Olympia: A Novel,Used

Amazon.com ReviewOlympia 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 grandchildrenPeter, who narrates, and his sister Ruby, both Canadianborn 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 Jewishand 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 SoldovieriProduct DescriptionDrawing on imaginary outtakes from Riefenstahl's infamous film of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, Dennis Bock weaves together the lives of a family living in the shadow of history.Olympia is the story of postwar German immigrants, as told by their son Peter, born in the New World and raised in the sixties and seventies.Though great figures and events of midcentury touch the lives of this remarkable family, it is the private histories, the grand failings and small triumphs of Peter's family that remain etched in the reader's imagination. From Ruby's struggle to rise above her leukemia and her father's love of severe weather and killing tornadoes, to the saint who witnesses a miracle at the bottom of a drowned Spanish village.Set against the backdrop of some of the most significant Olympic moments of our timesthe Nazis' stylish and sinister glorification of the Berlin Olympics and the 1972 Munich hostagetaking in which 11 Israelis were murderedOlympia offers a bold and refreshing perspective on the tragic relationship between Germans and Jews in this century.Bock writes with insight and clarity in a breathtaking, beautiful prose that signals the debut of a brilliant new talent.From Kirkus ReviewsThe 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 c