Olympia: A Novel - Hardcover

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

"Dennis Bock's Olympia moves us through sky and water, and delivers us whole into the stong hearts of a family worth knowing. The lines fall beautifully to pain, to mercy. This is bracing fiction."
-Michael Helm, author of The Projectionist

"In these stories about an extended family damaged by war, immigration and death, the narrator learns that a decent life demands not only survival but accomplishment. He discovers the things that make human accomplishment possible--endurance through the rough stuff and a profound loving loyalty."
-Bonnie Burnard, author of Casino and Other Stories