Soul of Wood

I just finished Jakov Lind's Soul of Wood. It's line drawing and aquatint cover (signed "Beck") along with its status on the half off shelf in a book store at the SFO airport are what drew me in.

When I think about what a book review might look like, words like "colorful" and "depth" and "portrayal" come to mind. This is not a book review; it's just some of my thoughts on this piece of writing I stumbled upon in an airport. I'm trying the get back into writing as a way of exercising my brain, so bear with me through the dry and unnecessary parts. P.S. I can't stand the phrase "bear with me" and all other thoughtless English phrases like it. There are more below.

I only read a few pages on the plane heading back to Boston. Bringing activities along while I travel has proven to be a useless effort on multiple occasions. The looming thought of boredom can convince sane-minded people like myself to bring along several unnecessary objects while traveling, and oftentimes they are heavy ones like books, work notebooks and binders, and computers. All the more to misplace, hurt your back over, and delay security with in my opinion.

As stated bolder than need-be on the cover of SOW, the introduction is written by a man named Michael Kruger. I remember a glaring typo while reading the introduction that greatly irritated me. Of course I can't find it now, but it was really difficult to get over at the time. I kept reading and re-reading the same sentence with appall. I felt like one of those children who becomes fixated on "clean" versus "dirty" and felt dirty in the midst of my first few moments reading this book with no opportunity to wash off.  Now that I just re-read the introduction I either see why the typo was missed in the first place or I see that I partied too hard in San Francisco.

In short, SOW follows Wohlbrecht, a blue eyed, crippled, WWI veteran who has been entrusted to hide a paralyzed Jewish boy by his parents. After abandoning the helpless Anton Barth in the woods, Wohlbrecht returns to Vienna where we're weened off his previously defined traits of honorability and loyalty and we witness his consistent misjudgment in trying situations and experience the demise of his sanity. In the insane asylum where he ends up, Wohlbrecht should have been killed the first day without question but he somehow lands a gig spying on the two men in charge and pledging loyalty to both of them, although what it means to be loyal seems to have shifted by this point. The storyline gives a gripping (that's another great review-word, isn't it?) view of the behavior of certain Germans during WWII. It ends with Wohlbrecht, the two men from the insane asylum, and an ill-mannered truck driver battling in the woods over the hidden Barth... who had miraculously regained control of his body and vocal chords the day Wohlbrecht abandoned him. Easy enough to follow, right?

The first instance we see Wohlbrecht lose his marbles is arguably when he's preparing to meet with a S.A. real estate acquirer and tries to flatten a bump on his head with the side of a broad knife. The bump moves to a different position on his head or neck each time he attempts to flatten it. But I believe this is Lind at work; not an establishment of Wohlbrecht's character. Certain areas of SOW are very Metamorphosis-esque without going there completely. It's said well on the back cover of the the book, "Lind distorts and refashions reality to make the deepest horrors of the twentieth century his own." 

Wohlbrecht really begins to lose it after his meeting with the evil S.A. man, when he begins to notice pebbles and people who have always been there, which seemingly now both frighten and entertain him. He throws rocks at passers-by and shouts relentlessly at officers. Reading this part, I imagined Wohlbrecht in my own backyard, the Boston Common, making such a scene. In Boston in 2012 most would just walk by and pretend not to notice the (probably drunk) crazy dude with a wooden leg making a scene, but in Soul of Wood the people engage in this public scene.

I found it interesting and cost-efficient that the way in which the insane asylum murders its patients is via an empty syringe to the carotid artery. They call it "fresh country air"-- that's pretty sick.

There is no official conclusion; those were some of my thoughts on Soul of Wood. It's not "colorful"-- in fact I imagine the world was gray during this time period anyway. WWII brings visions of colorless scenes, dirty things, cold weather and dead trees. As far as "depth" goes, it is what you make it. I enjoyed Lind's writing style, but I don't think he intended an aggressive amount of underlying meaning. As for "portrayal," shall I use it just once? Soul of Wood is a riveting portrayal of humanity during the darkest time of the twentieth century. You should just read it, if you haven't already.