The wartime themes unfold
ANNE MICHAELS AND BERNICE EISENSTEIN’S innovation brings us closer to understanding loss
In the great ongoing slide into digitization, something that’s too often forgotten is the idea of the book as irreplaceable object, a vessel where form and function are not just closely related, but inextricable. Happily, though, a rearguard bibliophile resistance seems to be gathering strength, and you won’t find many examples as eloquent as Anne Michaels and Bernice Eisenstein’s Correspondences.
Given that Michaels’s novel Fugitive Pieces is one of the central texts of postHolocaust fiction and that Eisenstein is best known for her 2007 graphic memoir I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, it won’t be surprising that their first book together deals with the themes of loss, recovered memory and the displacements caused by war.
What is unexpected is the form Correspondences takes. It’s what is technically termed an accordion book — that is, its pages fold out into a single long doublesided sheet. On alternating pages are Eisenstein’s portraits of writers, thinkers and lesser-known people united by their connection to the Second World War and the Holocaust, among them Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Albert Camus and Franz Kafka; facing those portraits are sparely chosen texts from those figures’ work and lives. On the flip side, a book-length poem unfurls, one that can be read in linear fashion or in whatever sequence the reader sees fit. In its exhilarating open-endedness, and its clear love for the act of reading, Correspondences can claim spiritual kinship with Chris Ware’s Building Stories: You’re forced to engage with it — literally, physically — and that engagement fosters a closer, more immersive experience. Not that you need any arm-twisting.
Talking to Michaels and Eisenstein, it’s clear that the closeness of the two To- rontonians’ collaboration is reflected in the way they speak about their book: They approach the same questions from subtly different angles, complement each other’s replies, at times almost finish each other’s sentences.
“We always knew we wanted to do (Correspondences) as an accordion book,” Eisenstein said when asked about the unconventional format. “It’s the most generous form for us to put everything in that we wanted.”
“The way that it opens up is that it unfolds,” Michaels said. “That means it’s not just a linear page-upon-page thing, even though that is its own kind of layering, but something that slows a reader down for the looking. They can move about anywhere through the book, and in so doing it brings a reader more intimately into the book. It closes and embraces everything that’s put inside, so by opening it unfolds all that’s in there.”
“It’s primarily a conversation,” Eisenstein said, “and many different conversations can be played out. Any section can placed against any other section, and the sections are discrete as well. There’s a conversation among the sections of the poem, among the figures, between the portraits and the poem.”
“We had this image of these figures gathering at a table, the table of history,” Michaels said. “We also felt very strongly that this gathering would provide a kind of solace, a kind of shelter, for everyone present. Any of these figures would immediately understand each other, despite political and philosophical differences. There would be a profound solace just in this notion of being understood. There’s so much in a life that’s unseen, that remains invisible, and by setting things next to each other, you’re making visible things that otherwise might not have found a form.”
As for the book’s minimalist deployment of text, Michaels asks, “What language do we have for death? We’ve had biblical, liturgical, rhetorical, but I wanted to get at something that was spare, to use a very ordinary language, and the challenge was not only to write it so that any one section could be placed against any other section, but to make a whole in which as few as six letters on a page could support a booklength poem.”
Finally, it’s striking that for a book containing so many iconic faces, the one chosen for the cover is the one readers are least likely to recognize: a young girl known only as Theresa, whose image was immortalized by David Szymin in his postwar photographic study of refugee children in Europe.
“Having someone less known (on the front) can make the discovery that much more profound,” Eisenstein said.
“It was important to bring Theresa to the table with all those other figures,” Michaels said. “They were chosen for many reasons — well-known, lesser known, unknown, and there was just such a strong sense that she belonged there.”
Correspondences
By Anne Michaels and Bernice Eisenstein McClelland & Stewart 128 pages, $35
Maybe the accordion book
is an idea we’d better get used to, because almost simultaneously with Correspondences comes Joe Sacco’s The Great War, an “illustrated panorama” that forms a single sweeping visual telling of one of the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare: the first day of the Battle of the Somme, on July 1, 1916. The Maltese-American Sacco, known for his cartoon reportage of conflicts in the Palestinian Territories and Bosnia, practises a form respected unquestioningly in most of the world but only slowly gaining critical acceptance in North America. In tandem with an extended accompanying essay by popular historian Adam Hochschild, Sacco’s work, almost superhuman in its attention to detail, is an antiwar statement all the more powerful for its willingness to let the images speak for themselves.
The Great War
By Joe Sacco Norton, 54 pages, $37