[.ca] Olympia (ISBN 0747542848)

From Amazon.com:
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

A touching and beautiful story about the burden of history:
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.