“Be Wolf: A True Account of the Survival of Reinhold Kaletch” by Wayne Tefs

Wayne Tefs’s Be Wolf should draw many readers from, or to, the proverbial hearth. Some will enjoy the novel as another tale of real-life survival in the Canadian wilderness. Others, who sleuth for literary traditions in a work, may find themselves cogitating over the land and sea terrors of Beowulf, the troubles aboard the ice-locked ship in Frankenstein, or the physical deprivation and heroism in accounts of epic journeys to the earth’s poles. As for myself, on this occasion, another Manitoba novel, Miriam Toews’s Swing Low, ferries me across the (frozen) waters of Be Wolf. Besides being apt and readable works, both enter the inner lives of individual men who live in marginal comfort within their respective communities. Tefs’s novel analyzes the oddities of emigration to a land utterly unlike the one left by the immigrant. In the process, Tefs fashions an apologia for the ordinary people of war-torn Germany in the 1940s by taking us into the hearts and minds of three 15-year-old boys attempting to find the sanctuary of the British army and escape a Gestapo military that will kill them if they find them in retreat, even though they are cadets in the German army’s own reserves. Tefs’s literary strategies and his language make his novel a great addition to the myriad other Manitoba novels that grace Canadian bookshelves.

First to Toews. Swing Low slogs along through hundreds of pages of boggy “biographia” in an attempt to draw for readers a precise picture of her father’s depression. His affl iction burglars his whole family’s joy and eventually takes his life. Tireless in its lengthy representation of a mind plagued by self-absorbed doubt, Swing Low left me numb with the endless, static “motionlessness” of a depressed person’s world. I was becalmed on a sea voyage on which I had been impatiently waiting to get started, and which had begun full of excitement and promise. But I know, I believe, Toews’s purpose. She found herself driven to give an account of her family’s sadness, the family’s inertia and her own fatigue at the prospect of writing it. Thus driven, she can tell it only in the language of its subject matter. Namely, to represent depression as accurately as possible, she must, by style and other narratological choices (by a specific device that Modernists called “the objective correlative”), force readers to experience the numbness of the sick subject himself. No admirable abjection here, only the boredom of the language, thought and event of the manipulative, chronically depressed person himself. No one but an uncompromising writer attempts such a novel. It is, in the general view, typically suicidal for a writer to “bore” her reader. And, in my view, it is heroic of Toews to have persisted in drawing this picture of an illness as pernicious and ubiquitous as depression is in the 21st century. I am glad the publisher took it on.

Tefs’s novel, too, is much affected by a subject limited by its protagonist’s situation. Though verging at times on the repetitive and the mundane, I never found that to be the case to such an extent that I wished to discontinue reading the book. A rich, retired German doctor, in love with his new residence in mid-northern Manitoba, leaves the comforts of home on a month-long adventure, a rambling tour by half-ton pickup over the thawing ice of South Indian Lake. Singularly stubborn of personality, and inexperienced in the hazards the land can dole out, foolishly beginning his ice-journey in April just as the ice is about to melt, his “boat” capsizes the first day out: 100 miles from nowhere he hears a loud cracking. He drives his Chevy precipitously onto the nearest shore, decides to capture the moment on camera by climbing an ice ridge nearby and suddenly slips and falls 20 feet to the jagged ice below. There he lies for hours, dead to the world with a broken back, bruised bones and dangerous concussions. His dogs, laying at his side, keep him from freezing till he regains consciousness. Then he crawls with white-knuckle deliberation, despite pain that threatens him every few minutes with blackouts, uphill to the capper of his truck, where he collapses and spends the next precarious weeks recovering. These are promising beginnings. They kept me on the edge of my seat, wondering whether, and if, the doctor would survive.

The rest of the novel, by inheritance of the accident and injuries, crawls along. And herein lies the novelist’s dilemma: how to blow me past Be Wolf’s Sargasso Sea; how to write the objective correlative of a paraplegic without losing my interest. Appropriately, Tefs subtitles the novel, A True Account of the Survival of Reinhold Kaletch. Think of it. Given the immobility of his subject and subject matter, the problems for the writer seem insurmountable. Day after day, Kaletch lies there, fighting pain and a desire to give up. Both reader and writer must survive the protagonist’s long, unrelenting convalescence, just as the doctor himself must survive his injuries and get himself back to civilization and medical help. Will the doctor’s thoughts alone, without his walking about and interacting busily with his environment, suffice to interest the reader? Regardless of the ending of the novel, when the doctor finally regains some mobility, Tefs skillfully navigates the longer account of his tedious survival and makes it eminently interesting. How does he do it? Well, let me just say that we find out sharply, in the truck capper’s long night, and, curiously, in flashbacks to a teenaged boy’s dismal memories of cadet-hood in the Nazi juggernaut, the surprising identities of life’s most dangerous enemy and civilization’s greatest gift. ■

Be Wolf: A True Account of the Survival of Reinhold Kaletch by Wayne Tefs, Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2007, paper, 438 pp, $22.95.

Douglas Reimer is a retired University of Manitoba English instructor who lives in Winnipeg.