Beginning the World Again: A Novel of Los Alamos

by Roberta Silman

Overview

An unhappy wife struggles at Los Alamos: “Deftly interweaves details of family life with the larger issues spurred by the scientists’ deadly work.”—Booklist

Winner of the Washington Irving Award

After a chance meeting in 1981, Lily Fialka confronts the defining time of her life: 1943–45 in Los Alamos, when her physicist husband, Peter, worked on the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project—a time of isolation, hard work, temptation, and loneliness, yet exhilaration and triumph; when great breakthroughs were made, but lives felt narrow; when loyalty was paramount, but the need for secrecy created unbearable tension. At the same time, Lily and her friends are haunted by what is happening to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Resistance in Germany, and his story serves as a counterpoint to theirs. In a sweeping historical novel that cuts across continents and reveals a deep knowledge of the science of the making of the bomb, Beginning the World Again offers valuable insights into that fascinating time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504009645
Publisher:	Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Publication date:	06/09/2015
Edition description:	Digital Original
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Roberta Silman’s first story was in The New Yorker; other stories followed there, in The Atlantic, Redbook, McCall’s, Hadassah, VQR, The American Scholar and in many places here and abroad. Her books are Blood Relations, stories; three novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning the World Again: A Novel of Los Alamos; and two children’s books, Somebody Else’s Child and The Astronomers.
 
Born in Brooklyn, brought up on Long Island, Silman graduated with honors from Cornell University and has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence.
 
A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, she has won the National Magazine Award for Fiction twice. Two stories were read on Selected Shorts, two others won PEN Syndicated Fiction prizes, and several were cited in Best American Short Stories. Somebody Else’s Child won the Child Study Association Award; Blood Relations won honorable mentions for the PEN Hemingway and Janet Heidinger Kafka Prizes; Boundaries won honorable mention for the Kafka Prize; and The Dream Dredger and Beginning the World Again won Washington Irving Awards. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, VQR, The American Scholar, and World Books PRI. She reviews regularly for the online magazine The ArtsFuse.
 
Ms. Silman is married to structural engineer, Robert Silman, and they have three married children and five grandchildren.

Editorial Reviews

"Roberta Silman has done a truly masterful job of bringing together the complex parts of the Los Alamos story—the science, the history, the place, the personal lives.” —Helen Del Monte, Books and Fiction Editor, McCall’s
 
“I like Beginning the World Again a lot, especially the way Roberta Silman deals with time. Her portrait of Los Alamos rings true.” —Freeman Dyson, author of Disturbing the Universe
 
“Filtering the narrative through the character of bright, vivacious Lily Fialka and her brilliant young husband, the author deftly interweaves details of family life with the larger issues spurred by the scientists’ deadly work.” —Booklist
 
“Located in quiet retirement in Vermont as the story opens, the narrator reflects on a time when she and her young scientist-husband were . . . at Los Alamos in the early 1940s . . . People [there] are portrayed as both terrified and obsessed with their creation as they race to have it ready to help end the war. Interesting fictional look at the human side of the Los Alamos experience and, due to the flashback aspect, the narrator can offer a perceptive juxtaposition of that experience with the current anti-nuke movement.” —Southwest Review of Books
 

From the Publisher

This seems like a good idea for a novel: to retell the oft-told but unfailingly dramatic tale of the Manhattan Project, and the high-powered scientists gathered in Los Alamos, N.M., in 1943-1945, from the point of view of their wives-- domesticating the atom bomb, as it were. In the event, however, this is a disappointing book. The problems begin with Silman's heroine, Lily Fialka, married to dashing nuclear scientist Peter but involved in a secret affair with moody Jacob Wunderlich. She is a remorselessly conventional narrator, and although the details of the hothouse atmosphere of that odd place and time are realistically conveyed, the effect is very much that of a romance novel with an unusual backdrop. There is a baby born dead, a dying wife, an exiled German agonizing over her wartime homeland. Real characters like Robert Oppenheimer, General Groves and Richard Feynman crop up without much conviction, and one subplot concerns the thwarted efforts of a thinly disguised Niels Bohr to get a reluctant Churchill and Roosevelt to agree to a pooling of atomic knowledge among all the Allies before war's end. But despite all the effort and research that clearly went into the book, it remains flat and predictable. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Another title for Silman's moving novel of the creation of the atomic bomb might be The Women of Los Alamos. This is the perspective she writes from and what gives her work its unique richness. Lily Fialka is the young wife of a project scientist and also the story's narrator. Through her we learn about the lives of those people thrown together by the circumstances of war. The idea of creation is a major theme of the work: Oppenheimer is trying to create a weapon to stop the enemy, many of the women are having babies to affirm life, Lily fashions a love affair out of loneliness, Estevan honors his Indian past by preserving its culture, Steffi tortures herself with the notion of stopping Hitler, and finally people understand that the world they hoped to shape by their actions and beliefs is often painfully beyond their control. Recommended.-- Joseph Levandoski, Free Lib. of Philadelphia

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