First Snow Storms and Winter Programming

So the first snows came and they were basically the first snow storms. It probably won’t last but I am enjoying this small taste of being snowed in before it really happens sometime in mid-December. Actually, as much as I was dreading it, I find that the winter actually arriving was a lot less scary than I thought and I handled it a lot better than I thought I would. I guess it’s important to remember that anticipating my anxious responses can turn them into self-fulfilling prophecies if I’m not careful.

In other news, my lovely spouse’s back has been severely impacted for the worse by cuddly cats. She’s walking around the house a bit stiffly and bending will be difficult for a few days. But she’s graduated from Richard III to Quasimodo, so things are improving.

Between War and Post War

Jakov Lind’s Soul of Wood is technically an example of post-war German literature but I decided to include it anyway because all of these stories revolve around the second world war and its aftermath.

The title story, ‘Soul of Wood’, concerns a German WWI veteran named Wohlbrecht, who is given the charge of a young Jewish man whose parents have been sent to the concentration camps and who cannot fend for himself due to his paralysis. Wohlbrecht decides that the ‘kindest’ thing to do is to leave him alone in the woods in order to sell the apartment that Wohlbrecht covets, but due to unforeseen circumstances Wohlbrecht soon becomes the assistant to a doctor performing the executions of medical patients. When the Allies begin to close in, there’s a race between Wohlbrecht and his employers to get to the woods and find either the young man or his body in an attempt to prove that they weren’t as bad as some of their compatriots.

The story is absurd and disturbing, but not without a hint of some very dark satire. While Lind’s work is not easy to read, it does force the reader to think about the lines that were drawn between perpetrator and follower. Mastermind and soldier. Do these distinctions ultimately mean anything in the wake of a genocide?

The Power of Absurdity

While Lind’s choice of subject matter is the horrors of war and extreme violence, the use of absurdity elements and a bit of magical plot twists soften it slightly. Though not enough to remove the bite of the narratives. So be warned that this might not be your cup of tea as these stories contain violence against children and the vulnerable.

Other than ‘Soul of Wood’, the stand-out stories for me were ‘Journey Through the Night’, the story of a cannibal warning his victim that his time will soon be nigh as they sit on a train speeding towards Paris, and ‘The Judgment’, which is about a serial killer who decides to kill his violent father just before he is executed only to discover that his violent father has similar plans. Both of these stories are meditations on the nature of violence and the rippling impact it has not just on killer and victim but on society in general and how it proliferates to make more killers and even more victims.

Its Pitfalls

The pitfall of absurd and surrealist elements is that sometimes they can erode or else distract from the statement that the story is trying to make. This collection is by and large an example of Lind’s mastery of using these elements to enhance his point. However, I think the absurd elements were why I found myself disliking ‘The Window’. I found it murky and unclear, and worse, just a bit boring when it compared with the rest of the selections.

That being said, I am not a reader that is drawn to these elements, generally. I am not the perfect audience for them. You may have a different experience and be drawn to different stories.

The Prospect of An Evening Walk

We have a play to attend tonight and we’re actually debating walking to it in the snow. At first, I was thinking that maybe the cold would get into my bones and make for a miserable night, but now I’m thinking that I worry a bit too much and some fresh air might be good for me. Also there’s something magical about walking through a fresh winter’s early evening night that I always enjoy.