Books: A Monstrous Complicity

SOUL OF WOOD by Jakov Lind. 190 pages. Grove. $3.95.

These disturbing fables might have as their epigraph the theme of Goya's nightmarish etching cycle, the Caprichos: "The sleep of reason produces monsters." With merciless humor, Goya gave the forms of grotesque man-beasts to 18th century hypocrisies. Jakov Lind, writing cheerily of cannibals and cripples in Nazi Germany, imprisons the reader in sweaty dreams of guilt. The guilt is not merely German. Lind's force lies in his ability to suggest that the sleep of reason in this century produced not only monsters but a...

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