The Winter Vault

Starred review from March 2, 2009
Profound loss, desolation and rebuilding are the literal and metaphoric themes of Michaels’s exquisite second novel (after Fugitive Pieces
). Avery Escher is a Canadian engineer recently moved to a houseboat on the Nile with his new wife, Jean, in 1964. Avery’s part of a team of engineers trying to salvage Abu Simbel, which is about to be flooded by the new Aswan dam. His wife, Jean, meanwhile, carries with her childhood memories of flooded villages and the heavy absence of her mother, who died when she was young. Now, the sight of the entire Nubian nation being evacuated from their native land before it’s flooded affects both Avery and Jean intensely. Jean’s pregnancy seems a possible redemption, but their daughter is stillborn, and Jean falls into despair, shunning the former intimacy of her marriage. When the couple returns to Canada, they set up separate lives and another man enters the picture. Michaels is especially impressive at making a rundown of construction materials or the contents of a market as evocative as the shared moments between two young lovers. A tender love story set against an intriguing bit of history is handled with uncommon skill.

March 15, 2009
Canadian poet and novelist Michaels (Fugitive Pieces, 1997) offers a deeply felt novel of ideas that explores loss, displacement, human connection and the"one or two organizing principles" that inform an individual life.

Avery, an engineer whose mother's family died in the Holocaust, and Jean, a botanist who still mourns her mother's early death, meet during the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which obliterates a community Jean has visited and loved since childhood. Married and living on a houseboat in the Nile while Avery works on dismantling and reassembling Temples during the construction of the Aswan Dam in 1964, they witness the destruction of another entire way of life. After the child that Jean is carrying dies in the womb, she is devastated by the loss and pulls away from Avery. On their return to Canada he suggests they separate. He hopes that giving her freedom will make returning to him possible. Broken hearted, he throws himself into studying architecture while she falls into an affair with an artist. Lucjan, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, is tender but damaged. And although his passion energizes her, he does not attempt to replace Avery in Jean's affection. Jean and Avery reunite on the anniversary of their baby's stillbirth. The heightened dialogue is brilliant but longwinded, and Jean and Avery's finely tuned sensitivities can grow cloying. Lucjan, meanwhile, is almost a romantic clich. What matters is the painfully beautiful prose with which Michaels brings lost worlds to life.

Readers passionate about history, philosophy and the power of words to bend meaning will swoon for Michaels' rarefied if oddly impersonal fiction.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 15, 2009
Canadian poet/novelist's second work of fiction (after "Fugitive Pieces") will likely be one of the more beautiful and startlingly written works you'll read this yearand one of the more infuriating. It's a meditation on loss, as exemplified by the flooding that obliterated towns and cemeteries, flora and fauna when the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Aswan Dam were created. Jean met Avery while trying to rescue plants that will be drowned by the St. Lawrence floodwaters; Avery was one of the seaway's engineers. Soon they are married and living on a houseboat on the Nile as Avery works to save Abu Simbel. What can't be saved is a millennia-old culture whose devastation is chronicled in eye-opening detail. It's heartbreaking but also frustrating. Michaels keeps a distance, weaving through time in a drily lyrical tone that creates an appropriate sense of dislocation but can leave the reader stranded; in the end, this story is not animated by story. A challenge but definitely worth pondering. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 12/08.]Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2009
The long-awaited second novel by an award-winning Canadian poet and novelist explores the most intimate thoughts and longings of Avery and Jean Escher. Avery, a practical and pragmatic engineer, is assigned to the project to remove and relocate the Great Temple of Abu Simbel, about to be inundated by the construction of the Aswan Dam. Averys wife, Jean, lives with him on the Nile and collects flowers and seeds to nurture life and the continued existence of these fragile elements of the environment. Flashing back to their first encounters along the banks of the St. Lawrence Seaway and to stories of their childhood, the reader is swept along in the current of these two lonely souls reaching out to one another. Driven apart by grief over a tragic pregnancy, Jean and Avery return to Canada and live separate lives. While Avery buries himself in the study of architecture, Jean encounters Warsaw ghetto survivor and artist Lucjean, who teaches her that regret is not the end of a relationship. Michaels skill is showcased in every well-chosen word of this luminous novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)