Side Effects by Woody Allen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Woody Allen’s “Side Effects” is most likely the funniest book I have read in my life. Almost each of the about two hundred pages contains at least one passage that made me laugh out loud, which makes things a bit tricky, especially when you read on the trolley and your fellow passengers look at you suspiciously and move to far-away seats.

Already the second paragraph on the first page is hilarious: “Needleman was constantly obsessing over his funeral plans and once told me, ‘I much prefer cremation to burial in the earth, and both to a weekend with Mrs. Needleman’”. As a mathematician I cannot avoid to laugh out loud at the “Oh, I ran into Isosceles. He has a great idea for a new triangle.” And the totally fabulous passage “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” And yet one more pearl of humor: “Never before has pornography been this rampant. And those films are lit so badly!”

Most of the book is just pure fun and devoid of any deeper content. However, I found four stories to be much more meaningful. “The Kugelman Episode” in which professor Kugelman meets Emma Bovary thanks to magician Persky (funny, I once met a Mr. Persky in Zakopane, and he was sort of a magician). Then “The Shallowest Man”, which is a great story about death and love. In “Fabrizio’s: Criticism and Response” Mr. Allen displays virtuoso literary skills writing about pasta. Finally, “Retribution” is one of the funniest stories about sex I have ever read.

What the heck, I am going to round my four and a half star rating up. The book is, of course, nothing in the class of Coetzee, Pynchon, Joyce, Faulkner, Vonnegut, etc., but the sheer hilarity factor is stunning. Allow me one last quote: “Wittgenstein used the above model to prove the existence of God, and later Bertrand Russell used it to prove that not only does God exist but He found Wittgenstein too short.” The previous five-star book I have read, Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five", is a masterpiece. This one is not, but it has been so much fun to read it.

Four and a half stars.


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Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Eva (originally Ewa) Hoffman's autobiographical book "Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language" is the fourth great book about childhood and growing up that I have read recently. It belongs in such a distinguished company as James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", John Coetzee's "Boyhood", and Amelie Nothomb's "Loving Sabotage". It is perhaps not as deeply intellectual as Joyce's work, not as fiercely social and political as the Coetzee's book, and not as utterly charming as the Nothomb's novel, but it is a great, wise, and deep book. Of course I may be biased - the book is mainly about the contrast between Polishness (which is my ethnicity) and Americanness. I am also both a Pole and an American (meaning USian) and I can relate to most things Ms. Hoffman writes about.

The author was born in a Jewish Polish family. When the political climate became milder in Poland in the late Fifties, the family was allowed to emigrate to Canada. Ms. Hoffman was 13 at that time, which is probably the most difficult age to emigrate. The family boards the ocean liner "Batory" and they finally arrive in Vancouver, after a trans-Canada train ride.

The book is built of three parts: the first, "Paradise", is mostly about the author's childhood in Cracow, Poland. I find that part most moving as I am about the same age and I remember a bit of the late 1950s. The second part, "Exile", is about Ms. Hoffman's youth in Canada and in the US, and in the third part, "The New World", she is a young adult or a grown-up. She studies at Rice University and at Harvard, and becomes a literary critic and a writer.

There are so many wonderful passages in the book that it would take me many, many pages to quote them. Let me just quote two fragments that so aptly characterize the essence of Polishness: "Politics, like religion, is a game, except almost no one - no one we know anyway - seems to believe in it. Poles don't need demystifying philosophies to doubt all sources of power and authority". And "A culture talks most about what most bothers it: the Poles talk compulsively about the Russians and the most minute shifts of political strategy. Americans worry about who they are." How very true this is!

I find the passages about becoming immersed in a new language the most fascinating - what becoming bilingual does to one's brain and to the worldview. It is like appreciating the world and life twice as much.

Wonderful book!

Four and three quarter stars.


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Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So it goes.

So goes one of the most horrifying novels I have read in my life. I have just reread "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, which I first read about 40 years ago, in translation.

Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time and relives various fragments of his life, in the US, in Europe during World War II (when he meets Kurt Vonnegut, the author), in particular during the destruction of Dresden, and as a zoo exhibit on planet Tralfamadore.

It took me over a week to read this short book; I just could not stomach the truth about the wretched human species. I am embarrassed by being a member of a species that burns their members in ovens (bad guys, the Germans, did that by millions in concentration camps) or boils schoolgirls alive (good guys, the Americans, did that by thousands in Dresden). I am embarrassed by how wars are in the very human nature, how mass murders cannot be avoided. How the wars are fought by children, when most adult soldiers are dead. How absurdly random human lives are.

I do not like the Tralfamadoria bit and do not much care for the Kilgore Trout story, yet
this is a great book, a must read, a masterpiece. The blurbs on the cover scream "Poignant and hilarious". Yes, absolutely. Hilarious and very, very, very sad. "Nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcome to the human race." And poor Edgar Derby, who has survived the unimaginable horrors of war, is executed for stealing a teacup. I really think that whoever is proud to be a human might be an idiot. Birds are smarter; they can say "Poo-tee-weet".

Five stars.


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I Can See in the Dark by Karin Fossum
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Norway's Karin Fossum is one of my favorite mystery authors. Her "Black Seconds" and "Indian Bride" are solidly five-star works, some of the best mysteries I have ever read in my life. "I Can See in the Dark" is not Ms. Fossum's best novel, although it is very readable. I do not like the term "page turner" as it implies inferior quality of writing - one just wants to turn the pages to follow the plot rather than savor the writing, but while "I Can See in the Dark" is a page turner, it is - as always with Ms. Fossum's work - beautifully written. The author uses short simple sentences, ably translated from Norwegian by James Anderson.

Riktor works as a nurse caring for elderly people at the Lokka nursing home. He is not a typical nurse, though, and he has dark secrets. He is accused of murder, but there is something deeply perverse about the whole set-up. The plot is really engrossing, but very, very dark. There is a passage, mid-novel, about Riktor's behavior with his patients that made my skin crawl.

Ms. Fossum is younger than me, but still, at 60 she is quite mature. This is a book for old people, for people who understand the vagaries and randomness of life. This is also a painful book about dying. "I often think about the old people in their beds at Lokka. Those cavernous faces, those bony hands always groping for something to hold on to. They, who have seen and understood about life and how it should be lived. I know so much more now, they think; I understand things at last, but it's too late. Now the greenhorns are coming to take over, and they won't listen to us, lying here twittering like birds." Yes, now I understand things, but it is way too late.

A very good mystery, but one that does not transcend the genre.

Three and a half stars.


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The Demon in the Freezer : A True Story by Richard Preston
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

With the first case of Ebola occurring in the U.S., I guess I chose the right time to read Richard Preston’s “The Demon in the Freezer” (2002). It is a non-fiction book that deals with the potential dangers of biological warfare. The main focus is on smallpox virus and anthrax bacterium, although the Ebola virus is frequently mentioned too.

The story begins in September 2001, one week after 9/11, when a letter to Senator Daschle's office in Washington D.C. is found to contain anthrax, and five people die as a result. The story then tracks back to 1970, when an outbreak of smallpox occurred in the small town of Meschede, Germany. A large portion of the book is about the Eradication (capital letter intended) effort, which united medical personnel of many countries on a quest to achieve global elimination of variola, the smallpox virus, which - according to the author - is generally believed to be the most dangerous virus to the human species. Variola was officially eradicated in 1979, although large supplies of the virus remain stored in the health agencies' vaults in U.S. and Russia (and, quite likely, in other countries too).

Several passages about the fight against smallpox are fascinating, for example the fragment that describes how a smoke-producing machine helped discover the mechanisms of the virus' travel through the hospital. I have also found the pages about insect viruses engrossing.

Richard Preston is known for his sensationalism, and this book is no exception. While the story about the smallpox eradication effort is deeply moving, most other sub-stories are written in a somewhat hysterical tone. Also, the author's attempts to "humanize" the protagonists are lame; why do we need to know that this or that doctor was a short and stout woman with brown eyes? Or that they drank whiskey or smoked cigars? What probably bothers me most, though, is that the book lacks focus; instead of telling one compelling story it is all over the place, jumping here and there.

The penultimate chapter is about virus engineering, which raises the prospect of horrible biological wars. I am way too old to worry about myself, but I am worrying about my child and my grandchildren.

An interesting and well-meaning book, if rather poorly written.

Two and a half stars.


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The Collini Case by Ferdinand von Schirach
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Baldur von Schirach was one of the top officials in Nazi Germany; he was the leader of the Hitler-Jugend (Hitler Youth) organization. Convicted for crimes against humanity in 1946, he spent 20 years in Spandau prison in Berlin. Ferdinand von Schirach, a lawyer and a writer, whose books have been translated into more than 35 languages, is his grandson. "The Collini Case" (2011) is a good courtroom drama. I find it better than many of John Grisham's novels.

Fabrizio Collini, an elderly man, a toolmaker posing as a Corriere della Serra reporter, visits an 85-year old rich industrialist, Herr Meyer, in a hotel in Berlin. He kills him, and defaces the body ("He couldn't stop, he kept grinding his heel into that face while blood and brain matter spurted over his trouser leg, the carpet, the bedstead.") Then he calls the police, sits down in the lobby, and waits for the law to come. Caspar Leinen, a young attorney on standby duty for legal aid (something like the public defender office in U.S.) picks up the case, against a famous and very experienced prosecution attorney.

I find the plot interesting and "The Collini Case" is a hard book to put down. The denouement is plausible and consistent with the setup. The author, being a criminal law practitioner, obviously knows about the court process in his country. I also like the writing; the sentences are mostly short and simple, yet they well convey the visuals (the translator must have contributed to the overall quality). The best thing of all is that the novel is only 186 pages long. No fluff, no padding, no extraneous stuff that many American writers so love to use to increase the volume. Way to go!

Three and a half stars.


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The Polish Officer by Alan Furst
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Although Alan Furst's "The Polish Officer" (1995) came highly recommended by a friend of mine whose judgment I value and trust, I feel a little disappointed having read the book. It is a rather standard spy novel slash war story fare; Daniel Silva's books, which I do not like at all, are quite similar, with the exception that Mr. Furst is obviously a better writer. The novel is written with great sympathy for Polish people and Polish resistance fighters in particular, but I am not allowed to be biased because of my country of birth.

September 1939 in Warsaw: Germans attack Poland from the west, thus beginning the Second World War. Soon the Soviets attack from the east. Captain Alexander de Milja joins the Polish underground resistance army and his first task is to transport Polish National Bullion Reserve gold to Romania and then to Paris. The plot follows de Milja's exploits in various European countries as he excels in spying, diversion, and sabotage craft fighting the Germans and Russians. Toward the end the book is less of a "historical spy novel" (the author's characterization of his work) and more about the horrors of war.

The novel has several lighter, funny passages, for instance, when Sturmbannfuhrer Grahnweis leaves the hotel by the Saint-Rustique side of the building: "For a time it wasn't clear that Grahnweis was ever going to be found, but, with persistence and painstaking attention to detail, he was" (based on crown on the second bicuspid molar).

Captain de Milja is a success with women and the sex scenes are discreet and well written. A few gems like "She was that indeterminate age where French women pause for many years - between virginal girlhood (about thirty-five) and wicked-old-ladyhood..." demonstrate the author's sharpness of observations. Yet, all in all, I find "The Polish Officer" a rather unremarkable novel.

Two and a half stars.


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Out of the Blackout by Robert Barnard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Robert Barnard's "Out of the Blackout" (1984) is the twelfth book by Mr. Barnard that I have read. It is quite an engrossing mystery, but not the best by this author.

1941 in London is the year of the Blitz, strategic bombings of British cities by German Luftwaffe. Many children are evacuated to the country. One such transport that arrives in a village in Gloucestershire has a five-year boy who is not on the list of evacuees. No one can figure out who he is and how he got on the train. The boy says his name is Simon Thorn, but does not seem quite sure about it. He is adopted by a local family and enjoys a happy youth.

The plot skips in time over the period of about 40 years as Simon tries to establish his real birth name and to learn about his family. Will he succeed? Are there any dark and ugly secrets in his family's past? I am not spoiling; read the novel.

The last chapter is the only place where Mr. Barnard shows his trademark acerbic wit and sarcastic writing style, which allows me to raise the rating a little bit.

Two and three quarter stars.


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Capitol Offense by William Bernhardt
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Reviewing William Bernhardt's "Capitol Offense" is not an easy task. This mystery/court drama has so many utterly moronic features that a one-star rating would be overly generous. Yet, it is not completely devoid of interesting stuff. For instance, the opening sentence, "I died three days ago", is pretty neat.

A female doctor in Oklahoma disappears, after having a car accident in a remote area. Her husband tries to have the police look for her, but for seven days he is unable to convince a detective to issue an APB or even to begin a search. After his wife is finally found, too late to be saved, he apparently has plans to kill the detective who indirectly caused her death and consults Ben Kincaid, a senator and a successful lawyer, to arrange a pardon for him for the murder. The whole premise is so idiotic that I was almost ready to stop reading the book, which I almost never do (I have not finished only two books in the last 20 years).

While the author's writing is occasionally so bad that I enjoyed it for entertainment purposes, the court drama part is quite interesting and competently written. Plausibility of the denouement is rather feeble. I enjoyed one passage: "People might not be willing to admit to extreme, even uncontrollable emotions with regard to their spouses. But a kitty was a different thing altogether."

"Capitol Offense" is quite a readable book, but in a wrong way. One wants to turn the pages, without reading them, just to learn the ending.

One and a half stars.


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The Special Prisoner: A Novel by Jim Lehrer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In the 1980s and most of 1990s, before I quit watching TV, I had been a fan of McNeil and Lehrer's NewsHour on PBS; I used to watch it almost every day. This was an interesting, serious, and mature news program unlike the so-called news on the networks. So I was quite excited about Jim Lehrer's book, "The Special Prisoner". Alas, I am not able to recommend it - while the plot is engrossing, the book is not written well.

John Quincy Watson used to be a B-29 bomber plane pilot during World War II. He participated in many bombing raids on Japanese cities and villages, where incendiary bombs were used. Men, women, and children on the ground were burned alive, and their surviving parents, children, spouses, or siblings could smell the burning human flesh. Watson could smell it too.

One day Watson's plane is shot down; he falls into Japanese hands, and in the infamous Sengei 4 camp for war prisoners he witnesses and is subject to unimaginably cruel torture applied by Japanese soldiers to Americans. One sadistic Japanese officer - whom the prisoners named Hyena - excels at torturing the prisoners of war. Almost each day an American is killed through unspeakably cruel means in front of other prisoners.

The plot of the novel begins in the 1990s, when Watson, who in the meantime became a Methodist bishop, spots Hyena at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. The past is told in flashbacks. The novel is, basically, a revenge story. It is quite crude and has A Big Ethics Question written all over it, all in capitals. The novel reads as if it was written with the purpose of becoming standard book club fare. There is some bad writing too, for instance, in the unconsumed sex scene. Very readable novel but grossly flawed.

Two stars.


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Gun Before Butter by Nicolas Freeling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lucienne Englebert, a protagonist of Nicolas Freeling's "Gun Before Butter" (1963) is as unforgettable a character as the much more recent Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson's famous "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". Both are strong. compelling, complex, and very well written female characters. I read Mr. Freeling's book for the first time in the early 1970s, and ranked it then among masterpieces of the crime genre, along Rex Stout's "Murder by the Book" and Sjowall/Wahloo's "The Laughing Policeman". I have just finished re-reading the novel, and my opinion has not changed; it is indeed a masterpiece of the genre, and my only problem is whether to award it four or five stars.

Inspector Van der Valk, probably my most favorite of all fiction detectives, a nonconformist policeman, critical of Dutch stolidity, provincialism, and isolationism, and a "queer character" overall, often does not do his police work by the book. He meets Lucienne for the first time at the scene of an auto accident where her father dies. Van der Valk is investigating a murder that happened in Amsterdam but which also has connections to Germany and Belgium.

Mr. Freeling's observations of European cities and people are phenomenally sharp. As in all his novels, he masterfully captures the essence of Europeanness (were he alive, he would be very happy about the current state of the EU) and satirizes the stereotypes about European nations. (He also makes jokes about the French, which is always a plus in my book, just kidding...) The passage where Lucienne judges her customers based on the look in their eyes exhibits unusual psychological depth. The conversations between Lucienne and her admirers ring true and they help elevate this mystery book to a first-class literary status.

The ending is astounding, but understandable upon reflection. Unfortunately, in the so-called real life there are very few policemen of Van der Valk's caliber. Probably none.

Wonderful title, believable characters, great writing, engrossing mystery. I decided to round my rating up. Of course, "Gun Before Butter" is not exactly in the same class as Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", Coetzee's "Disgrace", or Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49", but within its genre, it would be very hard to find a better novel.

Four and a half stars.


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Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Slow Man" is the tenth novel by J.M. Coetzee that I have read (and reviewed here). Mr. Coetzee might be my favorite author, but this is not my favorite book of his. While it conveys frighteningly deep wisdom about what it means to be old (the author was exactly my current age, 63, when he wrote the book in 2004 or 2005), I do not like the sudden transition from fiction to meta-fiction at about one-third of the novel. Of course, I know next to nothing about literature and am too obtuse to appreciate this particular literary structure, so my opinion is tentative at best.

Paul Rayment, a 60-year old Australian ex-photographer and bicycle rider, has an accident in the street; his leg is shattered and has to be amputated above the knee. He falls in a sort of love with his day nurse, Marijana, a mother of three children. The affection (it is really more than that) that Mr. Rayment feels for Marijana makes him offer money for her son's college education. Enough summarizing: any more would make the novel sound like the worst kind of soap opera, which it emphatically is not. The point of the book is far, far beyond the plot. The point of "Slow Man" is the difference between care and love and how painful the difference can be felt by those affected.

This is one of the most adult books I have ever read; I doubt people below forty will understand it at all. It is about longing for a child one has never had. It is about sexual awakening of a 60-year old amputee. Mainly, though, it is about yearning for love, including the sexual kind, when one is at the end of the earthly passage and readying to die. Mr. Rayment worries about "leaving no trace behind" and having been "sliding through the world". The subtlety and depth of psychological observations are stunning. Mr. Coetzee writes about things that we barely dare to think about in private and would never dare to talk about.

In addition to the meta-fiction trick, I am unable to appreciate the Marianna (not Marijana) episode. To me, it is redundant; I do not think the impact and message of the novel would change at all, if the Marianna event was removed from the text. Of course elderly and infirm people need sex and are sometimes lucky to have it. I just find the episode incompatible with the rest of the novel and the details (flour and water paste, nylon stocking, etc.) ridiculous. Skip Marianna, skip Elizabeth, and it could be the greatest novel for adults ever written. But then how ridiculous am I to criticize a Nobel Prize winner in literature?

Three stars.


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Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography And Discography by Vladimir Simosko
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The great musician and composer Eric Dolphy is little known outside of jazz circles. A so-called "average person" might have heard the names of John Coltrane or Miles Davis, but I doubt that more than one or two percent of randomly interviewed people would associate the name Dolphy with jazz. Yet, he was a giant of that genre and one of the most influential musicians/composers of the 1960s, which is the only jazz period that interests me (I do not "get" the pre-Sixties or post-Sixties jazz).

Vladimir Simosko's and Barry Tepperman's "Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography & Discography" is a very short book about Dolphy's musical trajectory so tragically interrupted by his death from a diabetic condition at the age of 36. The book is a well-researched chronology of Dolphy's engagements and performances, as a sideman and as a band leader. There is precious little in the book about Dolphy's personal life. I would love to know more about him, particularly because he has been frequently described as a deep, gentle, generous, and caring person. John Coltrane, the only musician whom I would put above Dolphy in the pantheon of jazz, says the following about Dolphy: "[...] my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician."

The authors' work has been largely wasted on me as I do not have even the slightest understanding of musical theory; still, I love reading about some of my favorite pieces, such as "God Bless the Child", or some of my favorite albums like "Africa/Brass" by John Coltrane Quintet with Eric Dolphy. Maybe I have not listened to a lot of flute music, but to me no one has ever played this instrument better than Dolphy. He is also widely acknowledged as a virtuoso of bass clarinet.

To my unsophisticated, completely untrained ear, many of Dolphy's works are some of the most brainy, intellectual music I have ever heard. In a certain sense, the joy of listening to it resembles the joy of a viewer of an abstract painting, when suddenly one transcends the jumble of shapes and colors and "gets" the picture.

Eric Dolphy died on July 9, 1964 in Berlin, Germany. There are rumors that doctors ignored his diabetic coma and instead attributed the artist's state to substance abuse, based on stereotyping; after all he was black and a musician (as far as I know, Dolphy did not use drugs). Coltrane was allowed only 41 years of life, Dolphy 36. World music would be very different today if they had a chance to live and create throughout the average human lifespan.

Good book. A pity it is so short and skimpy on biographical details.

Three stars.


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Murder by the Book by Rex Stout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Re-reading Rex Stout's "Murder by the Book" (1951) concludes my experiment that was supposed to establish how my reception of the Nero Wolfe series has changed over 30 - 45 years. The first two re-reads were not quite conclusive (I review "The Mother Hunt" here and "Champagne for One" here . Well, I have not changed my opinion of "Murder by the Book" much. It is an outstanding mystery and a very good book overall. A magnificent 32-page fragment rivals the best writing of Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler (yes, in this order).

When Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin discover a connection between two seemingly unrelated murders - a staff member of a law firm and an editor in a publishing house have been found dead - Wolfe is hired by the father of one of the victims to investigate. The connection is of literary nature (thus the title) and when yet another murder occurs it is also related to a book that looms in the background. Archie uses a clever 48-orchid trick to gather many female employees of the publishing company in Wolfe's office and - thanks to his manly charms - manages to gather some information. This is obviously implausible, which is usually a turnoff for me, yet the episode is somehow charming, and well written, and it gets the thumbs up.

After some further plot developments comes the unforgettable 32-page passage, where Archie goes to Los Angeles to conduct Wolfe's investigation and meets Mrs. Peggy Potter. The sequence of events is cleverly structured, the writing is beautiful, and the "almost love story" between Archie and Mrs. Potter is deeply touching yet sweet. I think I must have cried when reading it as a teen. In addition, the sub-story has many funny touches; for instance, Archie comes back from California, where it has rained incessantly for fours days, to New York, which is basking in early spring warm sunlight.

The flight from New York to Los Angeles took 10 or 11 hours in 1951. Most everybody smoked. To send a telegram (what's a telegram?) one had to go to a drugstore. Phone lines were often busy ("circuit congestion"), which made communication impossible. Ah, these were the wonderful days.

Alas, at the end, Mr. Stout again has Wolfe gather in his office the 17 people connected with the investigation to pompously expound the solution of the case. Why can't I tame my dislike of this theatricality? Still, unquestionable five stars for the California episode and four stars for the rest of the book. Maybe one day I will round the average up, with a dedication to Mrs. Potter, with her twinkling eyes and little giggles. She would be about 100 years old today, if she were alive.

Four and a half stars.


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Champagne for One by Rex Stout
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Rex Stout's "Champagne for One" (1958) is the second Nero Wolfe mystery that I have randomly chosen to re-read in a quest to find out whether my reception of the novels that I highly praised when I read the entire set (46) of Wolfe mysteries in the Eighties and Nineties has changed. I review the first one, "The Mother Hunt" here .

Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe's right hand, is invited to sit in for the sick nephew of a very rich woman who sponsors a famous annual charity party for unmarried mothers. Archie is to play a chevalier to one of the women. One of the attendees dies during the event, poisoned by cyanide. While the police and the hosts of the party maintain that the death is suicide, Archie insists it is murder. A rich guest of the party, afraid that certain events from his past may influence the police's thinking, hires Nero Wolfe to investigate.

I find the plot convoluted, quite clumsy, and the whole story rather implausible. Coincidences galore. As usual, I am annoyed by the excessively theatrical conferences in Wolfe's office, attended by all the protagonists and, sometimes, the police. It gives the author a chance to show pontificating Mr. Wolfe at his best (which is also his worst). One sentence made me smile: "A man who would never see eighty again came out hobbling over, squeaking at me, 'What's your name?'" The novel is a pleasant and very fast read (about two hours), but I believe Mr. Stout's average level is higher. Now I will conclude my experiment by reading Mr. Stout's "Murder by the Book", which I considered a masterpiece a long, long time ago.

Two stars.


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The Mother Hunt by Rex Stout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read my first Nero Wolfe mystery, "Murder by the Book", in translation into my native language, about 1970 or so. I liked it a lot, so when I came to the U.S. I was eager to read other books by Rex Stout. I believe I managed to read all 46 of them between the early Eighties and the mid-Nineties. At that time I was still able to read mystery series. Now I dislike series, but I decided to reread two or three novels in the Nero Wolfe series, just to see whether and how my reception of Mr. Stout's work has changed over time. The first book to reread, randomly selected, is "The Mother Hunt" (1963).

The wife of a successful novelist, recently deceased, finds in her vestibule a healthy baby with a note implying that her husband was the father. She hires Nero Wolfe to find out who the mother is. Archie Goodwin investigates, while Mr. Wolfe lazes around in his old brownhouse on West 35th Street, New York, attends his orchids, drinks beer, reads books, and thinks about the case during breaks between these activities.

A murder occurs, clearly connected to Archie's (sorry, Wolfe's) investigation. The plot is captivating, but rapidly deteriorates when Mr. Stout begins to use, several times, his trademark literary device - gathering in Wolfe's office several characters connected to the investigation and discussing the facts of the case with them. Too theatrical and implausible.

My feeling of being too familiar with the characters is strong; they are cut and pasted from book to book, never ever changing, perhaps except for Archie, who has always been the most (perhaps the only) interesting character. Yet the first half of the novel is enthralling and Mr. Stout's writing is good. I will try one or two more rereads and then come back to my favorite "one-off" books.

Three stars.


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Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival by Joe Simpson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I find it very hard to review non-fiction books because it requires carefully distinguishing between the impact of the real-life events they describe and the quality of the description itself. Joe Simpson's "Touching the Void" (originally 1988, but I have read the 2004 edition) presents an absolutely amazing story of a mountain climber's survival. Yet, despite the tremendous impact of the events shown, the book is not outstanding.

Joe Simpson and Simon Yates are climbing the yet unconquered West Face of Siula Grande in Cordillera Huayhuash (Peruvian Andes) in May and June of 1985. They succeed, reach the summit, but on the descent a tragedy occurs, and Joe breaks his knee in a horrible way (his lower leg is driven through the knee joint). Simon tries to help him, lowering him several times on a 300-foot rope, but then Joe falls into a crevasse. Simon cuts the rope to be able to survive, knowing that Joe is dead. However, Joe does not die, and with painfully broken knee (one leg is six inches shorter than the other) crawls and hops through crevasses, glaciers, snowfields, and moraines, many, many miles, without any water and food for three days and three nights, at the elevation of above 18,000 feet. It is the utter triumph of human spirit that he makes it.

The book is a bit overwrought, even maybe hysterical in some passages, and the three different postscripts, especially the Hollywood part, make it weaker than the original story. A non-climbing reader definitely needs the glossary to understand what the author is writing about: abseiling, fluting, cornice, belay, crampon, etc. It is just a good book about a fantastic story.

Three and a quarter stars.


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Snow White and Russian Red by Dorota Masłowska
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just wanted to write a little in my native language this one time, just to see whether I still am able to. The English version of the review - a different one - is below the Polish version.

Miesiac temu przeczytalem "Snow White and Russian Red" Doroty Maslowskiej - angielskie tlumaczenie powiesci "Wojna polsko-ruska pod flaga bialo-czerwona" i zachwycony jej wspaniala proza ocenilem ksiazke na cztery i trzy czwarte gwiazdki. Teraz, przeczytawszy ksiazke po polsku, musze zmienic zdanie. Jest to absolutnie fantastyczna ksiazka. Wiem, ze to zabrzmi jak swietokradztwo a moze obrazoburstwo, ale powiesc Maslowskiej jest dla mnie porownywalna z "Lalka" Prusa, "Przedwiosniem" Zeromskiego, czy "Ferdydurke" Gombrowicza. Teraz calkiem sie wychyle, ale porownam te powiesc tez do "Pana Tadeusza". Podobna sila przekazu i podobnej skali talent pisarski.

"Wojna polsko-ruska" portretuje rzeczywistosc Polski 2002 roku, nowo-wolnej Polski, sytuacje ludzi kompletnie otumanionych przez telewizje i reklamy, ludzi szamoczacych sie w tej nowo-nabytej wolnosci. Dorota Maslowska ma absolutny sluch pisarski, jej wyczucie jezyka jest fenomenalne. Jezyk powiesci jest prawdziwy, dosadny, bardzo wulgarny, bo przeciez tak, kurwa, wielu Polakow mowi. A do tego jest to histerycznie smieszna ksiazka. Zasmiewalem sie nad prawie kazda stronica. Wezmy chociazby zdanie "A w miedzyczasie osraly ja wazki". Czy tez "Wiesz, mnie od urodzenia bolalo w piersiach, czulem niepokoj. Wreszcie jednego dnia zajrzalem sobie do gardla, a tam podwojne dno". Ze wszystkich ksiazek, ktore czytalem w zyciu - a bylo ich wiele - chyba tylko "Wstep do imagineskopii" Sledzia Otrembusa Podgrobelskiego wywolal u mnie wiecej smiechu.

Zamieszczam ponizej moja angielsko-jezyczna recenzje z angielskiego tlumaczenia, a tutaj jeden z moich ulubionych fragmentow oryginalnej wersji polskiej: "Cale me zycie staje mi przed oczami takie, jakie bylo. Przedszkole, gdzie dwiedzialem sie, ze wszystkim nam chodzi o pokoj na swiecie, o biale golebie z bristolu 3000 zlotych za blok, a potem raptem 3500 zlotych, mus tak zwanego lezakowania, siku w majtki, epidemia prochnicy, klub wiewiorki, brutalna fluoryzacja uzebienia. Potem przypominam sobie podstawowke, zla wychowawczynia, zle nauczycielki w kozakach kurwiszonach, szatnie, obuwie zamienne i izbe pamieci, pokoj, pokoj, golebie pokoju z bristolu frunace na nitce bawelnopodobnej przez hol, pierwsze kontakty homo w szatni wuef." Ja tez przez to wszystko przeszedlem, mimo ze pani Maslowska jest mlodsza od mojej corki.

Poza tym odszczekuje krytyke zakonczenia z "Masloska" z mojej angielskiej recenzji. Jest ono swietne; w pewnym sensie przypomina mi najlepsze utwory Stanislawa Lema. A wiec albo moj angielski nie jest wystaczajacy, albo tlumaczenie nie jest tak znowu wspaniale jak uwazalem.

Dlugopis z napisem "Zdzislaw Sztorm" przypomina mi symbol Trystero z wspanialej noweli Thomasa Pynchona, "The Crying of Lot 49". Co za klasa!

Szesc gwiazdek za genialny warsztat literacki, cztery za tresc Czyli piec gwiazdek.

For years my wife has been telling me about this young (born in 1983) Polish writer, Dorota Maslowska, and about her book "Snow White and Russian Red" (2002) (the original Polish title sounds much better: "Wojna polsko-ruska pod flaga bialo-czerwona", which roughly means "A Polish-Russian war, under the white and red flag"). I have been reluctant to read it; after all what can one expect from a nineteen year old author? While it is obvious that at nineteen one can be a great mathematician, poet, chess player, and the like, it seems impossible to write a great novel at that age. At nineteen one can have the knowledge of structures, but not the structure of knowledge, which takes years and years of living to emerge. For example, I myself at nineteen was a total idiot (like almost all of my friends and acquaintances, boys much more than girls, sorry for the sexist stereotyping); of course I knew about music, games, sports, films, TV, etc., but I knew nothing about the matters that count, I knew nothing about life.

Now that I have read the book (in English translation, because someone has borrowed the Polish original from us and never bothered to return it), I am totally blown away by it. There is much depth in the novel, and the writing is utterly magnificent. The entire ending is a literary tour de force; it is poetic, hypnotic, brilliant. Like, wow, man.

The novel, which some critics rightly compare to "Catcher in the Rye", "Trainspotting", "Naked Lunch", is about gray, depressing, small-town life of young people, the author's contemporaries, in the times of systemic change in Poland, from the so-called Communism to free-market economy. The narrator is a young man, called Nails (Silny, in the Polish original), who has just been dumped by his girlfriend. Nails and everybody else in the novel are constantly on speed. They live from day to day, without any aim, in a country where, as they say, there is no future. They look up to the West and down on the "Russkies".

When I was 19, life was so much easier. We knew who the bad guys were: the government, the press, radio, and TV. They were always lying to us, the good Polish people. In 2002 Poland things are not so easy; it is hard to know who the bad people are. Nails claims to be a leftist-anarchist, but he really does not know what it means and is mainly interested in satisfying the needs of this one special part of his body.

"Snow White and Russian Red" is a biting satire on xenophobia and fake patriotism: "Either you are a Pole or you're not a Pole. Either you are Polish or you're Russki. And to put it more bluntly, either you're a person or you're a prick." Patriotism is measured by respect of the flag.

It is a very funny novel as well. I burst out laughing about every other page. The translation by Benjamin Paloff is totally wonderful. I will soon read the original and amend this review, if need be, but I cannot believe the original Polish version could be any better. The quarter of a star that I am taking off is for the author's failed device (in my opinion) of putting herself, "Dorota Masloska", in the final parts of the book.

Here's a passage that reminds me of some of the great works in world literature; it could have been written by William Faulkner or James Joyce, but it was written by 19-year-old Dorota Maslowska, barely out of high school in Wejherowo, Poland:

"Indeed, we're girls talking about death, swinging a leg, eating nuts, though there's no talk of those who are absent. They're scarcely bruises and scratches that we did to ourselves, riding on a bike, but they look like floodwaters on our legs, like purple seas, and we're talking fiercely about death. And we imagine our funeral, at which we're present, we stand there with flowers, eavesdrop on the conversations, and cry more than everybody, we keep our moms at hand, we throw earth at the empty casket, because that way death doesn't really concern us, we are different, we'll die some other day or won't die at all. We're dead serious, we smoke cigarettes, taking drags in such a way that an echo resounds in the whole house, and we flick the ash into an empty watercolor box."

Four and three quarter stars (five stars for the translation).


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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first read James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916) as an adolescent, almost 50 years ago. The novel made a huge impression on me then. The sublime beauty of Joyce's prose made it clear to me that I better become an engineer or a mathematician because I obviously had no talent for writing, even if I had dearly wanted to be a writer. I have just reread the book, and I still think it is one of the greatest works of world literature. Each of the five chapters of the book contains more wisdom and beauty than the entire Internet. The conversation between Stephen and Lynch in the fifth chapter carries way more meaning than all posts on Facebook combined.

"A Portrait" is a fictionalized autobiography of James Joyce's youth; in the novel he appears as Stephen Dedalus. Thousands of reviews by much better writers than myself are available so I will just offer some loose thoughts. J.M. Coetzee's "Boyhood" ( which I review here) deals with similar issues. It is also similar in its greatness. Coetzee's manufacturing of childhood memories is on the same level as the literary, political, and religious awakenings of Stephen Dedalus. I do not know which book I like better. They are both magnificent. Coetzee's book is politically sharper, but Joyce's is psychologically deeper. And it shows how little people changed in about one hundred years, despite all the technology.

The first chapter, about Stephen's childhood, is to me the most striking. The broken sentence patterns convey the fragmentary nature of childhood memories. In the third chapter we witness Stephen's struggles with emerging sexuality ("The sootcoated packet of pictures which he had hidden in the flue of the fireplace and in the presence of whose shameless or bashful wantonness he lay for hours sinning in thought and deed."). The chapter also contains monumental Jesuit sermons on the horrors of hell and the nature of sin. The fifth chapter showcases Stephen's growing fascination with language. The famous conversation between Stephen and Lynch about arts and beauty is the focus of that chapter. As is the later conversation between Stephen and Cranly.

Here's a passage from the fifth chapter: "A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret quietly and swiftly." Utterly magnificent. J.M. Coetzee writes equally beautifully, but his strength - because of his education - is the mathematical precision of the language rather than Joyce's lyricism.

Five stars.


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The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I find Philip Roth's "The Anatomy Lesson" (1983), the third novel in the Zuckerman trilogy, rather unfocused and uneven. The book contains spellbinding passages but also some unbearably boring ones. I loved "Portnoy's Complaint", which I read over 40 years ago, and I quite disliked Mr. Roth's "The Breast" ( reviewed here). This novel would place somewhere in between in my ranking.

Nathan Zuckerman is a 40-year-old author of four well-received novels. He is suffering from extreme pain in his arms, neck, and shoulders, and no medical treatment seems to be working. He has a number of women helping him with his everyday life and also ensuring that his sex life is thriving. Gloria, Jenny, Diana, Jaga (Yaga, really, as she is from Warsaw, Poland), and Ricky serve Zuckerman like the 1970s groupies did for famous rock band members.

It seems that for Mr. Roth the thread about Zuckerman's struggle with Milton Appel, his most vocal literary critic and archenemy, is crucial to the novel. Yet to me, it is way overdone, excessive, and just plain boring. On the other hand, Zuckerman's love for his deceased mother is truly felt, and that thread is deeply touching. The mother is a quiet hero: "Redressing historical grievances, righting intolerable wrongs, changing the tragic course of the Jewish history - all this she gladly left for her husband to accomplish during dinner. He made the noise and had the opinions, she contended herself with preparing their meal and feeding the children and enjoying, while it lasted, the harmonious family life."

Then there is the hilarious thread about the pornography business that Zuckerman is ostensibly in, and his conversations with Ricky about that business are priceless. "The Anatomy Lesson" contains so many stunning passages that I would need to write a four-page review to provide more samples. Just one example: "With Roget's Thesaurus under his head and Gloria sitting on his face, Zuckerman understood just how little one can depend upon human suffering to produce ennobling effects."

The spirit of early 1970s is portrayed well, with the sexual revolution and the Watergate affair in the background,. Can you imagine that people smoked joints on airplanes? Those were the days. Mr. Roth's prose conveys the feel of the city of Chicago well. Also, I like the title, which evokes the many doctors over Nicolaes Tulp's body in the magnificent Rembrandt's painting. Yet, while I love the individual scenes, I am unable to love the whole novel. It is way too disjoint, too self-referential, and too custom-made.

Three stars.


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The Suspect by Laurali R. Wright
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

L.R. Wright's "The Suspect" won the prestigious Edgar Award for "The Best Novel" of 1986. It is quite a good book, with a captivating plot, thus the latter part of this review explains why my rating is much less than stellar.

78-year-old George Wilcox kills 85-year-old Carlyle Burke, whom he has known for many, many years. The killing is described on the first few pages. The rest of the novel reaches deep into the past to reveal the reasons for the killing. "The Suspect" is a very good police procedural, or rather a "Royal Canadian Mounted Police procedural", as the events take place on Canada's Sunshine Coast. We learn how Staff Sergeant Alberg and his officers gradually get closer and closer to the solution of the case. The denouement is logical and mercifully lacks silly plot twists.

The novel is extremely readable; the term unputdownable fits really well. Thanks to my insomnia, I have been able to read it in one sitting. Yet "The Suspect" is all about the plot, while I love to read books for the writing. When I read "serious" books by, say, Coetzee, Pynchon, Joyce, etc., I read them for the magical "Wow!" sentences and passages that reveal deep wisdom or the beauty of the art of writing. But even in the "mystery genre" works by great authors such as Nicolas Freeling, Denise Mina, Hakan Nesser, Karin Fossum, and many others have depth and incredibly skilled writing in addition to the engrossing plot. I prefer books that I have to read slowly, books in which I enjoy rereading sentences and passages many times to appreciate the author's literary talent or wisdom. Reading books fast because they are interesting is not exactly my thing.

Moreover, there are too many coincidences and connections between people in "The Suspect", too many goings-on in a soap opera style. The romantic thread is well written, but a bit too sweet for my taste. Another complaint: how can a good writer - which Ms. Wright undoubtedly is - concoct the following monstrosity of a sentence: "His body had become a horrified, garrulous commentator on calamity", and - to make things worse - put it in the very first page of the novel? To me, it is a worthy contestant for the Worst Sentence of the Year Award.

Obviously I am very far from qualified to be an Edgar Award judge, but I checked their database and out of the 61 books awarded the best novel distinction since 1954 I read 13 and I would rate six of them with five stars. Definitely not this one, though.

Three and a quarter stars.


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Death And The Chaste Apprentice by Robert Barnard
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Having read several "serious" books in a row I think I have earned the right to some light entertainment. Here's yet another novel by Robert Barnard, "Death and the Chaste Apprentice" (1989), my eleventh work of his.

An annual music and theatre festival is held in Ketterick, a London suburb. The plot begins when the rehearsals for an Elizabethan play "The Chaste Apprentice of Bowe" and for subsequent opera performances begin at the Ketterick Arts Festival. The first 40 pages are really difficult to get through as there are too many characters, which makes the text hard to focus on. I almost never quit books before I finish them, but I have been tempted in this case. About one-third into the novel, there is a murder. The local superintendent Iain Dundy, helped by Charlie Peace from the Metropolitan CID, are on the case.

To me, the best parts of the novel are fascinating insights into the world of opera and Elizabethan theatre. Alas, one can find precious little of Mr. Barnard's trademark snide writing style, and there are very few sarcastic passages that have impressed me so much in several of his other novels. I burst out laughing only in three or four places. While the plot is serviceable, there is one twist too many at the end. No, it is not a bad book; it is just below the average for Mr. Barnard.

Two stars.


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The Next 25 Years: The New Supreme Court and What it Means for Americans by Martin Garbus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Everybody who cares about the future of the United States of America should read Martin Garbus' book "The Next 25 Years: The New Supreme Court and what it means for Americans" (2007). My chances of being around in 2032 are not good, but I am worrying about my daughter and granddaughter. While the actions of the President of the United States and of the Congress have only short-term effects, the Supreme Court decisions have a long-lasting impact; they affect generations. The Supreme Court decisions define our country.

Mr. Garbus is a famous First Amendment lawyer and a pre-eminent legal historian. His book is unabashedly and virulently anti-conservative. Thus a disclaimer is needed: I am much more of a liberal than a conservative, even if I always attempt to look at issues from various points of view, so my review may be biased by my beliefs.

The book was published in 2007. Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens were still on the court while Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were yet to be seated. In the book Mr. Garbus makes a convincing case for several theses of which I, as a complete layman, select the following five that have captured my interest the most:
(1) The Rehnquist Court followed by the Roberts Court have been engaged in massive rewriting of the US law established in the 1937-1980 period.
(2) The Court (Rehnquist's and Roberts'), with its conservative majority, has allowed a major increase of the executive branch's power at the expense of the legislative branch, the Congress. Mr. Garbus writes "the Court is now determined to impose its own political preferences over that of elected federal officials."
(3) The Court has allowed the United States to be "defined only by the vision of the majorities". Mr. Garbus rightly says that "majority rule and democracy are not the same thing".
(4) "The five votes today [...] are based more on political power and less on legal reasoning", which - to me - violates the separation of powers principle.
(5) The notion of Justice Kennedy and ex-Justice O'Connor being "swing votes" is a myth; both have always been solidly conservative votes.

Mr. Garbus' book is rich in brilliant observations. I have written down more than twenty "deep thoughts", but for sake of brevity will quote just one here: "As one federal court said 'Of the three fundamental principles which underlie government: [...] the protection of life, liberty, and property, the chief of these is property'"

This is a really scary book. For once, I agree with one of the blurbs on the cover that warns us about "how the [...] bench may imperil our way of life and endanger the liberties you may have thought were our inalienable rights."

The most famous preamble might now as well say "We the rich people..." The poor need not apply for constitutional protection.

Four and a half stars.



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No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories by Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gabriel Garcia Marquez' masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is one of my most favorite books. His "No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories" is certainly not of the same caliber, although - to me - one of the stories is a gem that redeems the whole collection.

The plot of the title novella takes place during troubled times in Colombia - the 1950's La Violencia that claimed lives of more than 100,000 people. The novella presents a grim and extremely sad story about an elderly couple: the colonel has been waiting for over 15 years for the pension that is due to him because of his participation in the Thousand Days' War almost 60 years ago (1899 - 1902). The colonel and his asthmatic wife have no means of support except for a very promising rooster that they plan to sell when the cockfighting time arrives. Colombia is under martial law and curfews. The bells in the tower ring out the censor's movie moral classification and most movies are "unfit for everyone". It is a captivating story, yet I find the ending cheap and trivializing.

There are several other stories in the collection, and the last one, "Big Mama's Funeral", is totally charming - one of the best short stories that I have ever read. Subtle wit, humor, generous doses of magical realism transcend the skillful storytelling and raise the story to a high level of literary art. "At dusk the resonant pealing of St. Peter's Basilica mingled with the cracked tinklings of Macondo. Inside his stifling tent across the tangled reeds and the silent bogs which marked the boundary between the Roman Empire and the ranches of Big Mama, the Supreme Pontiff heard the uproar of the monkeys agitated all night long by the passing of the crowds."

Three and three quarter stars.


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Snow White and Russian Red by Dorota Masłowska
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For years my wife has been telling me about this young (born in 1983) Polish writer, Dorota Maslowska, and about her book "Snow White and Russian Red" (2002) (the original Polish title sounds much better: "Wojna polsko-ruska pod flaga bialo-czerwona", which roughly means "A Polish-Russian war, under the white and red flag"). I have been reluctant to read it; after all what can one expect from a nineteen year old author? While it is obvious that at nineteen one can be a great mathematician, poet, chess player, and the like, it seems impossible to write a great novel at that age. At nineteen one can have the knowledge of structures, but not the structure of knowledge, which takes years and years of living to emerge. For example, I myself at nineteen was a total idiot (like almost all of my friends and acquaintances, boys much more than girls, sorry for the sexist stereotyping); of course I knew about music, games, sports, films, TV, etc., but I knew nothing about the matters that count, I knew nothing about life.

Now that I have read the book (in English translation, because someone has borrowed the Polish original from us and never bothered to return it), I am totally blown away by it. There is much depth in the novel, and the writing is utterly magnificent. The entire ending is a literary tour de force; it is poetic, hypnotic, brilliant. Like, wow, man.

The novel, which some critics rightly compare to "Catcher in the Rye", "Trainspotting", "Naked Lunch", is about gray, depressing, small-town life of young people, the author's contemporaries, in the times of systemic change in Poland, from the so-called Communism to free-market economy. The narrator is a young man, called Nails (Silny, in the Polish original), who has just been dumped by his girlfriend. Nails and everybody else in the novel are constantly on speed. They live from day to day, without any aim, in a country where, as they say, there is no future. They look up to the West and down on the "Russkies".

When I was 19, life was so much easier. We knew who the bad guys were: the government, the press, radio, and TV. They were always lying to us, the good Polish people. In 2002 Poland things are not so easy; it is hard to know who the bad people are. Nails claims to be a leftist-anarchist, but he really does not know what it means and is mainly interested in satisfying the needs of this one special part of his body.

"Snow White and Russian Red" is a biting satire on xenophobia and fake patriotism: "Either you are a Pole or you're not a Pole. Either you are Polish or you're Russki. And to put it more bluntly, either you're a person or you're a prick." Patriotism is measured by respect of the flag.

It is a very funny novel as well. I burst out laughing about every other page. The translation by Benjamin Paloff is totally wonderful. I will soon read the original and amend this review, if need be, but I cannot believe the original Polish version could be any better. The quarter of a star that I am taking off is for the author's failed device (in my opinion) of putting herself, "Dorota Masloska", in the final parts of the book.

Here's a passage that reminds me of some of the great works in world literature; it could have been written by William Faulkner or James Joyce, but it was written by 19-year-old Dorota Maslowska, barely out of high school in Wejherowo, Poland:

"Indeed, we're girls talking about death, swinging a leg, eating nuts, though there's no talk of those who are absent. They're scarcely bruises and scratches that we did to ourselves, riding on a bike, but they look like floodwaters on our legs, like purple seas, and we're talking fiercely about death. And we imagine our funeral, at which we're present, we stand there with flowers, eavesdrop on the conversations, and cry more than everybody, we keep our moms at hand, we throw earth at the empty casket, because that way death doesn't really concern us, we are different, we'll die some other day or won't die at all. We're dead serious, we smoke cigarettes, taking drags in such a way that an echo resounds in the whole house, and we flick the ash into an empty watercolor box."

Four and three quarter stars (five stars for the translation).


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A Book of Bees...and How to Keep Them by Sue Hubbell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My favorite animal is Apis mellifera and among many, many things in the world that make me sad, very few make me sadder than the danger to the survival of bees. World agriculture may suffer because of decreased pollination, people may have to miss out on honey, and this wonderful and fascinating species may face a risk of near extinction. I have a personal regret as well: over 12 years ago, when my wife and I bought a house with a large garden, we had thousands of bees, living in an ad-hoc hive in the walls of our pool shack, buzzing sweetly all around, working on flowers, and pollinating our avocado tree. Even two or three years ago, we still had some bees and my dream of getting a few beehives to work with when I retire was still alive. Now all bees are gone from our garden. What's worse, bee colonies are disappearing all over the world at much faster pace than in the past because of the so-called Colony Collapse Disorder, probably caused by new-generation pesticides.

I have just read a wonderful book about bees and beekeeping, Sue Hubbell's "A Book of Bees" (1988), one of the many books I had bought because of my retirement apiculture plans. In the 1980s Ms. Hubbell was a commercial beekeeper, with an annual yield of about 6,000 pounds of honey from 300 hives. She clearly knows what she is writing about, despite her protestations "The only time I ever believed that I knew all there was to know about beekeeping was the first year I was keeping them. Every year since I've known less and less and have accepted the humbling truth that bees know more about making honey than I do". (The realization that it takes a lot of learning to know how little we know is, of course, true for most professionals.) In addition to all the stuff about beekeeping, Ms. Hubbell writes about plants and various creatures of the Ozarks, where she had her honey business. Her writing is beautiful: leisurely, assured, quiet, yet engaging. She even quotes large fragments of Virgil's poem about bees that had been written over 2000 years ago.

Of all earth's creatures, bees feature some of the most fascinating social behaviors. I have read several books about bees, including research monographs, so I have some rudimentary understanding of the theory of the subject. Ms. Hubbell provides so many details of the practice. From her book I have learned about joining colonies, uniting hives, preventing swarming, dealing with "supersedure" (which happens when bees themselves "requeen" the colony), and many other topics. Let me quote one humbling tidbit: to make one pound of honey a single bee would have to fly 76 thousand miles (three times around the Earth). I have also learned that, contrary to popular perception, bees spend a lot of time doing nothing at all, which makes me love them even more. Clever creatures!

My fascination with bees probably began in 1962 or 1963, when I read the well-known 1901 book "The Life of the Bee" by Maurice Maeterlinck. I hope that fifty years from now bees will still be around, pollinating flowers, making honey, and making my grand-grand-grandchildren happy.

Four stars.


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Death And The Princess by Robert Barnard
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Robert Barnard's "Death and the Princess", my tenth book of this author, is quite unremarkable. I will make up for it by writing a remarkably short review, compared to my usual overlong and tedious writings. I keep reading Barnard because I love his sardonic writing style, occasional snide remarks, frequent use of high-quality humor, and the fun he has with the English language. Nice examples of all of these qualities can be found in the novel, yet this time I find the plot quite weak.

Princess Helena is a distant cousin of the British royal family. There are indications that she might be in harm's way, and Superintendent Perry Trethowan is chosen to be her personal bodyguard because of his "couthness". When people with whom the Princess has had connections begin to die, the plot gets quite complicated.

The denouement is surprising, but it is revealed during a conversation between the detective and his sidekick - so very cliché. Some funny bits about royal lifestyles and about Mrs. Thatcher are high points of the novel.

Two and a quarter stars.


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The Breast by Philip Roth
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I loved Philip Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus" when I read it some 45 years ago (note to myself: re-read it, as an adult). Alas, I cannot say the same about "The Breast" (1972), a strange tale of a 38 year-old David Kepesh, a literature professor, who turns into a breast. Yes, "a one-hundred-and-fifty-five-pound mammary gland".

"The Breast" is awfully dated. Dated to the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and the mumbo jumbo of the psychoanalytic frenzy of these times. Professor Kepesh is a dedicated observer of his bodily functions and psychological states. As a breast, he struggles with intense erotic desires and is totally focused on the pleasures of his body. His girlfriend, Claire, sucks at his nipple, but he yearns for "orgasmic finale to [his] excitement". So very Sixties, idiotic stuff.

Mr. Roth gives us a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" when he mentions Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Gogol's "The Nose". Then we have allusions to Swift, and a wonderful poem by Rilke is quoted. As if mentioning the famous works of literary art that inspired this novella could elevate it to greatness. Professor Kepesh says "I have out-Kafkaed Kafka." No, sir. You definitely have not. This is a mediocre effort.

Two stars.


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Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains by Jon Krakauer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Genetic lottery gifted me with an extreme lack of motor coordination and a case of vertigo, thus I have not become a mountain climber. Yet I love hiking in the mountains and reading about extreme climbing. I have just finished Jon Krakauer's "Eiger Dreams" (1990), and one of the stories in this book is particularly moving. In late 1970s and early 1980s I used to be friends with Dobroslawa "Mrowka" Wolf (I worked in the same room of a research institute with her husband, Jan Wolf, also a world-class climber), and my wife and I spent many evenings with them, proud to be their friends. Dobroslawa perished on K2 during the carnage of 1986. The eleventh story in "Eiger Dreams" is about that horrible summer. (Jan Wolf died several years later, also during a climb).

The book is a collection of 12 articles that mostly had been published earlier in various magazines. The first story is about the famous North Face, Nordwand, of the Eiger, and about the author's retreat caused by bad weather. (Incidentally, Jan Wolf was a member of the team that recorded the fastest winter ascent of the face in 1978.) The other stories are about various adventures related to climbing, such as bouldering, frozen waterfall climbing, determining mountain elevation, etc.

The seventh story, "Chamonix", brings another memory. Krakauer writes "The Czechs and the Poles, for instance, who tend to be both short of hard currency and hard as nails, eschew the hotels and pensions in favor of farmers' fields on the outskirts of town, where they pay four or five francs per night for the privilege of shitting in the woods and pitching their ragged tents amid the mud and cow pies." In 1981, my wife and I spent two days on such a camping in Argentiere, few miles up the valley from Chamonix. We looked at Aiguille du Midi, listened to the cows mooing, and drank large quantities of cheap French red wine, while the rain pounded our tent.

Mr. Krakauer, in addition to being an outstanding climber, is a gifted writer. The book is extremely readable, very informative, and occasionally quite funny ("Dangling fifty feet below the surface in the blue twilight of the crevasse, Conrad first made a quick examination of his trousers to see if his sphincter had let go..."). I also enjoyed learning about various sources of theodolite measurement errors (gravitational pull, refraction) and the ways of compensating for them.

I like the last story the best; it is about the author's attempt to climb the Devils Thumb, Alaska. It contains the following gem: "at the age of twenty-three personal mortality - the idea of my own death - was still largely outside my conceptual grasp; it was as abstract a notion as non-Euclidian geometry or marriage." Even if one has no personal connections to the stories, "Eiger Dreams" is a very good book.

Four stars.


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James Joyce by Chester G. Anderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A little over 40 years ago I read James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and the book made an extremely strong impression on me, then a young man but alas no artist. Since then, I have read substantial fragments of "Ulysses", many passages from "Finnegans Wake", and several stories from "The Dubliners" (quite recently the magnificent novella "The Dead", which I review here ). I have also read long excerpts of Richard Ellman's famous biography of Joyce, which I now want to read in its entirety.

Chester G. Anderson's biography "James Joyce" is much, much smaller in scope than the Ellman's work. Instead of over 800 pages, we have some 140 pages, almost half of which are used for wonderful photographs and illustrations (124 of them). Although this book may feel like a teaser for the real thing, I find it quite interesting and not at all shallow. For instance, Mr. Anderson writes about Joyce: "Looking intently at world through words and at words through his experience of the world, he needed to name everything in his experience". While having no literary talent whatsoever, I also look at the world through words rather than images, and I often find that one word is worth a thousand images.

Among other pearls of wisdom, the author twice mentions the quote "the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents" (from Joyce's 1904 essay). Then, towards the end, Mr. Anderson puts an exclamation mark on his work stating that Joyce could say to Samuel Beckett "I can do anything with language."

James Joyce was born only nine years before my grandmother. Had he been of better health, he could have been still alive when I was reading "A Portrait" in the early 1970s. But then, would he have anything left to write after "Finnegans Wake", which he finished in 1939 after dedicating to it 16 years of his life?

Three and a half stars.


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The Case Of The Missing Brontë by Robert Barnard
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Works by the Brontë sisters were mandatory reading in my high school in the 1960s yet I was never able to finish any of the books. I found the novels boring and I preferred reading various "counterculture" items and watching Monty Python's skit showing a semaphore version of "Wuthering Heights". Maybe that's why I do not particularly like Robert Barnard's "The Case of the Missing Brontë" (1983). It is a well written, and occasionally very funny mystery, but I find it the least interesting of the nine novels by Mr. Barnard that I have read so far.

Superintendent Perry Trethowan is on vacations with Jan and Daniel in Northumberland, when their car breaks down. Staying overnight in a small Yorkshire town they meet Miss Edith Wing, who tells them that she has found a manuscript, probably an unknown Brontë's draft. Few days later, Miss Wing is heavily assaulted and put in a hospital, where she fights for her life. Perry is assigned the case and tries to unravel the mystery of the missing manuscript.

The plot is rather pedestrian, and it is the occasional brilliant writing that somewhat redeems the novel. I laughed at the characterizations of some people from the U.S. - "all wind, or all fraud". The Yorkshire phrase "I said you didn't ought to have" is quite funny. What I enjoyed the most is the following clever wordplay: "[...] he just looked ahead with that bullish expression on his unintelligent policeman's face (I mean, of course, his unintelligent-policeman's face)". What a difference a dash makes! Superb writing! But not a superb book, by any means.

Two stars.


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A Little Local Murder by Robert Barnard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Up to almost the very end of Robert Barnard's "A Little Local Murder" I was thinking it was the weakest of his eight novels that I have read. Then the denouement came, and I do not think so any more. One of the most surprising, yet not implausible endings that I remember, and one that adds some gravity to the light satirical tone of the rest of the novel (quite unlike in the same author's "Bodies" reviewed here, where the grim ending is completely incongruous with the tone of the book).

The story happens in mid-1970s in Twytching, a small town in eastern England. Radio Broadwich is planning a documentary on the town to be broadcast in the twin town of Twytching, Wisconsin, U.S. All local personalities are jockeying to be on the show, which allows Mr. Barnard to offer a broad satire on small-town mentality and politics and lampoon the power games that people play. When a murder happens, Inspector Parrish and the tiny Twytching police force eventually manage to solve the case.

Robert Barnard has a unique gift of portraying people at their worst. We are vain, selfish, pompous, scheming, controlling, conceited, duplicitous, pretentious, full of envy, and just plain stupid, and Mr. Barnard illustrates it using his wonderfully acerbic wit and sardonic writing style. Allow me a quote: "[...] asked Jean, idly thinking it would be difficult to select a more thoroughly uninteresting specimen of the local population than Miss Potts, strong though the competition was." Later in the novel, we are told about the joyful anticipation of a husband to have his beloved wife arrested. Fun read! I am looking forward to more Robert Barnard to fill spaces between more serious literary works.

Two and three quarter stars.


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The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another great recommendation from "The Complete Review" website. It rates Cynthia Ozick's "The Puttermesser Papers" (1997) with an A+ and while I am not sure about the plus, this book is certainly a first-class piece of literature: quite strange, a little crazy, deeply intelligent, and overall delightful.

The novel is composed of five parts or episodes that portray various periods of Ruth Puttermesser's life and afterlife. In the first story, Puttermesser (her first name is seldom used) is a 34-year-old Jewish lawyer, fired from a Wall Street firm, working for the Department of Receipts and Disbursements in the New York City. The mechanisms of bureaucracy are shown with clinical precision and wit. Puttermesser comes "to understand the recondite, dim, and secret journey of the City's money".

Puttermesser, who is 46 in the second part, has an opportunity to follow the example of the 16th-century Great Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague. Somewhat accidentally she creates a golem, a teenager girl, who wants to be called Xanthippe, and who becomes Puttermesser's daughter and is quite instrumental in furthering her creator's political career. This part is solely responsible for my rating not being the perfect five stars.

The third episode is a magnificent literary construct. Puttermesser, now fifty-plus, meets Rupert, who reproduces (reenacts, he wants to call it) famous paintings. Puttermesser introduces Rupert to 19th-century works of George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans). They read aloud her biographies, particularly interested in her friendship with George Lewes. After Lewes' death George Eliot marries Johnny Cross, and the couple reenacts George Eliot's and George Lewes' trip to Venice. Puttermesser and Rupert reenact that reenactment, with all its natural consequences. Brilliant!

Puttermesser is in her sixties in the fourth part. These are the times of perestroika in the Soviet Union. Puttermesser cousin comes from Moscow, as a refugee, and a funny culture clash occurs when the capitalist Americans are interested in ideas while the socialist-raised Lidia is only interested in money. The Shekhina fundraiser story is hilarious. Alas, in the exquisitely written fifth part, we learn that Paradise, the place where we go after we die, is not really quite what we expect.

Wonderful book about life, death, philosophy, and literature, touching so many important topics. I am particularly interested in the "wrong generation, after your time" issue. Puttermesser does not believe in generations. Culture is obviously generational, yet human nature is not. The anger of an ancient Greek does not differ from the anger expressed on Twitter today.

Four and a half star, rounded up.


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Death Of A Mystery Writer by Robert Barnard
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

After finishing the outstanding "A Scandal in Belgravia" (see review) I had an appetite for some more Robert Barnard. "Death of a Mystery Writer", although - typically for this author - an interesting, funny, and fast read, is not on the level of the other novel. It is just a solid, very traditional whodunit, set in England in mid-1970s.

Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs is a popular writer, author of bestselling but not particularly good mystery novels. He is quite a character; while being a "formidable upholder of Victorian attitudes", he is also an utterly obnoxious and unbearable person. The family and a couple of neighbors convene for his birthday party, which unfortunately for Sir Oliver ends in an event of the contrary kind. Inspector Meredith, quite a clever chap, commences the investigation.

The characterizations in the novel, both physical and psychological, are excellent. The writing is delightful, but I wish there were more of those eminently quotable passages like, for instance, "He had heaved himself into his club at St James's, where old men who had sodomized each other at school shook their heads over the younger generation." I find the mystery component adequate, fortunately there are no spurious plot twists, and the denouement is somewhat unexpected. Nice, pleasant read, but like Sir Oliver's novels, not a great literary achievement.

Two and a half stars.


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