Posted on: Sunday, October 7, 2001
Books
'Ash Garden' intertwines fates of an unlikely trio
By Hillel Italie
Associated Press
History has worked in interesting ways for Dennis Bock. Had it not been for World War II, the 37-year-old writer might never have reached this moment, drinking coffee on a mild Canadian morning and discussing his well-praised novel, "The Ash Garden."
"The what-ifs are very fun to play with," says Bock, the son of German immigrants. "Every single person in the planet is where they are now as a direct consequence of the war."
Reviewed favorably in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere, "The Ash Garden" combines the fates of a nuclear scientist, an Austrian refugee and a victim of the bombing of Hiroshima. The novel covers several decades, from the 1940s to the 1990s, and is set everywhere from Japan to Canada.
Few people read Bock's first publication, the story collection "Olympia," but his current book has a solid first printing of 60,000 and already has allowed him to move from the small flat in which he was interviewed to a five-bedroom house outside the city.
Among the first and most important fans of "The Ash Garden" is Bock's editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, who also works with Richard Ford and Cormac McCarthy. Fisketjon recalls returning to New York after a weekend holiday, burdened with reading a stack of submissions he expected to turn down.
"I had never heard of Dennis before picking up his manuscript," Fisketjon says.
"I had already looked through several manuscripts, and there was no chance I would want any of them. But when I read the first page of Dennis' book, I knew I had to have it."
In "The Ash Garden," Anton Boell is a German scientist who escapes to the United States and helps develop the atomic bomb. His ailing wife, Sophie, is a half-Jewish orphan from Austria who had met Anton while he was visiting a refugee camp.
Emiko Amai, badly disfigured as a child when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, was selected in the 1950s to fly to New York City for cosmetic surgery. Anton, it turns out, was her sponsor.
Bock said he wanted to explore the nature of a man's responsibility for his own actions. "The Ash Garden" reads like an updated "Frankenstein," a story of the consequences of science, and like a statement about the creation of fiction. Novelists are always negotiating between freedom and control, maintaining the focus of a narrative while allowing the characters to develop spontaneously.
"I had very little control over Anton," Bock notes. "He was the slipperiest character I ever tried to write. I don't know him after living with him for four years."
Bock's book also continues a trend among younger writers: imagining a period in history that they know at best secondhand. Other recent novels set during this time, by authors under 40, include Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and Rachel Seiffert's "The Dark Room," a finalist for the Booker Prize.
"Our parents have memories, and pass them on to us; it's probably as simple as that," Bock says. "That helps shape the imagination you end up carrying around for the rest of your life."
Bock is an Ontario native whose parents spoke about their early years, although in opposite ways. His father, who lived in the German countryside, was unaffected by the war and had only peaceful memories. His mother, who lived in an industry town that was frequently bombed, told stories of horror.
"That played out in their personalities, because my dad is a very happy-go-lucky guy ... and mother's a little more brooding and intellectual," Bock says.
Growing up in the 1970s, he recalled how older kids in the school yard would needle him about his background. "The implication was that a German Canadian had a definite connection with the Holocaust," he explains.
But Bock says that he wasn't traumatized by the remarks, only "fascinated."
He has an analytical mind, so much so that by high school he was appraising texts like a critic, calling "Gulliver's Travels" the first book he appreciated as the result of an individual's imagination.
Bock majored in English and philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, and then spent five years in Spain, where he began working on "Olympia." The book was published in 1998 and was nominated for several awards in Canada and Britain.
He is an admittedly slow worker, often editing out a book's worth of material from each manuscript. "The Ash Garden," for example, began five years ago with Anton as an art restorer working in Italy in the 1960s.
"Nothing I wrote in the first two years made it into the final book," he says. "It was all like chunks that fly off the marble block."
Both "Ash Garden" and "Olympia" tell of people shadowed by personal history. In his first book, a Canadian family struggles to communicate with its German kin, impeded by both language and culture.
The three major characters of "The Ash Garden" all try somehow to comprehend, or escape, their past.
Emiko wants to make a documentary about Hiroshima, with Anton as an interview subject. Sophie, unhappily married to Anton, turns down the chance for real love because it would mean a return to Europe. And Anton, in old age, seeks an innocence he never knew through the ritual of watching children play in the snow.
"For it was the children who brought him out on these cold evenings when staying home and keeping warm would have been much easier," Bock writes.
"It was a vision of youth Anton treasured not because it bore some faint resemblance to his own, lost behind decades of clouded memory, but because he might never have known this beautiful and simple chaos had it not been for this place, this time, these children."
