The Ash Garden FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
The characters in Dennis Bock's thoughtful first novel find their lives revolving around the axis of an explosive act -- the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945, and all of its shocking reverberations, from Japan to New York to a small village in Canada.
Employing the voices of three separate characters -- a scientist en route to Los Alamos, a woman under quarantine on a ship in the Atlantic, and a young Japanese girl watching as a plane slowly draws nearer in the sky -- Bock's tale wields a quiet power that builds steadily as he details the lives of these three characters and the repercussions of one unfathomable act of war.
Each of the characters in this work is scarred, whether physically or psychically, by what they have witnessed. And each of them has a story to tell another, until a perfect triangle is formed between the three.
From the first few riveting pages, Dennis Bock proves himself a literary talent worthy of the attentiveness his novel demands. Poised to stand alongside John Hersey's classic work of nonfiction, /booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?&isbn=0679721037">Hiroshima, The Ash Garden is
a heartrending examination of the all-too-human dilemmas faced by the participants, both willing and unwilling, in a historic event that continues to shape our modern world and attitudes.
(Fall 2001 Selection)
FROM THE PUBLISHER
A scientist stealing across the Pyrenees into Spain, then smuggled into America . . .
A young woman quarantined on a ship wandering the Atlantic, her family stranded in Austria . . .
A girl playing on a riverbank as a solitary airplane appears on the horizon . . .
Lives already in motion, unsettled by war, and about to change beyond reckoning—their pasts blurred and their destinies at once defined and distorted by an inconceivable event. For that man was bound for the desert of Los Alamos, the woman unexpectedly en route to a refugee camp, the girl at Ground Zero and that plane the Enola Gay. In August of 1945, in a blinding flash, Hiroshima sees the dawning of the modern age.
With these three people, Dennis Bock transforms a familiar story—the atom bomb as a means to end worldwide slaughter—into something witnessed, as if for the first time, in all its beautiful and terrible power. Destroyer of Worlds. With Anton and Sophie and Emiko, with the complete arc of their histories and hopes, convictions and regrets, The Ash Garden is intricate yet far-reaching: from market streets in Japan to German universities, from New York tenements to, ultimately, a peaceful village in Ontario. Revealed here, as their fates triangulate, are the true costs and implications of a nightmare that has persisted for more than half a century.
In its reserves of passion and wisdom, in its grasp of pain and memory, in its balance of ambition and humanity, this first novel is an astonishing triumph.
SYNOPSIS
A scientist stealing across the Pyrenees into Spain, then smuggled into America . . .
A young woman quarantined on a ship wandering the Atlantic, her family stranded in Austria . . .
A girl playing on a riverbank as a solitary airplane appears on the horizon . . .
FROM THE CRITICS
Washington Post Book World
Each panel is created with exquisite care, and the three portraits that emerge together illustrate an eloquent truth about the aftermath of war.
Publishers Weekly
No matter how far they travel from Hiroshima, the protagonists of Canadian author Bock's roomy, thoughtful novel are marked by the effects of the atomic bomb. For Emiko Amai, the imprint lingers on her face, in the form of burn scars from the heat of the bomb's detonation in 1945, when she was six. For Anton B?ll, a refugee German scientist who helped build the bomb, the scars are emotional, though he tried to transform his feelings into images in a series of secret films shot among Hiroshima's ruined buildings. For Sophie, Anton's wife herself a half-Jewish refugee from Austria there is the pain of exile, a debilitating illness and the heavy shadow of her husband's guilt. Though Anton claims that the bomb was dropped "to save lives," he remains acutely aware of the human cost, both to its victims and himself: "I know the world requires a certain payment from us... for the freedoms we enjoy. We have all paid." When Emiko confronts Anton in 1995 at a lecture in New York, he surprises himself by agreeing to participate in a documentary she's filming. He invites Emiko to the quiet house he shares with Sophie in Ontario, and as Sophie declines toward death, Anton tells Emiko all the ways he has influenced her life since Hiroshima. In his attempt to obliquely represent the overwhelming horrors of Hiroshima's destruction, Bock (Olympia) has created a group of characters with closely guarded emotional lives. When they reveal themselves, it's in flashes as brilliant as the splitting of the atom. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
VOYA
This compelling story marries life to death, guilt to innocence, and truth to deception through the entwined lives of two Hiroshima victims over a fifty-year period—Anton, a German scientist who helps invent the bomb, and six-year-old Emiko, whose face and family it destroys. When she is fifteen, Emiko is selected to come to the United States for a series of painful plastic surgeries. There she finds that film is her passion. While composing a documentary about Hiroshima, Emiko discovers that her American benefactor is the scientist who first saw her, her grandfather, and her dying brother in a Japanese hospital. Emiko learns that plastic surgery cannot heal her emotional trauma. Anton discovers that he cannot control the ramifications of the bomb. That Anton marries an Austrian with a Jewish father;Anton's wife dies of lupus, a disease whose pattern mimics the burning radiation sores;and Emiko's grandfather, a doctor, cannot save his own family add additional irony to the story. This historical novel that sometimes discusses war, sex, and love in graphic and pragmatic terms requires readers who understand symbolism and paradox. Emiko will have the most appeal for the teen audience. In 1985, John Hersey added a chapter to the original version of his book Hiroshima (Knopf, 1946) to explain what happened to the six people he interviewed. Bock, in tracing the lives of his characters, parallels some situations and attitudes that Hersey describes. Teens should read Hersey's nonfiction account, which provides the necessary emotional and factual context, before tackling Brock's provocative narrative. Reviewer:Lucy Schall—VOYA, December 2001 (Vol. 24, No. 5)
Library Journal
More than 50 years after the bombing of Hiroshima, that event still resonates as one of the defining moments of the 20th century. This novel explores the consequences of the bomb on the lives of three people who were directly touched by it. Anton Boll, one of the scientists involved with the Manhattan project; his wife, Sophie, the daughter of an Austrian-Jewish violin maker; and Emiko Amai, a documentary filmmaker and one of the bomb's victims. All three are key players in the events leading up to and surrounding the dropping of the bomb. Boll escapes from wartime Europe to contribute a critical piece of information in the bomb's development. Sophie is sent from home aboard the SS St. Louis and ends up in an internment camp outside Quebec City. Emiko, who loses her family and half her face in the bombing, is chosen to come to the States for reconstructive surgery in an act of postwar contrition. From its achingly sad opening to its haunting conclusion, this riveting novel explores the moral ambiguities of war while illuminating a shameful moment in our collective history. Highly recommended.Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, Ont. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An intellectually demanding, yet emotionally affecting, first novel by short-story writer Bock (Olympia, 1999) tackles the large philosophical and ethical questions raised by Hiroshima. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, developing the three main characters' private histories since WWII as they move inexorably toward recognition, and perhaps resolution, of their connected fates. In August 1945, six-year-old Emiko Amai is playing on a riverbank with her younger brother. While he and her parents die, she survives the bombing horribly disfigured. At 16, she is chosen to have reconstructive surgery in America, where she spends her adult life. Her strength remains her ability to endure pain in silence. In 1995, now a filmmaker documenting the aftermath of the bombing, she approaches one of the scientists responsible, Anton Boll. A young physicist in 1940, Boll escaped Germany less for reasons of morality than because he recognized that his science would be better utilized in America. He ends up at Los Alamos and then in Hiroshima itself. There he begins to film what he sees, at first to communicate to his wife Sophie, then increasingly as a private record of the horror he witnesses. But in his self-absorbed pain he loses any sense of Sophie. A refugee from Austria whose family did not survive the Nazis, she finds herself desperately isolated. Like Emiko, she lives within a certain silence and with secret pain. Emiko ends up at Boll's rural home to view Anton's films just as Sophie enters the last stage of lupus. Bock does a lovely job of creating subtle, overlapping images-shadows, scars, elderly men's silhouettes-but his authorial reticence is even more effective: his charactersremain hauntingly elusive even as they reveal themselves. A shattering yet generous story not merely about survival guilt or scientific ethics, but the imperfection and resilience of the human condition. First printing of 60,000
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