A first printing of 60,000 copies and a six-city author tour attest to Knopf's faith in this sophomore effort.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 10:00:55 Boxid IA40150809 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Hiroshima, and may be overlooked in the crowded ranks of WWII-inspired fiction, Bock acquits himself well. 11)įorecast: Though his novel cannot touch a nonfiction classic like John Hersey's When they reveal themselves, it's in flashes as brilliant as the splitting of the atom. 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. 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.

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. 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 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.

For Anton Böll, 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 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. 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.

Ash Garden by Dennis Bock