“Stories told on a battlefield, on a life raft, in a hospital ward at night. In a café that will disappear before morning. Someone overhears. Someone listens, attentive with all his heart. No one listens. The story told to one who is slipping into sleep, or into unconsciousness, never to wake. The story told to one who survives who will tell that story to a child, who will write it down in a book, to be read by a woman in a country or a time not her own. The story told to oneself… What we give cannot be taken from us.”
My third read from the 2024 Booker longlist was Anne Michaels’s Held (Knopf 2024, in the UK Bloomsbury 2023). Held is a quick read that is more akin to poetry than a novel, and its stories dance across timelines and locales, quick and light, weaving in and out of memories in a saga of love and loss and longing.
The novel starts on a battlefield in 1917, where John has been wounded and, unable to move, finds warmth in a sensual memory of his wife and their life of domesticity, a life he is so eager to return to. Theirs is a beautiful love story (the cover of the UK is a tribute to their love), and the stories that unravel from that moment are also beautiful.
It’s a really short novel and a review runs the risk of ruining beautiful moments, so I am keeping this brief. (How many times can I say ‘beautiful’?)
This is a novel for the poets and dreamers, the romantics. As for me, I wanted more. More of the words. More of the stories. More flesh on the bones of a memory, of a love, that keeps surviving.
The judges said they wanted heart. Held certainly delivers there, even if I’m not as smitten with it as others.
Booker Count: 3 of 13
A Girl Named Tommi 