Dennis Bock, former literary editor of the magazine Blood & Aphorisms, tells this “novel in eight stories” from the perspective of a suburban Toronto boy grappling with the shattered history of his immigrant German family. Born into middle-class Oakville in the 1960s, Peter and his younger sister Ruby are distanced by language and culture from the family’s difficult wartime past, yet haunted by the undercurrents of pride, shame, denial, and nostalgia that it continues to stir in their extended family.

Peter struggles to make a narrative from fragments and artifacts, trying to reconcile the memories of his relatives with his own insights and imagination. He hears proud stories of the family’s past athletic achievement (as yachtsmen, divers, and swimmers) that are overshadowed by Hitler’s 1936 Olympics, and tales of wartime brutality under the Russians alongside classroom history lessons that accurately vilify Germany’s role in the Second World War. Peter’s struggle to comprehend the past seems even more urgent after a series of fatal accidents and illnesses befall his family: these seem to him almost like aftershocks from wartime.

For Peter the past is a powerfully mythic, yet half-submerged place. This view provides Bock with his novel’s central motifs. Each story foregrounds an incident involving water, swimming, drowning, or flooding, which convey both the athletic/Olympic ideal of Peter’s family and the swirling flow of history, at once transparent and dangerous. Though employed a little too schematically overall, Bock often has a gift for bringing these metaphors to vivid life for his readers: there are wonderfully compelling sequences of a swimming marathon in an outdoor pool flooded by rain, and of a submerged town in Spain that surfaces after decades underwater.

But this taste for dramatic and suggestive imagery sometimes seems to distract the author from the business of developing character on a deeper level. Peter’s quiet youthfulness accounts for his observer’s status in the opening stories, but images ultimately come to substitute for authentic continuity, reflection, and resolution in all too many of the narratives.