Liminality and Palimpsest in Anne Michaels’s The Winter Vault

Abstract

Abstract Anne Michaels’s first novel, Fugitive Pieces, garnered numerous awards and produced much scholarly discussion. The Winter Vault followed thirteen years later, but has received little critical attention. This novel traverses the spaces of the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the reconstruction of the Old Town of Warsaw. Time bubbles up through these layered landscapes, evidencing markers and minutiae of masses of human lives, as modern-day engineering feats are in the process of obliterating them. The plot of The Winter Vault spirals through palimpsests of not only place, but also time as it bubbles up in the present—carried along great rivers in Canada, Egypt, and Poland: the St. Lawrence, the Nile, the Vistula. In The Winter Vault Michaels’s evocative prose writing style continues to create an oneiric tone through which well-defined characters are forced by events across a threshold into hidden recesses of their own being. For the central characters in The Winter Vault, the painful rawness of the confusing and discombobulated liminal space in which they find themselves the wake of loss resonates through place, evincing palimpsests of lives and experiences of others across time. It is, perhaps, the interwovenness of human life and the ability to connect with the suffering of others that is the catalyst for Avery and Jean to connect to the suffering within themselves.