A tale spanning between World War I and our modern day told through short evocative moments displaced through time from the POVs of people related to one another through the generations.

Each copy of Anne Michaels’s Held should come with a contract granting the author the right to bounce you around like a human ping pong ball through time and space giving you shockingly evocative glimpses into people’s lived experiences rippling through time, long after these people have passed away.

Held is about legacy, memory and, more broadly, how our ancestors live on through us.

The secret to its success as a novel is two-fold.

Firstly, Anne Michaels is a great poet and her writing in Held makes that clear. It’s not poetry per-say, it’s prose but if all literary writing exists along a scale between poetry and prose then Held’s words would fall somewhere in the middle. Each section in Held is so short and so evocative in a way that reminds me of great poetry despite being prose.

Secondly, the structure of novel allows Anne Michaels to “zoom in” on specific scenes displaced through time each of which has a lot of room physically on the page and fictionally to breathe and this gives space for the reader to step back and really contemplate them. Each section is dense with emotion in part because how much of both the past preceding it and future is left for the reader to guess at. Anne Michaels leaves a lot of room for the reader to imagine how the characters have come to be where they are now and how they got there. She solidifies parts of this as the novel goes on but doesn’t reveal everything.

This makes Held similar to Gilgamesh(Sophus Helle) in that they’re both inherently fragmentary. Of course, Held is fragmentary due to Anne Michaels choosing it to be and the Epic of Gilgamesh is because many parts of the story have been lost to time.

In both cases, a lot of room is left on the page leaving the reader’s mind open to imagine the connective tissue that would bring all these disparate glimpses into the past together into a cohesive whole. This feels resonant with Held’s theme of ancestral legacies rippling through time which I think is really cool!