Olympia [Paperback]

Dennis Bock (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 20, 1998

This is a story of evolution, love and death which centres on three generations of Olympic athletes - the Bavarian grandparents who escaped Nazi Germany, and their Canadian descendents.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Olympia tells the story of three generations quietly grappling with the emotional fallout of war. There are the grandparents, Lottie and Rudolph, who met while competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics; their son and his wife, who emigrated from Germany after World War II; and the grandchildren--Peter, who narrates, and his sister Ruby, both Canadian-born children of the '70s. Into this portrait Bock skillfully splices imaginary outtakes from Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1936 Olympics, The Olympiad. The result is a layered album of family stories and a moving meditation on the intersection of memory, identity, and the past.

Early on we discover that this family is Lutheran, not Jewish--and that Bock is tackling the uneasy question of what it means to be German in this century. He avoids generalizations about guilt or complicity in the war, aiming for something more delicate, more murky. "It seemed that everyone my parents knew back then had escaped to this country from that dark place ... after the war had ended," Peter explains. "But it took me until that summer to find out that there were things I hadn't been told, that there were secrets in my house."

Bock focuses with understated precision on the private moments of victory and defeat that make up the subjective history of a family: Ruby's fight against leukemia and her dream to succeed as an Olympic gymnast; a failed reunion between Peter's mother and the brother she hasn't seen since the end of the war; the deaths of the grandparents; a father and son's shared obsession with storms. Elliptical, nuanced, affirming, and sad, Olympia is a masterful examination of how a family embodies and survives its legacy. --Svenja Soldovieri --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

The allure of the past and its power to deform one's life are at the heart of this lyrical and often surprising first novel. ``We believed we were a gifted family,'' narrator Peter explains. ``We were Olympians.'' His grandparents had both been members of Germany's 1936 Olympic team. Their glory, though, cant be recaptured. Peter's father has failed, having made it to the Olympics for Canada, where the family has resettled after the war, but being unable to bring home a medal. And Ruby, Peter's younger sister, a promising gymnast who seems a likely candidate for the Olympic team, dies of leukemia. In a series of interrelated stories, Bock traces the ways in which one family's efforts to regain the glory and the hazy romanticism of the past repeatedly disrupt the present. His grandparents decide to renew their marriage vows on a boat in the middle of a Canadian lake, but the romantic gesture turns to tragedy when his grandmother drowns. In another episode, Peter, who has set out to break the record for continuous hours spent floating in water, is himself almost drowned when heavy rains set in motion a flood that sweeps him out of the small municipal pool in which hes been determinedly floating. Bock brings his various themes together in a climactic episode in which a now grown Peter, living in a small Spanish town, is visited by his parents, who have decided that they too want to renew their marriage vows on water. The event goes wonderfully awry when the boat on which the ceremony is being held goes aground: the lake its been launched on is being drained by the authorities, and as the water recedes, it reveals a ruined town hidden for decades under the lake. The inescapable presence of the past is thus caught in a lovely metaphor, and Peter's liberation from his own obsession with the past, when it comes, is believable and moving. An impressive, energetic, and original debut. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 252 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury (May 20, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747542848
• ISBN-13: 978-0747542841
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,614,088 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A touching and beautiful story about the burden of history, January 13, 2000

By 

A.K. (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Olympia: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is the story of a family of post-WWII German immigrants in Canada, and their struggle to come to terms with life as Canadians, in spite of their difficult, war torn past. I thought this book was beautifully written and wonderfully sensitively wrought. The writer's very unique writing style sustains a tremendous level of poignancy and sensitivity throughout the story, but the author manages to achieve this without ever compromising the story at any point. It remains immensely readable and compelling to the end. In particular, the beautiful relationship drawn between the protagonist, Peter, and his sister, Ruby, is so beautifully drawn that I think it could quite easily go down in the annals of literature alongside such famous sibling relationships as the one in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. The book is a series of interconnected stories, beautifully held together with bridges of pure literature. The stories follow Peter, a second generation German, as he tries to make sense of his life in small town Canada. Inevitably, though, his history as a German, and all of the associated feelings of guilt enter into the fabric of his, and his families, lives and emotions and forces each of them to come to terms with the weight of history. The way in which this is achieved is so moving, so finely crafted, it brought tears to my eyes, and furthermore, it gives a very important and valuable perspective to another group of people who also suffered as a result of WWII. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in history, who enjoyed reading Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces or to anyone who enjoys fine literature.