fantastic novel about the repercussions of war, also written by a poet - and as prose poetry for that matter! - that I would never have encountered without the Prize. So please read this, or read some Rainer Maria Rilke, whose quote "Every angel is terrifying" from the Duino Elegies features in the book - has Michaels also read Walter Benjamin's ideas about the "angel of history"?

Shortlisted for the Booker prize 2024.

It is so hard to review this book because I am not sure what to say about it. It’s not like I understood much, anyway. Ok, only half joking.

Held might be quite tiny, but it is not an easy read. It requires quite a bit of concentration due to its structure. Also, patience. It took me a while to fully appreciate the writing and feel the atmosphere. I almost gave up at some point, thinking this is not for me.

I might say that the novel is a collection of vignettes about the members of a family (and some well-known people such as Marie Curie). The novel starts in 1917, on a battlefield, where John lies after a blast. The beginning is full of musing such as : ”We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever” or “We can only think about the unknown in terms of the known”. The latter idea is also found in Thinking, Fast and Slow, a non-fiction book I recommend. I think the author started as a poet and it shows. So, we jump back and forth in time and we get to know some of what happened to John and his kin. All, enveloped in a poetic, semi-translucent haze.
It seems to be a novel about death, loss, hope and …afterlife? Confusing at times but worth reading.

I'm torn. This is beautiful, but maybe a little too spare for my tastes. I felt an odd sense of deja vu reading the section about the photographer. It's fine to use a non-original idea (pretty difficult not to!) but there needs to be more time given to it, if so. A more specific take offered. I did enjoy this, I just found it a little wanting compared with my expectations, after Fugitive Pieces. But the writing, of course, is gorgeous.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

This is a really beautiful book. It came to my attention due to its Booker longlisting, I was delighted to get the opportunity to read this ahead of its publication date.

Held is a book about love, loss, change and connections. The prose is exquisite thoughout as the book unfolds in its unusual fragmentary style.

Initially ( the first 40 pages or so) I found this book quite challenging so I gave up on trying to work out where the book was going and just gave in to the beautiful writing. I didn’t alway understand parts of this book and it’s absolutely a book that deserves and requires a reread, I think the connections will sharpen for me in doing so. Yet despite this it was a really pleasant reading experience, almost dreamlike in parts.

One of the most unusual books I’ve read this year.

Held
By Anne Michaels

I can acknowledge that this Booker longlist nominated translation is poetic and dreamy but I find it difficult to interpret and rather unmoored. I'm not a huge fan of this style of writing and just did not enjoy my reading of this. It's getting a lot of really good reviews so it is likely just a matter of taste.

Thanks to #netgalley and the publisher for access to a review copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

This book tells of love stories and deaths that span generations, it's full of connections that I feel I've not fully worked out. The prose is poetic and some of it is easily read and understood, whilst other parts requires much more brain power! I think it's a book that needs to be read a few times to get the most out of it, and some parts of it absolutely absorbed me, whilst I felt a little lost in others.

I really tried to like this book as the writing is undoubtedly beautiful but I found it so hard to connect with the characters and their situations, it all felt jarring and disconnected. I really appreciated the opportunity to read it though and thank the publisher for providing me with an ARC to review.

A stunning book which has remained with me long after I turned the final page. Humanity laid bare in beautiful prose. A must read.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, Anne Michaels’ "Held" weaves interconnected narratives spanning from World War I to the modern era, exploring themes of memory, grief, and love amidst historical brutality.
The narrative shifts across time and geography—from England to the Gulf of Finland—yet feels disjointed, reliant on clichés and predictable metaphors. Characters' struggles with trauma lack nuance, leaving their experiences feeling flat. The attempt to blend historical figures with personal stories often feels forced and distracts from the core themes. Despite Anne Michaels talent for evocative language the novel ultimately falls short.

Held by Ann Michaels is often quite stunning. Ranging in time from 1910 and 2025 it begins with a young soldier laying immobile on a WW1 French battlefield thinking of his loved ones and wondering if he'll ever see them again. The chapters telling of him and his wife,from meeting to after a war that he never really left behind are beautifully written and there's a touch of the supernatural ,which usually turns me off of any story instantly, that is moving and thought-provoking.

The rest of the book jumps around the generations of the couple's family and can be quite confusing,not least in the last few chapters that beat my efforts to link to the rest of the book completely.

The writing is amazing,often verging on beautiful,and I did enjoy it and appreciate it but it totally lost me towards the end when I was just left confused wondering what I'd missed,going back a couple of chapters and reading again I still didn't get it.

3 Stars for the book,without the confusing ending it would have been 4,and a solid 5 for the amazing writing, so overall 4.

‘Held’ by Anne Micheals,makes for an interesting though at times challenging read.Just when one is comfortable with the direction of the storyline it ether stops abruptly or takes a different direction.Overall I enjoyed this book yet felt that some episodes would have benefited from following further through in their telling.The almost poetically worded styling was beautifully done though occasionally the threads of narrative unravelled a little in my opinion,diminishing the general effect.
Frequently an entrancing journey like recalling remnants of a half remembered dream.Worth making the effort to appreciate the delightful journey.

NO SPOILERS:
Held begins in 1917, and moves back and forth between 1910 and 2025, with many stops in between. Each chapter fills a gap in the plot and completes the story.

But this is book is so much more than that. It is wisdom, reflection, meditation. It is words to savour and ponder, so very beautifully written awash with sentences and paragraphs which are a joy to read and re-read.

This passage is just beautiful:
“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.”

And this, on dementia:
“He was lonelier than me, he didn’t even have himself.”

And this, on loss:
“When someone dies, the very air changes”

The thoughts and understanding of the characters (of course, these are really of the writer) show great understanding of compassion, being human, being alive and being absent.

For all that, I do have one criticism. Marie Curie, unless I am missing something, adds nothing to the book and it would be no less of a wonder without her.

At the time of writing, Held by Anne Michaels is on the Long List for the Booker Prize 2024.

Held is a short novel currently longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. It was one of the few who spoke to me the most when it comes to the themes – it promised a reflective historical fiction that spans different generations and moments in time featuring a ghost and the tragedy of war.
I have to say I did not enjoy this book at all. The main issue I had with it was the overblown writing style. This was very much style over substance (I know the writer is also a poet and it shows). If you want to pick up this book I strongly encourage first reading a sample to see if the style works for you – clearly there are people who really enjoyed this novel but for me the writing was insufferable and the whole book was incredibly monotonous, pretentious and overall forgettable. It was trying very hard to be poignant and it really showed… There was almost no characterization, and I could not care for anything that happened in the disjointed narrative.

Thanks to Netgalley and Bloomsbury for the e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Booker Prize longlisted.

Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist whose debut “Fugitive Pieces” won the Orange (now Women’s) Prize in only its second year (1997).

At the time of her second novel – The Winter Vault – she explained in a Guardian interview that while her poetry writing gace her the discipline of not wasting a single word, she started writing novels because "I was pushing the form as far as I could in the longer pieces, trying to make connections on a larger scale. I stretched the poetry as far as it would go … Fiction is expansive: it offers a way of layering things; of having images and gestures that connect between page 100 and page 303. It gives you the chance to bring the reader in slowly, via as many strands as you can”

This is her third novel and the first I have read – and I have to say that, even before reading this interview, my view reading it was that, both in terms of writing style and the impression I came away with, this had very much the experience of reading a linked poetry collection.

Ostensibly a series of vignettes – largely linked by four female generations of a family – and moving in time from 1910 to 2025 and in location from France to Suffolk to Estonia – it is thematically I think drawn together by two linked ideas (one timely but perhaps conventional, the other more unusual and I have to say slightly jarring for me initially).

We open in 1917 – John (the close point of view character in this section) lies wounded on a WWI battlefield in France facing another younger soldier. As John realises he is going to survive we realise the other soldier is dead, and we are also with John as memories from his life return, particularly the way in which he met his wife Helen.

Also though the key themes of the book emerge almost immediately:

Firstly (conventionally) war and its aftermath and how major world events play out in individual lives

Secondly (less conventionally and in my words) the interplay of science and mystery – the way in which both were going through a major point of development in the first decades of the twentieth century (science due to the discoveries of atomic science, radiation, relativity and so on; mystery due to the sudden uptake in spiritualism due to the sheer number of deaths of loved husbands and sons).

But all written in poetic language

The second section starts off again in conventional territory – John and Helena are living in North Yorkshire in 1920, John running a photographer’s studio remembering also the death of his mother in a Zeppelin raid and also remembering how Helena tried to persuade him to elope with her rather than enlisting. When however John takes a photo of a young man he is shocked to see an apparent image of another figure on the plate, even more so when the man reveals it is his mother - and that leads back in particular to the second theme above, in a nuanced and moving way.

From there the book becomes more fragmentary:

We meet Anna – John and Helen’s daughter – who travels over the world nursing in war zones; her hatmaker husband Peter and their daughter Mara who, despite the challenges on her own childhood from her mother’s frequent humanitarian absences, becomes herself a war-zone nurse and marries Alan, a war journalist, the two meeting after a bombing raid.

But we also see Marie Curie first by observation (by a female British mathematician writing to her now dead husband) including a vignette of a real life incident when with Pierre and a group of other scientists they attempt to measure and investigate what is happening a medium summons spirits; later in 1912 in the aftermath of the controversy over her second Nobel Prize when she flees to England to take refuge with her friend and fellow-widow Hertha Ayrton and both meditate on life and death (while also meeting the mathematician’s husband).

And two more enigmatic chapters are I believe based on the real life Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (fictionalised as Paavo) and the turn of the 20th Century French documentary photographer Eugène Atget (unnamed in the book).

And we finish with (I think) Mara’s daughter Anna observed by Aimo (a character we met in a previous chapter as a child) in what seems to be a new Baltic War in the very near future.

Overall this is a beautifully written book - one which rewards a re-read and which shows the truth of something John once wrote down

"The elusiveness of the form is the form"