The Winter Vault

by Anne Michaels

Ebook, 2009

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Your library, World Literature

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Publication

Vintage (2009), Kindle Edition, 354 pages

Description

In 1964, a newly married Canadian couple settle into a houseboat on the Nile just below Abu Simbel. Avery is one of the engineers responsible for the dismantling and reconstruction of the temple, a "machine-worshipper" who is nonetheless sensitive to their destructive power. Jean is a botanist by vocation, passionately interested in everything that grows. They met on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, witnessing the construction of the Seaway as it swallowed towns, homes, and lives. Now, at the edge of another world about to be inundated, they create their own world, exchanging "the innocent memories we don't know we hold until given the gift of the eagerness of another." But when tragedy strikes, they return to separate lives in Toronto: Avery to school to study architecture; and Jean into the orbit of Lucjan, a Polish emigre artist whose haunting tales of occupied Warsaw pull her further from Avery but offer her the chance to assume her most essential life. Stunning in its explorations of both the physical and emotional worlds of its characters, intensely moving and lyrical, The Winter Vault is a radiant work of fiction.… (more)

Media reviews

Quill & Quire

In Canada, much of our most venerated fiction has the feel of high-minded scrapbooks. Don’t get me wrong: themes don’t come more classic than memory and loss, and readers seem to treasure books that overflow with backward-looking mournfulness. But too much woe is, well, too much.

— 11 more

Michaels produces passages of lyrical beauty, and eloquently expresses her horror at human violence inflicted on the land and its inhabitants. Yet the novel's emotional impact remains subdued, in part because Michaels at times allows her lessons - of botany, history, architecture - to overwhelm her

story; and in part because of the abrupt narrative shift halfway through.

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New York Times

That intertwining of the novel’s style and content — the impossibility of rescuing the past from the ravages of time, balanced with the unlikelihood, even the absurdity, of using this poetic language to document those ravages — is ultimately the great theme of “The Winter Vault,” as it

was, for example, in Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter,” which attempts to resurrect the life and music of Buddy Bolden, whose cornet playing was never recorded. What these novels can’t do (and Michaels never seems entirely reconciled to this fact) is create much of a texture of ordinary lived experience. No one comes down with sand rash or dysentery; no one pumps gas or orders French fries. Every gesture is freighted; every remark a bon mot. But what they can do is leave us with a sequence of indelible images: the displaced villagers rowing out to drift where they used to live; the Nubian women having to exchange their traditional dresses — a flowing black cloak called a gargara — for plain white saris more suited to the savannah around their new villages; the temple of Ramses at Abu Simbel cut into pieces with diamond saws and painstakingly reassembled miles from its original home on the Nile.

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Bookmunch

Reading The Winter Vault is a peculiarly intense experience: Michael’s language is acutely precise, richly textured and lyrically beautiful, whether she is describing the immensity of the Egyptian desert or focusing in scrupulous detail upon a flower in Jean’s garden. The most ordinary objects

become charged with layers of meaning, articles in Michael’s “catalogue of desires… market of the broken and lost” each evoking a highly resonant series of significations. Yet frequently Michaels’s sentences are almost too beautiful, too intensely suffused with portent: Jean and Avery converse in a series of cryptic, gnomic utterances which are too mannered to be convincing.

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The Walrus

The characters in The Winter Vault live in a world of intense emotion and ethical grappling, “an engagement of mind…almost shattering in its pleasure.” Freed from the shackles of groceries and telephone bills, their essences appear distilled or concentrated on the page. Luckily this paring

down, under Michaels’ sure hand, makes them not less human but more so. Her gift for subtlety reverberates throughout the rest of the book as well.

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Iliteratura.cz

Jazyk Michaels je nesmírně hutný, plný metafor a vyznačuje se vypjatou obrazností. Místy je plný symbolů, autorka opakuje a zrcadlí jednotlivé motivy a tím jim dodává na dalších rozměrech. Místy velmi konkrétní, to když se snaží zachytit všechny střípky reality pomocí

detailních popisů kaž-dodenních předmětů. Slova plynou jako řeka, která je jedním z hlavních symbolů celého románu. Představuje paměť, jež v sobě všechno nese a uchovává, zároveň ale její proud podemílá a obrušuje vzpomínky a přináší zapomnění. Zároveň je řeka ničitelkou odná-šející pryč vše, co mělo zůstat do paměti otisknuto. Stává se tak spojnicí hlavních témat knihy, jejím prostřednictvím se vše doplňuje, navzájem odráží, protíná. Voda je v knize zásadním živlem, stává se sama postavou. Jazyk se jí podobá ještě v jednom aspektu, a to sice ve své melodičnosti, hudeb-nosti. Místy zurčí, místy se líně a těžce dere kupředu, nikdy však nepolevuje a jeho bohatost je ohromující.

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