Held by Anne Michaels | Booker Longlist 2024

[@gregorykim1344]

Great review. I loved this novel too. What you said about what you want from a Booker book resonates with me. I want something that expands the form and is filled with memorable and beautiful writing. There are so many poetic like passages and paragraphs that drift into the realm of ideas of permanence/impermanence and the connection between the living and the departed and the power of memory. This novel floats to the top of the list for me.

[@dM-ij1we]

It’s a book that doesn’t give it to you on a plate. In fact you may have to bring your own plate. It will however hold your hand. Feel the gaps. Breathe. Give it space. Be held. You will get out of it what it let’s you put in. Stunning book.

[@NerdyNurseReads]

Perfectly said

[@dylanwolf]

Amen to all that. Held is a fabulous novel.

[@jamesyouwere]

Justice for Held! Massively underrated!

[@NerdyNurseReads]

It's so good!!!

[@Showmeyourshelfie]

A couple things. First, your skin looks so healthy and amazing in this video. Your skin is great in all your videos but in this one you are glowing. Second, yes, Held is just so crazy good. The language, the fragmented structure mirroring how we remember and think, the characters - all of it is just amazing. I didn't read this earlier because I needed a break from "contemplative" novels and needed something plotty and fun but I regret not picking this up earlier when everyone was still discussing them. You nailed it and Held is absolutely an RC cola in the desert and in this instance @discoking is dead wrong!

[@NerdyNurseReads]

OMG thank you! As someone who grew up with terrible acne and had horrible skin through most of my teenage years this means so much. And yes Held is so good! I wish there were more books that made me feel like this on the Booker longlist. Also, @thediscokingofficial is allowed to be wrong on occasion lol

[@LifeisGoodLiveFully]

I loved Held and it is definitely Booker level literature! I really want it to win... Great review!

[@justheathers]

I loved Held! It's my favourite so far of this year's Booker! I agree about the last third, but I still enjoyed it as a whole.

[@HappyKnitter2020]

The perfect review.... I loved it too for all the reasons... will read all her other publications too

[@TheLinguistsLibrary]

Yay, a new historical fiction to add to my wishlist!

[@BookishTexan]

Dammit! Now I have to read it to find out if I love it or hate it. RC Cola? Hell yeah!

[@TomBrzezicki]

Not Diet Mountain Dew?

[@BookishTexan]

@@TomBrzezicki Ha! Id feel more compassion for JD if he seemed capable of showing it to others himself. I almost never drink any kind of soda these days, but when I do, it’s not diet. RC Cola has a nostalgia based appeal for me.

[@TomBrzezicki]

@@BookishTexan I gave up pop decades ago, too, but when I was a kid it was usually Hire's Root Beer or Stubby Orange Crush.

[@BookishTexan]

@@TomBrzezicki I don’t think we had Stubby Orange Crush. I did enjoy Nu Grape grape soda.

[@TomBrzezicki]

@@BookishTexan Don't remember ever having Nu Grape, but did have some brand of pink cream soda, which was about the only pop we ever called soda up here in southern Ontario.

[@BookishTexan]

Read it. I really liked it. Not quite as much as you, but I liked it.

[@NerdyNurseReads]

Apparently the judges liked it too since it’s shortlisted!

[@michelleveade1943]

Held has the best opening line of any of the Bookers I’ve read so far.

[@NerdyNurseReads]

It was so good, especially when compared to some the other books on this year's list.

[@Book_Hugger]

But, the reflections on death, afterlife, and love were beautiful, I can agree with you on that. I put that same quote on my IG with my review.

[@TomBrzezicki]

“James” and “Held” are the only two Booker Longlist books I’ve read to date-I’m waiting for the local library to inform me a copy of “Safekeep” is available-and I have to say I preferred “Held”. It’s a short novel, so you can begin reading without the sense that you have to plunge right in and make rapid headway in the text for fear your attention will start to flag. The book actually invites you to read it slowly and carefully, word by word, as if it were a poem; at least, that was my experience. I liked the way we came to know the characters, not by an extended chronological narrative, but by being presented with brief vignettes of them at different times and at different places and under different circumstances in their lives. The way the story backtracked in time in the last part of the novel didn’t trouble me. In the second last chapter of the book, we meet up with Helen James walking in the woods wearing her father’s hat in the year 2010, which connects us with the people we last met in 1984, who are the children and grandchildren of the characters from the Great War introduced to us in the novel’s opening pages. So, the story does contain a connecting thread from beginning to end because of these generations of people and their stories. The backtracking in time is also makes sense if we recall the sentence on the opening page: “The past exists as a present moment.” And later on, we read: “… we must move forward, into the past that exists as a present memory”. We might also consider that for the dead there is no time; for them, time has no meaning, so we should be able to read the chapters where we are shifted from 1980 to 1908, to 1912, and back to 2010 without any sense that these events are out-of-place or not occurring in their proper order, because for the dead everything is happening at the same time. As far as the Great War references are concerned, I can imagine some readers having to look up the Angel of Mons. Also, when the author refers to the “magnesium” glow of the moon, I’m sure she intends a comparison with the magnesium parachute flares that were fired into the air at night over the Western Front to illuminate No Man’s Land between the opposing trench-lines. I also liked the detailed particularity with which Michaels describes everyday objects. In Chapter I she gives us that lecture on fishermen’s sweaters and the significance of the various patterns of stitching with which they are knitted, something I’d never heard of before. We observe that Helena doesn’t just carry a purse, we are told that it was “bought for her on Hill Road, soft brown leather, with a clasp in the shape of a flower.” There are similar descriptions of well-worn but comfortable couches and armchairs, pots of tea, and crackling fires in the hearth at night. On a grim note, there are also descriptions of people killed and wounded in war, including “a baby in the womb, a bullet hole in its forehead”. These details help anchor the story in the here-and-now and make more plausible the musings about life and love and whether death is really the end of all things. To veer off topic for a moment, when I began reading Clarice Lispector a month or so ago, one of the things that struck me about her prose style was her use of phrases and sentences that contain opposing or mutually contradictory ideas. For example, she will refer to “a silent scream”, “joy without laughter”, “she was so body that she was pure spirit”, “she was sadly a happy woman”, “the sadness of happiness”, and so on. I’m sure there’s a literary term for this, and I noticed Anne Michaels uses it too. She writes of “the error of love that proved its perfection”, “what we give cannot be taken from us”, “the snow growing brighter as dusk deepened”, and “when sleep came at last, it was only another, more tortured form of being awake.” Whenever I came to one of those passages, I paused a moment to consider it, which the format and pacing of the novel invites the reader to do. Finally, if I hadn’t known Anne Michaels was Canadian, I’m pretty sure I would have deduced the fact from the numerous references to snow throughout the novel, not only snow itself, but the weight of accumulated snow on trees and housetops, the snow that makes driving impossible, as well as the look of light reflected from a fresh snowfall. There’s also an invocation of the 1998 ice-storm in Chapter VI, and when she describes how the dead show us their presence by, for example, bringing “a cardinal to a fence”, I’m sure she’s thinking of the bright red Northern Cardinal, native to North America.

[@NerdyNurseReads]

I love your points on backtracking. In this context I guess it makes more sense. But I still wonder why we brought Marie Curie into it? Does she mirror the other women in the book, the ones who are doctors? Held is so beautifully written and I love that you found a way to connect this to Lispector!!!! I need to reread Held a few times to catch more of the little details because you're right, the way she talks about everyday objects and makes them beautiful and important was wonderful!

[@TomBrzezicki]

@@NerdyNurseReads Just as I said in my earlier comments about “Held” that some readers might have to do a quick check to see what Anne Michaels meant by her reference to the Angel of Mons in Chapter II, so I had to do a bit of online research about Marie Curie to see why she makes an appearance in Chapters IX and X. Chapter IX begins with an unnamed widow writing a letter to her dead husband, Eugene. The couple have two sons, named Sandor and Marcus. Like Marie Curie, the late Eugene was born and raised in Poland and there is a brief description of the family visiting Poland at the end of the chapter. The older son, Marcus, appears again four years later in Chapter X, where he is now a pharmacist in a chemist’s shop in Dorset, England. As far as I could tell, this family is fictional. The only person in the Curies’ social circle named Eugene whom I could identify was Marie’s father-in-law, Eugene Curie. However, he lived until 1910, so no-one would have been writing to him as if he were dead in 1908. There is also nothing in the widow’s letter to suggest she is writing to Marie’s father-in-law. It’s entirely possible I’m wrong about this and that Eugene and his family were real people, so I’d appreciate being corrected by anyone who has more information than I do about the Curies and their family and friends. My best guess is that the purpose of this anonymous widow is to give us a look at Marie Curie and her situation in Paris in 1908. At this time, Marie was a widow, her husband, Pierre, having been run over and killed in the streets of Paris by a horse-drawn wagon in April 1906. In her letter, the woman writes to the dead Eugene and tells him of an earlier dinner party that took place in June 1903 to celebrate Marie Curie obtaining her Doctorate of Science, the first woman in France to do so. We are told that this party was hosted by a Paul Langevin and his wife. The Langevins are historical figures, and Paul Langevin was actually a former student of Pierre Curie. After her husband’s death, Marie Curie and Paul Langevin, who was estranged from his wife, had a year-long affair that came to light in 1911. This generated a major scandal which resulted in Marie being subjected to the worst sort of misogynistic abuse and false accusations of being Jewish. Marie was hounded out of France, which is why Chapter X finds her seeking refuge in Dorset, England, in 1912, where Marcus the pharmacist displays a supportive and protective attitude towards her. But getting back to June 1903 and the party of the Langevins, it is here we meet another historical figure in the person of Madame Palladino. Madame Eusapia Palladino was a famous Italian spiritualist and medium, who was invited to come to Paris in order to have her powers tested by a group of scientists, including Marie and Pierre Curie. The Curies attended some of Madame Palladino's seances in order to see whether she could really communicate with the dead. Although Madame Palladino was found to use trickery to create her illusions of levitating tables and objects moving by unseen spirits, Pierre Curie believed that some of her manifestations were genuine. Perhaps he was influenced by his brother, Jacques Curie, an ardent believer in spiritualism. BTW, Madame Palladino didn't come to Paris until 1905, but the fact that Anne Michaels places her there in 1903 doesn't matter to the story she's telling. As for Marie, she was more skeptical than her husband, but after his death she continued to write to him in her diary every evening, just as we see her doing at the end of Chapter X, as if it might be possible for her to remain in communication with her deceased spouse after all. Marie’s diary entries to her dead Pierre mirror, of course, the letters to the dead Eugene written by the anonymous widow. The spiritualism theme in the chapter is maintained by the description of the moon at night “moving slowly across the sky like a planchette”, a planchette being a heart-shaped piece of wood used in spirit writing or with Ouija boards. And spirit writing, or writing to spirits, is what Marie and the nameless widow dedicate themselves to doing. In the letter to Eugene which forms Chapter IX of “Held”, we meet the historical figure, Hertha Ayrton, who appears front and centre in Chapter X as a supporter and protector of Marie Curie during her exile in England. Like Marie, Hertha is a scientist with knowledge of mathematics, physics, and an interest in the properties of electricity. Hertha does not display the interest in spiritualism that Marie does, yet she understands that there are certain questions which to science are “inadmissible”, such as “if there is something beyond flesh and bone”. Hertha is fascinated by the workings of unseen forces in Nature, such as the moon and the tides of the ocean, or how waves create ripples in sand. Hertha thinks of time in terms of “the unceasing and the infinite, an endless line flowing into the future, or [I’d say it’s a BIG “or”] at least cycles that are so large we will never grasp them.” These immense cycles of time would suggest events may not have a fixed place in time. We also discover that Hertha’s husband, William, is dead, and that she writes to him every night. Chapters IX and X continue and expand upon the themes running through the rest of “Held”. One of these themes is love, particularly the love we feel for people who are dead and no longer with us. We see this in the examples of Marie Curie, Hertha Ayrton, and the anonymous woman writing to her deceased Eugene. These three women have refused to accept that death is the end of us; all three write to their dead husbands with the hope that somehow their letters will be delivered in the Hereafter. But Marie and Hertha are familiar enough with the unseen forces of nature to have an expectation that science might someday understand exactly what happens to us after death, and allow us to remain in touch with those who have gone before us. This connects them to the people who come to James’s photography shop in Chapter II in order to have their portraits taken, only to find dead relatives appearing with them in the finished prints. These phantom images seem to demonstrate some form of survival after death, which James tries to understand by checking his camera equipment and photography supplies to eliminate the possibility that some other commonplace explanation for the images might be the case. But we are not told anything to indicate the images are not what they seem to be. By adding the real Marie Curie and Hertha Ayrton to her novel’s fictional cast of characters, I think Anne Micheals is trying to lend plausibility to the idea that the boundary between the living and the dead may be more permeable than we currently believe. If people of the scientific background of Marie and Hertha thought there was some purpose in correspondence with their dead husbands, perhaps we should consider the possibility that the dead are not gone forever after all, and that they have their own ways of communicating with us. The error we make is in looking for signs that are big, bold, and unmistakable. We must become familiar with the subtle “language of the dead”, as Eugene’s widow calls it. She writes to her late husband, “My ears and eyes never miss a sign you send me: a flicker of light between the trees, a twitch of wind across my face, a bird sitting for long minutes on a branch beside me, unafraid. I hadn’t understood before, how being unafraid makes for love.” By putting these words into the widow’s mouth, Michaels may be recollecting a quote from Marie Curie herself on the subject of fear and the unknown: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

[@TomBrzezicki]

The final chapter--'The Gulf of Finland, 2025'--brings the novel full circle. We began with the young English couple, James and Helena, and we close with the young Finnish couple, Aimo and Anna. But one object connects the two couples, and that is Helena's purse. The same soft brown leather purse with a flower-shaped clasp that James bought for Helena at a store on the Hill Road in 1917 or earlier, now turns up again at a jumble sale in Amsterdam in 2025 where Aimo buys it for Anna. Perhaps this is Helena's own attempt to speak to Anna using "the language of the dead". And there's the fact that Aimo and Anna both happen to turn and look at each other at the same moment, the act that proves to be the catalyst for their relationship.

[@stevies-readies]

i love that the most divisive of the list are the shortest ones! personally speaking, i really liked Headshot, Orbital is 5-stars, and Held is a 1-star 💀lolll

[@NerdyNurseReads]

Meanwhile I disliked Headshot and Orbital lol We're Booker opposites

[@alyssa_jensen]

I stopped reading through the longlist after reading Headshot and Orbital back to back... you might just have convinced me to give this one a try!

[@NerdyNurseReads]

I really hope you enjoy this and this doesn't put you off Booker forever

[@judybrown1624]

I'm currently reading Held and loving it. I didn't get along as well with Fugitive Pieces. I think this will make the shortlist partly because it begs to be read more than once.

[@NerdyNurseReads]

Interesting point about rereading! I hope it's shortlisted. It would be on my shortlist if I was a judge but I have to admit I'm struggling to come up with a shortlist prediction list. There are too many mediocre books.

[@judybrown1624]

@@NerdyNurseReads I'll probably only get 8 read before the SL is announced, so my guesses will undoubtedly include ones I haven't read yet!

[@anaovejero103]

Ive found Held gorgeous. Like you, I admire poets who write prose. The writing is just marvellous but I understand people who need some plot. I love when small details are paid attention to. We, common people, have common lives, I love to find beauty in our common lives. Have you read Martyr! by Akbeh Kavar? He's also a poet and it is his frist novel.

[@NerdyNurseReads]

I LOVED MARTYR!!!!!!

[@TheLinguistsLibrary]

A poet and philosopher? We have been fed

[@NerdyNurseReads]

I feel like you might love this

[@TomBrzezicki]

Your obvious enthusiasm for the book and the other information I’ve found about it online-including the brief summary on the author, Anne Michaels’, website-moved me to order a copy-my local indie bookstore being out of stock-which should arrive next week. In the meantime, I’m wondering about the meaning of the book title. Does “Held” refer to the act of someone holding or having held another person, either physically, emotionally, or spiritually? That’s what I’d bet money on. Or does it possibly mean the German word for ‘hero’, ‘der Held’. I guess I’ll find out. The quotes you read from the novel put me in mind of Clarise Lispector; but then, the spectre of Lispector seems to hang over just about everything I read these days. Kaveh Akbar used a line from Clarice as the epigraph to his book, “Martyr”, and I now wonder whether the phantasmagorical scene that ends his novel was his attempt to pull off a Lispectoresque finale. “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?” That’s one of the lines from “Held”, and the obvious answer to the question posed is, “We believe death lasts forever because that’s what the totality of the evidence points to.” So, I’m wondering if there will be a certain wish fulfillment fantasy of love and/or life, surviving death in some manner in the story, which also makes me wonder if “Held” will fall into the category of ‘feel-good fiction’ for me when I read it, not that there’s anything wrong with that. However, to be fair to the author, I probably shouldn’t speculate until I read Ms. Michaels’ book, which I’m now impatiently looking forward to doing.

[@NerdyNurseReads]

I can't wait to hear your thoughts once you read it!!

[@randallowen9350]

If you loved Held. The prose of Lawrence Durrell would appeal to you, I love his writing. Love and peace to you 😊

[@NerdyNurseReads]

Thank you for the recommendation. Where would you suggest I should start?

[@randallowen9350]

@@NerdyNurseReads The Alexandria Quartet

[@FrankOdonnell-ej3hd]

I was so looking forward to reading creation lake but it sounds like you're saying it's a piece of s----⚛

[@petrinablair1999]

I agree first 2/3 was good but after that it fell off a cliff. Very disappointed. My least favourite.

[@NerdyNurseReads]

I feel like there will be a lot of people who don't like this one. Sorry this it didn't work for you! Which have been your favorites so far?

[@petrinablair1999]

⁠@@NerdyNurseReadsMy favourite is James . I also loved the quiet plot and characters of Enlightenment. A joy to read after ‘held ‘and the slog of ‘this strange eventful history ‘. I am disappointed with the list , have read 8 so far,but have read much better books this year.. glorious exploits, the heart in winter, martyr, the road to the country.

[@NerdyNurseReads]

@@petrinablair1999 This Strange Evenful History was strangerly uneventful and tedious. I don't know why it was longlisted. Have you gotten to Wandering Stars yet?

[@petrinablair1999]

@@NerdyNurseReads on library wait list .

[@NerdyNurseReads]

@@petrinablair1999 I hope you enjoy Wandering Stars. In my opinion, it's one of the best books on the list

[@Book_Hugger]

Noooooooo 😮😮 I can’t vibe with this one. Too much flinging me around geographically and times.

[@NerdyNurseReads]

I totally understand but I'm really glad you found something to enjoy (the reflections on death, afterlife and love). It's not going to be for everyone.