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Loading... The Winter Vaultby Anne Michaels
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  Niecierpek | Nov 21, 2009 |  Summary: Avery and Jean are a married Canadian couple sent to Egypt where Avery is an engineer helping with the moving of the temple at Abu Simbel. Avery and Jean experience loss in Egypt, and their return to Canada as well as their growing apart are told in dreamy poetic fragments. Review: I’ve made it my goal this year to read every book on the 2009 Giller shortlist, and this is the first book I can knock off that ‘to do’ list. And it’s not a bad start at all. The Winter Vault is written in such poetic language that it’s a treat just to watch what Michaels will come up next, kind of like watching a trapeze artist fly through the air. You wait for her to fall, but she never does. In her book, she explores loss, marriage, history, and the private lives of several characters, from Avery and Jean to the man Jean takes up with, the bohemian artist Lucjan. The book is a bit cold in the sense that I never grew to like any of the characters. There isn’t much of a solid plot, only musings as the characters go through their lives. This can get boring after a while, and I did flip quickly through a few pages where I felt nothing of significance was happening or Michaels was getting too pretentious. For people who are looking for a traditional plot-based novel, this isn’t the book for you. But if you want to see beautiful language at play, I recommend reading The Winter Vault. Instead of digesting it all at once, read it as if you would poetry, a bit every day. It works better when you think of it like that. Conclusion: The plot and story are so-so, but the language is stunning. (  ) jibrailis | Nov 11, 2009 | I attempted to start this book several times. I had not read fugitive pieces although I had heard it was beautifully written. I found with this book there were too many technical details and it took too long to hook me with anything about the personal story. I will attempt again at some point and hopefully with greater success. jessstewart | Sep 22, 2009 | The Winter Vault is beautifully written but I had a hard time to get into it and basically I did not finish reading it. I believe with times and other moments, I will get back to it and finish it. The story did not seem to start fast enough for me. (  ) labelleaurore | Sep 15, 2009 | "The Winter Vault" is the long awaited novel from Canadian novelist Anne Michaels who penned the international best-selling lyrical novel "Fugitive Pieces" in the last decade. In "The Winter Vault", Michael juxtaposes a non-linear structure set in Canada and Egypt and the reader is also privy to memories to post-war Europe, particularly war-torn Poland and England. Although, the novel is somewhat reminiscent of her other fictional masterpiece, "The Winter Vault" is interwoven in such eloquent, passionate, and beautiful language that reading it almost seems like an intrusion to the melancholic, isolated, and beautifully flawed characters. Due to a move, this book took its sweet time to get to me, but the wait was well worth it. Michaels' voice is ebullient, richly evocative, and still manages to be self-deprecating at times. saroshig | Aug 26, 2009 | 
 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.
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:12 -0400)
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Both the premise and the factual info that make the foundation of the book are quite interesting. The language is very poetic and from time to time quite stunning with some memorable images dispersed throughout. Yet the whole doesn’t work. There is too much dreariness there, too many unnecessary digressions, and the characters come out awfully flat despite all the drama that happens in their life. (