The Ash Garden

Last updated
The Ash Garden
Ash Garden.jpg
Author Dennis Bock
CountryCanada, United States, UK
LanguageEnglish
Publisher HarperCollins, Knopf, Bloomsbury
Publication date
August 25, 2001
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Pages281
ISBN 978-0-375-41302-5
OCLC 46929224
813/.54 21
LC Class PR9199.3.B559 A9 2001

The Ash Garden is a novel written by Canadian author Dennis Bock and published in 2001. It is Bock's first novel, following the 1998 release of Olympia, a collection of short stories. The Ash Garden follows the stories of three main characters affected by World War II: Hiroshima bombing victim Emiko, German nuclear physicist Anton Böll, and Austrian-Jewish refugee Sophie Böll. The narrative is non-linear, jumping between different times and places, and the point of view alternates between the characters; Emiko's story being written in the first person while Anton and Sophie's stories are written in the third person. Bock took several years to write the novel, re-writing several drafts, before having it published in August 2001 by HarperCollins (Canada), Alfred A. Knopf (USA) and Bloomsbury (UK).

Contents

Critics gave it mostly positive reviews and it became a best-seller in Canada. It was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Kiriyama Prize. It has been analysed in several literature journals, including Canadian Ethnic Studies which noted the similarities between the character Emiko and the Hiroshima Maidens.

Background

At the time of publication, author Dennis Bock was 36 years old and living in Toronto. [1] He had previously published a book of short stories called Olympia, but struggled with this project that would become his first novel, taking several years to write the novel. Doubleday Canada originally owned the rights but Bock withdrew the book from Doubleday citing "a difference of opinion" between himself and the editor. [2] He had written two drafts, including one in which the main character was an art historian involved in art theft and looting during World War II. [3] [4] With a working title of A Man of Principle, Bock gave the draft to editor Phyllis Bruce in 1999 and sold it to Knopf for US$250,000. [5] He re-wrote most of the book with the help of Bruce, and two other editors, Gary Fisketjon of Knopf and Liz Calder of Bloomsbury (who published the book in the UK).

Summary

The narrative alternates between three characters (Emiko, Anton and Sophie) and takes place around the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, though the back story of each character is told. Emiko was a small girl living in Hiroshima with her parents, younger brother, and grandfather during World War II. Following the atomic bombing, with her parents dead, Emiko and her brother recover in a hospital and her grandfather cares for patients. Though her brother dies, Emiko travels to the United States as part of a group of girls receiving reconstructive surgery. On the way, the American media takes an interest in the girls and she appears on an episode of This Is Your Life thanking the American audience for bringing her to the US. She later becomes a documentary filmmaker and, in 1995, approaches Anton Böll to be part of a new project.

My own unceasing pain erased any concern for those people. I did not care. There are things you get used to. There are things you learn not to see. I came to a point where I would not have cared if they all had died, and might not even have noticed them if somehow I'd been given the promise that my brother and I would leave this place together and alive. I am not proud of this. I would not know the truth of such a terrible confession had I not lived through that time.

— Emiko in a Hiroshima hospital, The Ash Garden, page 34.

Anton was a scientist in Nazi Germany who, following a disagreement regarding the direction of its nuclear program, is recruited by the US and flees via France, Spain, and Portugal. He becomes a part of the Manhattan Project, witnesses the tests, and travels to Hiroshima recording the aftermath. Anton regrets the consequences of the atomic bombs, attends the Pugwash Conference, but maintains his belief that it was necessary to end the war and prevented more deaths. He marries Sophie and becomes a professor at Columbia University in New York. With Sophie, he retires to a small town outside of Toronto.

As World War II was beginning, Sophie's Jewish parents sent her away from Austria. She was on board of the MS St. Louis when it was turned away from Cuba and sent to the United Kingdom. She was living in a refugee camp in Canada when she met Anton. She was diagnosed with lupus and takes up gardening, planning elaborate landscapes every year. In 1995, after refusing further medical treatments, and with Anton by her side, she succumbs to the disease.

After Sophie's funeral Anton reveals to Emiko the extent to which he had been involved in Emiko's life. He first met her while volunteering at the hospital in which her grandfather was working. Feeling he had to make amends in some way, he ensured that Emiko was on the list of girls to get reconstructive surgery, and secretly filmed her at memorial events. He had been waiting for her to find him.

Style and themes

The portions of the book that follow the character Emiko Amai is written as a first-person narrative, while the portions following Sophie and Anton Böll use the third-person. [6] The tone was described as "disturbingly calm". [7] Its central theme is that of identity and attempts to find solace. [8] Bock states "All three of the main characters in The Ash Garden are refugees who don't belong anywhere. Each has a desperate search for home." [1] In Harper's Magazine , Pico Iyer compares The Ash Garden with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient as "a book that ends where Bock's begins". [9] An essay in the journal Canadian Ethnic Studies, looked at The Ash Garden from the a Japanese historical perspective, finding strong similarities between the real-life Hiroshima Maiden Shigeko and the character Emiko, but noting it was not a roman à clef. [10]

Publication and reception

The book was released as a hardcover on August 25, 2001, published by HarperCollins in Canada, Alfred A. Knopf in the United States, and Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom. Knopf ordered an initial print run of 60,000 copies. [2] It debuted at the #2 spot on the Maclean's fiction bestseller list and peaked at #1 in late September and early October. [11] It was translated and published in multiple languages, including Japanese and German. [3] The book was a finalist for the 2001 for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, as well as the Kiriyama Prize, an international literary award for promoting greater understanding of the Pacific Rim and South Asia. [12] It was nominated by the Vancouver Public Library and the Bergen Public Library for the 2003 International Dublin Literary Award. [13]

In Time , Brian T. Bennett wrote, "The Ash Garden may not be a page-turner, but Bock's prose lures the reader along through smooth, sculpted sentences full of rich detail and subtle meditation." [14] In Maclean's magazine, Brian Bethune wrote, "Intellectually engaging, beautifully written and powered by three memorable characters, The Ash Garden will seduce anyone who reads it." [15] In the Christian Science Monitor , fiction critic Ron Charles wrote "Bock moves back and forth through time in a series of exquisite scenes, always keeping his vision tightly focused, despite the world-altering events he describes. ... What makes the novel so compelling and disturbing, though, is its emotional restraint." [16] Regarding the quality of the prose, a review in the Quill & Quire said "Bock's writing is both dense and immensely readable" [17] while the review in Library Journal "highly recommended" it. [18] In Books in Canada one reviewer highlighted that on "occasions, the prose turns mannered and cliches pop up". [19] though a later review by W. P. Kinsella called it a "brilliant novel...[with] superb plot twists that make it a spellbinding adventure in reading". [20]

A Japanese review in the Yomiuri Shimbun noted "something inaccessible about all three [characters...who are] as remote to each other as they [are] to the reader, and thus are never truly empathetic". [21] The review in The New York Times by literary critic Michiko Kakutani called it "an elegant, unnerving novel" but that Bock "tries too hard to underscore those links by using leitmotifs to connect his characters' experiences". [22] In London, the review in The Sunday Telegraph was more critical, finding it "is badly let down by its form, a split-time-scale narrative...[and] is significantly short of narrative dynamism", [23] while novelist Amanda Craig concludes that it "reads as the work of a young writer who is straining with too much effort". [24]

Related Research Articles

Southern Ontario Gothic is a subgenre of the Gothic novel genre and a feature of Canadian literature that comes from Southern Ontario. This region includes Toronto, Southern Ontario's major industrial cities, and the surrounding countryside. While the genre may also feature other areas of Ontario, Canada, and the world as narrative locales, this region provides the core settings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Way the Crow Flies</span> Novel by Ann-Marie MacDonald

The Way the Crow Flies is the second novel by the Canadian writer and author Ann-Marie MacDonald. It was first published by Knopf Canada in 2003. The story revolves around a fictionalized version of the death of Lynne Harper, and the subsequent murder trial of Steven Truscott. The novel is set in the early 1960s predominantly at the Royal Canadian Air Force Station Centralia located in a small town near London, Ontario. In the story, the character Ricky Froelich, a Métis foster child, is the fictionalized version of Steven Truscott.

<i>The Ingenuity Gap</i> Book by Thomas Homer-Dixon

The Ingenuity Gap is a non-fiction book by Canadian academic Thomas Homer-Dixon. It was written over the course of eight years from 1992 to 2000 when it was published by Knopf. The book argues that the nature of problems faced by our society are becoming more complex and that our ability to implement solutions is not keeping pace. Homer-Dixon focuses upon complexities, unexpected non-linear results, and emergent properties. He takes an inter-disciplinary approach connecting political science with sociology, economics, history, and ecology.

Kevin Chong is a Canadian author. Born in Hong Kong, Chong studied at the University of British Columbia and Columbia University, where he received an MFA in fiction writing.

Dennis Bock is a Canadian novelist and short story writer, lecturer at the University of Toronto, travel writer and book reviewer. His novel Going Home Again was published in Canada by HarperCollins and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2013. It was shortlisted for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Rebecca Eckler is a Canadian book publisher and former writer of columns and blogs about motherhood, and is author of two books on the same subject, Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-Be (2004), and Wiped! Life with a Pint-Sized Dictator, (2007). Since 2016, she has written five more books, the latest of which is The Mommy Mob: Inside the Outrageous World of Mommy Blogging (2014).

<i>The Great Fire</i> (Hazzard novel) 2003 novel by Shirley Hazzard

The Great Fire (2003) is a novel by the Australian author Shirley Hazzard. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and a Miles Franklin literary award (2004). The novel was Hazzard's first since The Transit of Venus, published in 1980.

Darren Shawn Greer is a Canadian writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yann Martel</span> Canadian novelist

Yann Martel, is a Canadian author who wrote the Man Booker Prize–winning novel Life of Pi, an international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, among many other best-selling lists. Life of Pi was adapted for a movie directed by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars including Best Director and winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.

Danila Botha is a Canadian author and novelist. She has published two short story collections, with a third to be published in 2024 and two novels, with the second to be published in 2025.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ania Szado</span> Canadian writer

Ania Szado is a Canadian writer.

Claudia Casper is a Canadian writer. She is best known for her bestseller novel The Reconstruction, about a woman who constructs a life-sized model of the hominid Lucy for a museum diorama while trying to recreate herself. Her third novel, The Mercy Journals, written as the journals of a soldier suffering PTSD in the year 2047, won the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award for distinguished Science fiction.

<i>Half-Blood Blues</i> 2011 novel by Esi Edugyan

Half-Blood Blues is a fiction novel by Canadian writer Esi Edugyan, and first published in June 2011 by Serpent’s Tail. The book's dual narrative centers around Sidney "Sid" Griffiths, a journeyman jazz bassist. Griffiths' friend and bandmate, Hieronymus "Hiero" Falk, is caught on the wrong side of 1939 Nazi ideology and is essentially lost to history. Some of his music survives, however, and half a century later, fans of Falk discover his forgotten story.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anakana Schofield</span> Irish-Canadian writer (born 1971)

Anakana Schofield is an Irish-Canadian author, who won the 2012 Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the Debut-Litzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for her debut novel Malarky. Born in England to an Irish mother, she lived in London and in Dublin, Ireland until moving to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1999. The novel was also a shortlisted nominee for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

Alix Hawley is a Canadian novelist and short-story writer. Her novel, All True Not a Lie In It, won the amazon.ca First Novel Award in 2015.

Frances Greenslade is a Canadian writer. She grew up with four sisters and one brother playing among the orchards of the Niagara Peninsula. The family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, when she was ten. Greenslade earned a degree in English at the University of Winnipeg before moving to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in 1992. In 2005 Frances and her family moved to Penticton, in the southern Okanagan, where her love of British Columbia's landscape flourished and was a source of inspiration in writing Shelter, her first novel. Greenslade now lives in Penticton, British Columbia, where she teaches English Literature at Okanagan College.

<i>Split Tooth</i> 2018 novel by Canadian musician Tanya Tagaq

Split Tooth is a 2018 novel by Canadian musician Tanya Tagaq. Based in part on her own personal journals, the book tells the story of a young Inuk woman growing up in the Canadian Arctic in the 1970s.

<i>Adult Onset</i> 2014 novel by Ann-Marie MacDonald

Adult Onset is a 2014 novel by Canadian writer Ann-Marie MacDonald. Set in The Annex neighbourhood of Toronto, the story centers on one week in the life of a successful writer of young adult fiction, Mary Rose MacKinnon, who finds herself taking care of her two young children while her wife is out of town directing a play. The novel starts with a light tone in describing Mary Rose's new-found solo daily domesticity with her son and daughter. But through a series of flashbacks, "Mister" or "MR" as Mary Rose is known to family and friends, is forced to confront her own repressed abuse as a child. At the center of the family drama is her mother, Dolly, an immigrant child-wife in postwar Canada.

Linda Little is an author from Nova Scotia, Canada. Her third work of fiction has been praised as a "darkly beautiful novel".

<i>Visible Worlds</i> 1998 novel by Marilyn Bowering

Visible Worlds is a novel by Canadian author Marilyn Bowering, published in 1998 by HarperFlamingo, an imprint of HarperCollins. An adventure story, the book was shortlisted for the 1999 Women's Prize for Fiction.

References

  1. 1 2 Feldman, Gayle (July 2001). "Bock: Rising from the Ashes". Publishers Weekly (27): 48.
  2. 1 2 Feldman, Gayle (July 2001). "At Work and At Large". Publishers Weekly . 248 (27): 47–48. Retrieved January 14, 2011.
  3. 1 2 Gussow, Mel (November 7, 2001). "Write What You Know? Why, No". The New York Times .
  4. ↑ Ross, Val (August 2001). "Gambling man". Quill & Quire . 67 (8): 16.
  5. ↑ Crawley, Devin (December 2000). "In the Works". Quill & Quire . 66 (12): 10.
  6. ↑ Murphy, Richard (Spring 2002). "The Ash Garden". Review of Contemporary Fiction . 22 (1): 127–128.
  7. ↑ Gwartney, Debra (December 23, 2001). "In Hiroshima, Three Lives Fused in a Blinding Flash". The Oregonian . pp. D09.
  8. ↑ Goossen, Theodore (Winter 2003). "Writing the Pacific War in the Twenty-First Century". Canadian Literature : 56–69.
  9. ↑ Iyer, Pico (June 2002). "The Last Refuge". Harper's Magazine . pp. 77–81.
  10. ↑ Rozhon, Jon (2001). "The Ash Garden". Canadian Ethnic Studies . 33 (2): 179–180.
  11. ↑ "Maclean's Bestsellers - Fiction". Maclean's . September 10, 2001. Note: The book reached #1 in the September 17 edition before falling back to #2 in the October 22 edition.
  12. ↑ Pearl, Nancy (July 15, 2002). "The Kiriyama Prize: Award-Winning Fiction". Library Journal . 127 (12): 152.
  13. ↑ "Writer runner-up for esteemed prize". The Record . Kitchner, Ontario. May 20, 2003. p. B1.
  14. ↑ Bennett, Brian (February 25, 2002). "The Fallout of War". Time (International South Pacific Edition) (7): 62. Archived from the original on October 22, 2010. Retrieved January 14, 2011. Also March 2002 Europe Edition.
  15. ↑ Bethune, Brian (September 3, 2001). "Destroyer of worlds". Maclean's . 114 (36): 58.
  16. ↑ Charles, Ron (September 27, 2001). "The cost of righteous vengeance". Christian Science Monitor . Vol. 93, no. 213. p. 20. Retrieved January 14, 2011.
  17. ↑ Hodges, Hugh (September 2001). "The Ash Garden". Quill & Quire . 67 (9): 44. Retrieved January 14, 2011.
  18. ↑ Love, Barbara (August 1, 2001). "The Ash Garden". Library Journal . 126 (13): 156.
  19. ↑ Nickson, Keith (September–October 2001). "Another View of The Ash Garden". Books in Canada . 30 (3): 3.
  20. ↑ Kinsella, W. P. (April 2002). "First Novels". Books in Canada . 31 (2): 36.
  21. ↑ Curran, Beverley (March 3, 2002). "'Ash' offers equivocal stance on A-bomb". Yomiuri Shimbun . Tokyo.
  22. ↑ Kakutani, Michiko (September 21, 2001). "Disparate Lives, Connected by One Bomb". The New York Times . p. 35.
  23. ↑ Smith, Edward (October 14, 2001). "The nuclear winter's tale". The Sunday Telegraph . London.
  24. ↑ Craig, Amanda (October 6, 2001). "Life force - Book of the week". The Times . London.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.