A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although J.L. Carr's "A Month in the Country" was published in 1978, it reads like a classic. It is an enthralling novella of What Might Have Been. People who are on the descending path in their lives, like myself, will understand it better than the young ones. We do not have any future; we only have the past. Most of what we have are the memories of the good times long time gone and we often think of what might have been if we did things differently.

It is the hot August of 1920. Tom Birkin, a World War I veteran is hired to restore a whitewashed, several-hundred-years old mural in a Yorkshire parish of Oxgodby. He meets another veteran, Charles Moon, who has been hired to find remains of a 14th-century character in the same parish. Tom also befriends the stationmaster's young daughter and the vicar's wife,

It is just about a month in the country, but viewed from the perspective of fifty or so years later, the month is a tremendous turning point. What might have been if we did things differently. How totally different our life would be if we just said one word or moved our arm in a different way.

An exquisite fragment of prose can be found here (but it is a kind of a spoiler).

A beautifully written book. A masterpiece of English prose. One of the best books I have read in my life.

Five stars.


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The Red Road by Denise Mina
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Denise Mina is not just a great mystery writer and the "tartan noir" flag bearer. She is a great writer, without the "mystery" qualifier. Her "Garnethill" is one of my favorite books - ostensibly a crime novel, it is a deep and wise piece of real literature about the human condition. "The End of the Wasp Season" and "Gods and Beasts" , although flawed, transcend the usual limitations of the mystery genre and contain some breathtakingly beautiful fragments of prose.

Glasgow, 1997. The night that Princess Diana died. Rose Wilson, a fourteen-year old prostitute kills her pimp. The time switches to the present (2012 or 2013), and we meet Alex Morrow testifying in a case of a career criminal. Alex learns that his prints have been found on a gun used for murder that happened while he was locked up in jail. The plot alternates between 1997 and now for about a third of the novel. The gruesome events from the past influence the present, and Ms. Mina masterfully untangles the web of threads at the end of the novel.

I do not think "The Red Road" is among Mina's better books; getting through the first 200 or so pages required hard work and dedication. The rich tapestry of threads is intimidating - too many characters and too many connections. The world is indeed extremely complex, but Ms. Mina handled the complexity so much better in her other novels.

The complexity of the plot is not the main reason for my disappointment. More importantly, I have been unable to find anything in the novel that transcends the plot. "The Red Road" is all about the plot. True, it is a very clever and skillfully constructed plot, but I have not learned anything new about Glasgow, Scotland, or the Scottish people (aside from the Pakistani connection). I have not learned anything new about Alex Morrow; she is exactly as I know her from the previous books. "The Red Road" is just a good mystery, and I have been accustomed to expect more than that from Ms. Mina.

The author's writing, usually stellar, is not always up to par this time. There are two jarring fragments of prose (one involving Buchenwald reference and the other about Aileen Wuornos) that indicate that maybe Ms. Mina did not have enough time to read what she wrote. On the positive side, "The Red Road" is one of the precious few books that are better at the end than at the beginning.

Summary: a so-so book from a great writer. Ms. Mina has set the bar so high that she has difficulties clearing it.

Two and a half stars.


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The Color of Blood by Declan Hughes
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Nothing's ever what it is, it's always bound up with something else, something that happened in the past." This is a quote from Declan Hughes' "The Color of Blood" but it could as well have been a summary of the main theme in novels written by an American mystery writer, Ross Macdonald. When I was reading the first two chapters I felt as if I were reading a new book by the author of "The Chill" and "The Underground Man", one of my most favorite mystery authors. I fell in love with the first half of "The Color of Blood". Reading a Ross Macdonald's novel happening in Dublin, Ireland, in 2006 was an unexpected treat. In addition to interesting plot, the novel invited comparisons between Southern California society of the 1950s and 1960s and that of Ireland of the 2000s.

Ed Loy, a private investigator in Dublin, is hired by Shane Howard, a rich and powerful man, to find his 19-year old daughter whose pornographic pictures are being used as a blackmail tool. The case soon becomes much more complex; several people are murdered, and connections to the past of the Howard family emerge. Mr. Loy is very much like Lew Archer of Macdonald's novels: a PI with strong moral principles and a heart of gold who is able to respond to violence with violence and who is inclined to take law into his own hands. The case investigated by Mr. Loy, like Lew Archer's cases, is about what powerful people can do to less powerful people; how they can destroy their lives just because they can.

My enthusiasm about "The Color of Blood" gradually decreased as I kept reading. What was a great four-star novel after first few chapters, a good three-star book by about the mid-point, totally collapsed into a ridiculously overblown, overcomplicated, and way overlong mess. The plot became so bizarrely convoluted in the last 80 or so pages that I felt it bordered on the absurd. I had a hard time to force myself to finish reading the novel that began so wonderfully promising.

One of the main differences between a great writer and a not-so-great one is that the former knows when to stop writing.

Two and a quarter stars.


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Donkey Punch by Ray Banks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ray Banks' "Donkey Punch" could be categorized as a novel of suspense, although in its second half it should rather be called a thriller. On the back cover, Don Winslow, a gifted and successful writer of Southern California thrillers, screams "Banks wields language with a knifefighter's precision [...] From the first words to the last, this book flashes brilliantly." Way too much hyperbole, but I agree that it is an interesting read.

Callum Innes, an ex-PI and currently a caretaker in a Manchester, UK, boxing club, is fresh off his probation period, after having spent some time in jail. Because of his bad back, he is a codeine addict, and an extremely heavy drinker. The club owner asks Cal to escort a young boxer, Liam, to a competition (so-called "smoker") in Los Angeles. Cal and Liam fly to California, where the trouble and the thriller thread begin.

As a resident of Southern California I can see that Mr. Banks conveys the feel of the place with quite a skill. The first half of the LA thread is very interesting. Things disintegrate a bit in the third, last part of the novel. It lacks basic plausibility, and the character of Nelson Byrne feels artificial from the very moment that the reader first meets him.

It is a very violent novel, yet the violence feels superficial - lots and lots of blood and pain that somehow do not convey the notion of real suffering. Writing is very competent, and the novel is an extremely fast (three hours) and captivating read.

Almost three stars.


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

J.M. Coetzee's "Foe" is my eighth book by this author, and one that I like the least. I understand that I am just being obtuse, but I see this novella as somewhat incoherent and lacking precision of the message. Mr. Coetzee must see this work as important in his opus as he dedicated parts of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to motifs from "Foe".

In early eighteenth century, an English woman, Susan Barton, looking for her abducted daughter in Brazil is cast adrift by mutineer crew of a ship. She manages to get to a desert island, where she finds Mr. Cruso and his black servant, Friday. When they are rescued, she manages to get back to England, where she tries to convince a gifted writer, Mr. Daniel Foe, to write the story of her stay on the island. Mr. Foe has somewhat different ideas.

"Foe" is mostly about writing - its purpose and its labors. About the literary Muse, language and speech. It is also about how a story might not be a good story only because it is true. Perhaps most importantly, it is about the relationship between the story, the characters in the story, and the person called "the author". At some point Susan Barton worries about her own identity, fearing that Mr. Foe will write her out of her own story.

There are passages of great clarity and beauty in "Foe"; I have learned to expect them in Mr. Coetzee's work. Yet, to me, the language is not as wonderfully economical and precise as in his other books. I am puzzled by the thread about a young woman who presents herself as Susan Barton's daughter. The beautifully written ending is too enigmatic.

Three and a quarter stars.


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Steps by Jerzy Kosiński
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

In my late teen years a stupid drinking game was popular in my native country: one was supposed to go to a party, get very drunk, and then puke on as many walls as possible, including the ceiling. I remembered that game when I was reading the first half of Jerzy Kosinski's disjoint novella "Steps". Mr. Kosinski, my compatriot, vomits repulsive prose in every direction, spewing about ugly sex, violence, and pain. "I want to make love to you when you are menstruating" is a typical example of the novella's content. There is a young woman having sex with a "big animal". Genitals are crushed between two rocks until "the flesh became an unrecognizable pulp."

The novella is built of 48 vignettes connected mainly by their grim content, sex, and violence. There is a narrator in most vignettes, but it is only in the second half of the book that there is any conceptual continuity. The twenty-first vignette, about a concentration camp designer and about rats as animals that deserve to be exterminated is the only piece of real literature that I can find in this horrid mess, which in 1969 received the National Book Award in Fiction, the highest literary prize in the U.S.

Brutality, perversion, and sex obviously have their place in literature, for instance when they serve to amplify the writer's message. I have read painfully brutal novels that also contained kinky sex scenes (J.M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" comes to mind), but they might have a purifying effect and make me want to be a force for good. Reading the first half of Kosinski's novella made me feel defecated on. There is no message here; sex and violence are solely for shock value or maybe because of the author's mental health issues. The second half of the book is different; there is a message of alienation, loneliness, and control, but that message has been voiced much better by many other authors. The deep chasm between the two halves of the novella is yet another flaw of Kosinski's work.

With the somewhat redeeming second half I can no longer call "Steps" the worst book I have ever read.

One star.


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The Human Bobby: A Novel by Gabe Rotter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gabe Rotter's "The Human Bobby" is not quite as good a book as his "Duck Duck Wally", which I have reviewed on Goodreads (see the review). The first 80% of it reads as a spellbinding mystery, but the solution of the puzzle, although clever, is not satisfying. I admire the way that the "loose ends" are tied, yet I feel somehow cheated. This is the plague that affects most mystery books I have read - a fascinating setup and then a dud of denouement.

The book cleverly starts with Chapter 31 and only then we are given Chapter 1, where the story of Robert Flopkowski begins. Coming from a blue-collar Brooklyn family, Bobby works his way up to graduating from USC medical school and becoming a successful Beverly Hills pediatrician. His beautiful wife, Ava, loves him, and they have a wonderful baby son, whom they both insanely adore. Happiness in its purest form. Some people are just so lucky.

And then Bobby loses everything. Completely everything. He becomes homeless in Los Angeles, and quite happy about it. Had I stopped reading at the about 80% mark, I would have probably rated the book with almost fours stars. Alas, the denouement, although clever and quite plausible, is disappointing.

"The Human Bobby" is a very well-written book. It is one of the very few books that I read in one night. I strongly recommend it for its extreme readability. Except for the ending, though, it has very little depth. Interesting, clever fluff.

Three stars.


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The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" (published in 1966) is an absolutely unique book. This is my first complete Pynchon's novel; I have read large fragments of "V" and "Gravity Rainbow", but even if I have totally loved the writing I have never finished those as I detest books longer than 200 or so pages. "The Crying" is only 138 paperback pages long yet it took me about 12 hours to read the novella. I can read 1000 pages of lesser authors in 12 hours. Almost on every page of "The Crying" there are sentences and passages so fascinating that I have to keep rereading and rereading.

The plot of this novella takes place in 1964 or so. Oedipa Maas is named the co-executor of the will of her recently deceased ex-lover, Pierce Inverarity. While trying to discharge her executor's duties she becomes aware of a historical mystery - she learns about an ancient postal delivery service, the Trystero, that used a characteristic muted post horn symbol. The service was vanquished in early 1800's by Thurn-und-Taxis Post, but went underground and has continued its existence since then. The premise is so ridiculously absurd that it presses all my "love of surrealism" buttons. Tradition of postal fraud dating back to 1206!

So Oedipa is looking for Trystero muted post horn signs and we are offered an incisive and funny portrait of California and Californians in the mid-Sixties, during the "British Invasion", and just before the great cultural revolution of 1968-1969. Pynchon's writing is extremely rich in social and cultural references. There are references to references to references, and the prose is labyrinthine and dense. Just as an example, in the space of half a page we learn about a nose-picking contest, electronic music, and about Czar Nicholas II of Russia dispatching his Far East fleet to San Francisco Bay.

Great authors create alternative worlds through their writing. The world created by Mr. Pynchon is exhilarating and fascinating. How can one not like KCUF, the name of radio station where Oedipa's husband, Mucho, works? How can a mathematician not love a passage on "DT", delirium tremens, that slowly morphs into "dt", an infinitesimally small increment of time in the foundations of calculus? The whole Courier's Tragedy shtick is superb. The bits about European history suggesting that maybe the French Revolution was caused by Trystero are hysterically funny. The passages that happen in the Bay Area read as extended hallucinations. Maybe Oedipa does indeed take LSD prescribed by Dr. Hilarius, despite her claims to the contrary?

Two favorite sentences from the novella - one for its sheer surrealism, the other for subtle beauty: "In Golden Gate Park she came on a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering". And "As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine."

I have read that Mr. Pynchon himself does not consider "The Crying" an important book. Yet it is a gigantic, hilarious joke by a great writer. For me, with this novella, Mr. Pynchon is what Rene Magritte is in visual arts. Post modern? What does "post-modernism" really mean? Will Professor Derrida's Gallic mumbo-jumbo illuminate me? I doubt it.

Four and three quarters stars.


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Being There by Jerzy Kosiński
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I saw Hal Ashby's movie "Being There" about 20 years ago and I still remember the huge impression it made on me. Peter Sellers was magnificent as Chance the gardener. I have just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski's book, on which the movie is based, and I find the book much weaker than the movie.

Kosinski's short novella is a one-gimmick book: a simple gardener who has never been outside of his employer's residence, who knows first-hand only about gardening, who learns about people and the world from TV shows, and who is just being there, suddenly becomes a respected political pundit, whose opinions are sought by most prominent business leaders and politicians of the highest level. The entire book is devoted to the exposition of this one simple premise. It is a very short book (117 pages, paperback) yet a better writer would have created a richer literary structure, one with more depth. True, the original "joke" (the premise) is very funny, but the fun evaporates, when the same "joke" is retold time after time.

The novella is a satire on the power of people's preconceptions, on how we judge based on appearances, how a man named Chauncey must be wiser than one named Chance, and how we are controlled by what the media tell us. The target of Kosinski's satire is well chosen, but the implementation lacks; the writing is competent yet pedestrian, and already at about the middle of the book one gets the whole point that the author wanted to make, so why keep reading? I kept reading only to find out that there is nothing more there.

Film is a perfect medium to handle such a one-gimmick premise; the actors and the visuals supply the depth the text does not have. "Being There" - a wonderful movie and an OK book.

Two and a half stars.


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Duck Duck Wally: A Novel by Gabe Rotter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"That's a tasty beverage." This famous phrase from "Pulp Fiction" appears twice in Gabe Rotter's "Duck Duck Wally", which is quite a "tasty novel". The first half of the book is absolutely captivating and extremely funny.

I love the book for its sheer audacity of premise. An awkward Jewish man, meek and easily scared (to the point of wetting himself when confronted with a powerful opponent), works as a ghost author of "lyrics" for the world's most famous rap artist. All the gangsta rhymes sung by the rapper are penned by Wally Moscowitz, who in his private time is an aspiring author of very naughty children poetry books designed for adults.

Mr. Moscowitz trouble begins when he urinates on a badass gangster in a public lavatory (Coen brothers' wonderful "The Big Lebowski" comes to mind). The little incident unleashes an avalanche of consequences that include multiple murders and nationwide fascination with the case.

The passage about the genital herpes commercial is one of the most hilarious fragments of prose I have ever read. What's more, not only is it very funny, it is also pretty incisive in showing how deeply biased, prejudiced, and just plain stupid we, the humans, are, when we confuse the unreality of TV with the reality of life.

The plot sags quite substantially in its second half and the novel becomes pedestrian and boring when slowly inching toward the denouement. Still, with its utterly audacious (and wonderfully politically incorrect) premise and its magnificent genital herpes bit, I am unable to rate this book lower than

Four stars.


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Runoff by Mark Coggins
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Mark Coggins' "Runoff", the fourth book in the August Riordan series, is this author's first book for me. August is a private investigator in San Francisco as well as a bass player in a jazz band. In an additional quirk (it seems the more quirks a P.I. has the better), Mr. Riordan uses a cross-dressing sidekick in his crime-solving endeavors.

Leonora Lee, a powerful "overlady" of the San Francisco Chinese community hires August to investigate irregularities in recent city mayoral elections, related to software that handles the touch-screen voting machines. Quickly, the voting fraud case becomes a double murder case and Mr. Riordan and those close to him are in grave danger.

The plot is often implausible but the bits about San Francisco local politics (Green Party, fight against gentrification, the general dirt of politics, etc.) are somewhat interesting. Unfortunately, the author is not able to convey the San Francisco atmosphere. Even though he constantly throws at the reader the names of Chinatown streets, bars, and buildings, it is not enough to evoke the sense of the place, which is disappointing because, to me, San Francisco is the most interesting city in the U.S.

The passage about a battle between a backhoe and a fire hydrant is pretty funny. The writing is competent, if overly chatty. Some professional reviewers compare Mr. Coggins' novels to works of Chandler, which is totally ridiculous. Several Chandler's books are literature while "Runoff" is just a pleasant and fast read.

Two and a half stars.


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What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" is indeed mainly about running. Mr. Murakami, a famous Japanese writer, for several years one of the main favorites to win the Nobel prize in literature, is an accomplished long-distance runner. During the 23-year running career he finished 24 marathons and one ultramarathon, a 100-kilometer (62 miles) run.

I love long-distance running too, but I am very, very far from Mr. Murakami's class. Still, even being a quasi-runner I can relate to most of what the author writes about. Running as a way of getting rid of stress works for me too; the more I run, the more unhappiness I am getting rid of. Similarly to Mr. Murakami, I approach running as a craft of pain management. As I am a little older than he was at the time of writing the book, I share his resignation that we will not run fast in our fifties and sixties. Our bodies will not let us, even if the spirit is still willing.

In the most interesting fragment Mr. Murakami writes about how he handled extreme physical pain during the ultramarathon near Saroma Lake on Hokkaido. Also, there is a nice story of his 1983 run from Athens to Marathon that copied, in the opposite direction, the famous run of Pheidippides, a messenger from the battle of Marathon, 2500 years ago in Greece.

I have read the book in a non-English translation so I am unable to comment on writing. I love one sentence, though, and I wonder how the English translator handled it: "The fact that a life ends does not mean that it has had any meaning." So sadly true.

Three stars.


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What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In a sense, Richard Feynman's "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" is a sequel to his "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" as it mainly covers the famous physicist's later years. Yet it really is a different kind of book - a rather loose collection of Feynman's texts ("stories") selected and organized by his secretary, Ralph Leighton. Because of this lack of coherence, the book makes less powerful impression than "Surely You Are...". Still, it is a great read, and for me three "stories" are deeply memorable.

The chapter on Feynman's beloved first wife, Arlene, is moving. She is staying in a hospital in Albuquerque, dying of tuberculosis (her early death being a result of various doctors' incompetence). Feynman is working on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos and visits her over the weekends. The chapter is poignant, without being sentimental, and the story of several flat tires as Feynman rushes to be with Arlene during her final moments is unforgettable.

For purely personal reasons I loved reading Feynman's letter to his third wife, Gweneth, as it was written in a hotel that was on my way from home to school, when I was in the seventh grade in 1963. I walked past that hotel twice every day. Feynman describes the atmosphere and some details of life behind the Iron Curtain quite well.

Part 2 of the book is titled "Mr. Feynman Goes To Washington" and it tells the well-known story of the physicist's crucial role in finding the causes (O-ring failure and the culture of under-appreciating mission risks) of the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster. The author is not naive when he alludes to the simpleminded and uplifting Capra's movie "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington". He shows how seven people died so the politicians could strut. He shows how various top people in government are in the business of manufacturing and selling the truth. He shows the dirt of politics, without calling things by name. Feynman even manages to describe the most wily liar on the Rogers Commission in friendly and respectful terms. Good writing job.

The best comes at the end, like in a good mystery, when we finally learn who really discovered the cause of Challenger disaster.

Three stars.


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Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Richard Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" is a highly entertaining read. In this series of chronologically ordered episodes Dr. Feynman, one of the brightest minds in human history, writes about his scientific, engineering, and practical endeavors from boyhood to the period after receiving Nobel Prize in physics (1965).

There are two threads in Dr. Feynman's narrative. One deals with how he has been able to solve hundreds of scientific or practical problems that no one else was able to solve. Feynman is well aware of his extremely rare intellectual powers. He describes his achievements without any boasting yet without false modesty either. The other thread, one that I find much more interesting, is the sharp criticism of what I call human "mental sloth" - people's unwillingness to think when trying to solve problems. "I don't know what's the matter with people," Feynman writes, "they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something." In the most damning fragment Feynman writes how business reasons influenced selection of inferior textbooks for teaching of the "new math" in the Sixties in California.

As we travel with Dr. Feynman through his incomparably interesting life we read many amusing stories: how he fought censorship in the Los Alamos atomic bomb project, how he flunked his physical for the army because of psychiatric problems, how he was able to get girls in the bar to sleep with him, how he tried to get hypnotized and induce hallucinations in an isolation tank, and many others. The funniest of all these stories is the one about a stenotypist who told Dr. Feynman that he could not be a professor as she could understand all that he was saying.

The closing chapter, "Cargo Cult Science", adapted from the author's commencement address at Caltech in 1974 is a passionate and powerful indictment of the ways a lot of "science" is done. Feynman writes about how good scientists should "bend over backwards" to show how they are maybe wrong rather than just make their point.

Dr. Feynman paints a grim portrait of the intellectual condition in the 1930-1960 period, when celebrities were more important than geniuses, bullshit was stronger than reason, faking counted more than knowing, and wearing a uniform trumped being right. Guess what - things have not changed at all since the Sixties.

Four stars.


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Criminal Convictions by Nicolas Freeling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nicolas Freeling's "Criminal Convictions" is an outstanding piece of literary criticism. It is a collection of essays on the best "literary masters of crime fiction" of the 19th and 20th centuries: Stendhal, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Georges Simenon. To me, the best features are the two introductory chapters (one of them is "Metaphysics of Crime"), and the stunning ending chapter ("Apologia Pro Vita Sua"), where Mr. Freeling, one of the best writers in the history of the mystery genre, humbly describes himself as less talented and accomplished than the authors he writes about.

I have read almost all (25 or so) books by Nicolas Freeling, and I love his writing, his erudition and his "Europeanness". He is one of the few of my most favorite authors. This does not mean that I agree with everything he says. The title of the book is clever - "conviction" brings to mind a guilty verdict, yet here it just means "a firmly held belief or opinion". Mr. Freeling indeed has firm opinions on who is "a very great writer" (his own phrase). I have not been able to finish any Dickens' book, so it was hard for me to relate to an overlong and quite enthusiastic chapter on this author. Neither am I a fan of my compatriot, Joseph Conrad's work, but maybe I haven't read the right books. In the chapter on Chandler, Mr. Freeling praises "The Big Sleep" at the expense of "The Long Goodbye", while my "convictions" point in the opposite direction. Well, he certainly knew a thousand times more about literature than I do, so I am probably wrong.

"Criminal Convictions" is a tour de force of writing. The ending of the book contains the following grim yet hilarious passage about the future of the human culture: "When we look in the glass we will no longer see the features and port of Renaissance man, the skilled hands and active feet, but the huge shapeless boots and clumsy gloves, the monstrously imbecile grimacing mask of Mickey Mouse. We are wholly owned by the Mouse Bank, mortgaged to the Mouse Insurance Company, manipulated by the Mouse Communications Corporation [...]" So deadly true.

Four and a quarter stars.


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Blind Date by Jerzy Kosiński
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Jerzy Kosinski's "Blind Date" has greatly disappointed me. Perhaps even more than "The Devil Tree" that I have reviewed recently. I have yet to read "The Painted Bird" and "Being There" (presumably his best books), but based on the two mediocre novels, I am not awed by my compatriot's work. Mr. Kosinski clearly has two obsessions: with the rich and famous people and with sex. The latter can be forgiven; it has driven the work of many artists. However, the former is indefensible - it makes large portions of Kosinski's prose quite suitable for celebrity tabloids.

The protagonist of the story is George Levanter, an émigrée from Eastern Europe, and a rich investor (whatever the word means). The story is told in an episodic style - vignettes from various periods of his life are arranged in random order. There is a lot of Kosinski in Levanter: the Eastern European background, past struggles with Communist regime, a marriage to an extremely rich woman, and the sexual escapades of a very handsome and supremely confident man. The novel takes its title from an episode about horrible activities that Levanter participated in as a teenager. I have found these pages truly painful to read and their cruelty and brutality gratuitous.

Many episodes involve real people: we meet Stalin's daughter, Wojciech Frykowski, Jacques Monod, Charles Lindbergh, and Abigail Folger. We are shown glimpses of one of the most notorious murders in history, peppered with Kosinski's trademark sexual references. Some of the episodes are so mind-bogglingly incongruous and lame that one might suspect the author did not have a wastebasket.

In a rare deep insight Kosinski writes "Civilization is the result of sheer chance plus a thousand or two exceptional men and women of ideas and action." That's a true and profound statement, and Kosinski shows that despite the total randomness of life, determined people can achieve some of their goals. Yet the novel could be so much better if only it were not so focused on celebrities and details of sex life. A destitute Michael K. from Coetzee's novella is much more interesting than all Kosinski's billionaires put together. Coetzee's prose is often very painful to read as well, but the pain is spiritually awakening, while reading Kosinski's prose makes me feel soiled.

One and three quarter stars.


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The Devil Tree by Jerzy Kosiński
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Jonathan is a billionaire, a heir to one of the greatest fortunes in the world. Karen is an extremely beautiful and famous model. Can one imagine more boring characters to star in a novel? Their sex life is described in such detail that one might suspect "The Devil Tree" is Jerzy Kosinski's masturbatory fantasy.

The novel takes place in the 1970s. Jonathan comes back to the U.S. after a long stay abroad to avoid draft. There is no plot in the usual sense of the word. The novel is a sequence of episodes (vignettes) that happen at various times of Jonathan's life. However, there is an actual, classical ending, which is one of the best parts of the book.

The Seventies were indeed the times of sexual experimentation, and those people who could afford it did stretch the conventional boundaries of sexual expression. In addition to sex, Mr. Kosinski attempts to present a portrait of the U.S society in the 1970s. Critics find that the author satirizes the rich, the famous, and the powerful. I do not see the satire. Instead, I see the author's fascination with the extremely rich and extremely beautiful people.

Jonathan and Karen seem to be seeking the meaning of life. "The challenge I face now is how to actualize, how to concretize, the quiet eminence of my being," muses Jonathan. Both characters are obsessed by the notion of freedom, but since they are almost infinitely rich and beautiful and free to do absolutely anything, the notion can have no meaning for them. As Jonathan can buy a medium-sized country at his whim, he misses the happiness of an ordinary person who buys a new book or a new piece of clothing.

"The Devil Tree" has some truly atrocious passages (e.g., about certain aspects of women's physiology) as well as several well-written fragments, for instance the astute deconstruction of the American business myth. To me, the weakest aspect of the book is that it completely lacks emotion. It has some wisdom, but no heart.

Two stars.



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The Bat by Jo Nesbø
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The Bat" is the first book in Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole series, but the English translation was first published several years after Nesbo's later novels. It is not as good a novel as the outstanding "Redbreast" nor is it as interesting as "The Snowman". Still, I like it better than the horrid "Phantom" (which I reviewed on Goodreads).

Harry Hole is sent to Sydney, Australia, to help investigate the murder of a minor Norwegian TV celebrity. He is teamed with an Aboriginal detective and the novel tells us quite a lot about indigenous Australians and the race relations in the country. Harry travels a lot while working on the case and much of the book is about the Australian society.

There are several memorable passages; for instance the story about a local boxing tournament in a small town or fragments about Hole's youthful love affair with Kristin. The Harry and Birgitta story is interesting and believable. We learn a lot about events in Harry's early life. On the other hand, the characterizations of his Australian colleagues are paper-thin. There is a bit too much cheap philosophizing and the purpose of including several Aboriginal legends is not clear - they must be metaphors for something, but for what?

I am unable to evaluate the writing as I have read the book in a non-English translation. The narration reads OK, but the dialogues sound awkward, which might have been the translator's fault. I am rounding my rating up, but "The Bat" clearly does not reach the three-star level.

Two and a half stars.


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Bay of Souls by Robert Stone
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The whole world of otherness was waiting for him there [...] It was no place for him." That's what Robert Stone writes about the protagonist of his novel "Bay of Souls" who visits a Caribbean island. Unfortunately, this "world of otherness" makes the novel no place for me. I am heavily allergic to possessions of souls by evil spirits, soul reclaiming rituals, and most of all, to Caribbean vodoun. Of course, many readers enjoy supernatural elements in literature; they will probably like the novel more than I did.

Michael Ahearn is an English professor at a mid-Western university. He lives a relatively happy if boring life with his wife and son. A beautiful and mysterious Caribbean-born Lara joins the faculty. Michael becomes totally infatuated with her and a frenzied love affair commences. When Lara asks Michael to accompany her to her native island of St. Trinity to participate in traditional rites on the occasion of memorial service for her brother, he readily agrees. The island is torn by political unrest, and corruption and drug smuggling are rampant. And then we have the whole thing with vodoun, rites, evil spirits and places where "untended souls await visitation, salvation, home." Gritting my teeth I managed to get through the St. Trinity episode (over 100 pages); enjoying only the passages on diving (no souls here, just the good old real life). Back in mid-West Michael faces the consequences of his transgression.

I really like the fragments of the novel that happen outside St. Trinity. There are some powerful and well-written scenes. The memorable wheelbarrow incident during the hunting trip and the post-St. Trinity passages show that Mr. Stone is an accomplished writer. I just wish there were no Lara in the novel. In a way the book reminds me of "Deer Hunter", the famous movie about Vietnam War. I vividly remember the magnificent pre-Vietnam and post-Vietnam sequences in the film. Nothing else.

Two stars.


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John Coltrane: His Life and Music by Lewis Porter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dr. Lewis Porter's "John Coltrane. His Life and Music" is an extraordinarily well-researched book, with meticulous references (571 reference notes spanning 37 pages), and quite detailed chronology of performances and recorded interviews (38 pages). The author is a noted musicologist, an author of several books on jazz greats and jazz history, a professor of music at Rutgers, and an accomplished pianist. The book sets a very high standard for future jazz biographies.

I first heard John Coltrane's music on the radio about 1965, when I was in high school. This strange, intense, and powerful music (it was one of the late-period works) made a huge impression; it was so wonderfully different from the simple, cheap pap of the then Animals or Beatles. But I did not seriously get into Coltrane until the 1980s, and since then I have read several books about his life and music as he is, to me, one of greatest artists who ever lived. Dr. Porter's book is most likely the best, although readers such as myself can only make sense of less than half of the text. Without basic knowledge of music theory one cannot understand the remaining portions of the book, which are dedicated to musicological analysis of Coltrane's works.

There is no point in summarizing the book. It alternates between presenting events from Coltrane's life and discussing the music in chronological order. Curiously, his early life is shown in more detail than the period after 1960, when he gained wide prominence. There are numerous interesting observations in the book, for example that "one can become one of the great musicians of all time and not start off as some kind of prodigy." The chapter about "A Love Supreme", Coltrane's most famous suite, clearly stands out. Perhaps because it validates my belief that "A Love Supreme" is a stunning musical tour de force, comparable in its power and majesty to, say, Bach's "Mass in B minor."

In addition to being about Coltrane's breathtakingly compelling and beautiful music, the book shows John Coltrane the man, profoundly humble, quiet, serious, and deeply spiritual. "I feel I want to be a force for good," he says. World would be so much a better place if more of us followed this simple motto.

If I weren't so completely ignorant of music theory, I would likely rate the book higher.

Four stars.


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The Big Thaw by Donald Harstad
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Donald Harstad is the author of two very good police procedurals, "Known Dead" and "Eleven Days" (I have reviewed these 4-star novels on Goodreads) . He is also the author of lame and silly "Code 61", with a plot that includes references to vampires. A 26-year-veteran of Sheriff's Department in an Iowa County, he is at his best when he writes about the actual procedure when the sheriff's deputies are working on solving a case. I was hoping "The Big Thaw" will be more like the first two books rather than the vampire idiocy. It falls somewhere in between.

The book reads great for the first 150 pages or so. Two frozen bodies are found, packed in a tarp in an empty Iowa farmhouse. The victims seem to have been executed. The narrator, Carl Houseman, the senior deputy at the Nation County Sheriff's Office, does not believe the main suspect, a small-time burglar, is the culprit. Then, quite suddenly, the novel turns from riveting to ridiculous. Deputy Houseman asks a journalist and a photographer to help him in solving the case. Some plot twists of "The Big Thaw" would rather belong in a cheap James Patterson's novel.

Fortunately, the extended ending sequence is written much better as it again focuses on procedure. We get delightful passages about how the Bad Guys make fools of the combined and bumbling forces of the Sheriff's Office and other agencies. Mr. Harstad certainly knows from his own experience how calamitous the cooperation between different agencies might be.

Overall, an interesting and pleasant read, and somewhat believable plot, except for a few ludicrous twists.

Three stars.


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In Heart Of The Country by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

J.M. Coetzee’s novella “In the Heart of the Country” (the US edition, for some obscure business reasons, is titled "From the Heart of the Country") is quite an unusual literary work. It is composed of 266 numbered paragraphs, some of which contain just a few words while others comprise two pages. Mr. Coetzee's writing is not as mathematically precise and economical as in six other books of his that I have read so far. The sentences in this novella are still wonderfully economical and precise, but their sequences are not. The paragraphs flow in a convoluted and hypnotic way; they circle the subject, touch it, and again float away. I do not care much about plots in literature, but some readers may be put off by not knowing whether the events that ostensibly happen in the plot are real or just fabricated by the narrator.

The story is narrated by Magda, a lonely spinster, by her own admission an ugly, old, dried-up virgin, who lives on her father's sheep ranch, in the middle of nowhere, deep in the heart of the country, "where space radiates out of [her] to all the four corners of the earth." Nothing has happened in her life so far. Her mother died a long time ago. Her father dislikes her for not being his son. The only other people on the farm are the "brown-skinned" servants. In her life she has had more contact with insects than with people. Her own thoughts are her only companion, and she is a keen, if a bit hysterical, observer of her thoughts. Her father may have brought himself a young new wife. Or maybe it was his servant, Hendrik, who brought the young woman for himself, and the father sleeps with her. Magda kills her father. Or does she? Quite bizarre events follow, culminating in Magda's memorable conversations in Spanish (which she does not know) with the flying machines.

Many reviewers find various issues and metaphors in the novella: the master-slave relationship, the colonizer vs. the colonized, the racial conflict, etc. I disagree. To me, the novella is a grand exercise in writing. The author sets out to describe how reality is perceived and distorted by an aging, embittered, and extremely lonely woman, who is slowly losing her sanity. Mr. Coetzee spectacularly succeeds in all aspects of the endeavor. Magda's "stream of consciousness" is completely believable (even if the events may not be realistic). I very rarely agree with blurbs on book covers (they are almost always exaggerated and misleading), yet this time one quote is absolutely correct: "The writing and mood are a remarkable piece of sustained intensity ... One false word could have ruined this short tour de force completely. It never does." With its virtuoso writing, the novella is indeed a literary tour de force, a masterpiece of form and style. Yet, I do not find much depth in the book. The fascinating structure is empty inside. The beauty of the novella is superficial. This is not a masterpiece like "Disgrace", "Boyhood", or "Waiting for the Barbarians." Even the most unforgettable passages are more form than substance.

This is also one of the most demanding books I have ever read. I have spent over 12 hours to read its 151 pages. With books by lesser authors, the same number of pages would take me an hour and a half.

Three and a half stars.


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Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

William Boyd's "Brazzaville Beach" has been exhaustively discussed and reviewed during the 23 years since it was published. It has served as book club fare probably thousands of times. Everybody who has read it has an opinion on what the novel is about. Some say it is about scientists being only human. Others say it is about the similarities between chimpanzee and human behavior. One arrogant bozo, trying to ride the fashionable bandwagon, even posits the book is about "emancipation of women". Bollocks! Being a mathematician, I will suggest, with equal arrogance, that "Brazzaville Beach" is about the difference between continuous and discontinuous types of change and between predictable and chaotic phenomena. Calculus needs continuity, as Mr. Boyd mentions himself. Despite all its pretentiousness, it is an extraordinary novel. The author tells a great story and does it so well that I can forgive him the excitement about how clever he is. The brazen attempts at using results of mathematics as metaphors for certain aspects of human life are excused too.

The story is mostly narrated by Dr. Hope Clearwater, a Ph.D. in ethology. We first meet her when she collects a chimpanzee's feces. The novel interleaves plots occurring in two different periods of Hope Clearwater's life. The earlier one is the story of her marriage to John, a mathematician on the verge of brilliance, and her work surveying an ancient and historic estate in South Dorset, England. The later thread is located in Africa, where Hope - employed by a world-famous primate research center - studies the behavior of large groups of chimpanzees.

"Brazzaville Beach" is a complex novel and Mr. Boyd handles the complexity well. We have a totally fascinating and beautifully presented layer of observations of chimpanzee behavior. Then there is a layer dealing with nastiness in science, where people go to extremes trying to defend their theories. There is a still higher-level layer, that of Hope reflecting on the direction or lack of it in her life. The war between various factions in an African country provides a background layer. Threads on the Dorset estate survey and on a man's slow descent into mental illness complete the exquisite structure. Mr. Boyd connects all layers with references to mathematics.

The passage about Hope's visit to her father's 70th birthday party is beautifully written and the "digging episodes" and horsefly-powered airplanes have left a deep imprint in my memory. Wonderful stuff. On the other hand, Mr. Boyd uses the phrase "susurrus of prurience". Yikes. Also, the grandiose "three questions" reek of pretense.

Four and a half stars (today I am rounding up, because of "my" mathematics, but maybe I will change my mind one day).


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The Rogues' Game by Milton T. Burton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Milton T. Burton's "The Rogues' Game" might be construed as a novel of suspense or perhaps even a western. It is the author's debut novel. According to an anecdote, Mr. Burton wanted to write a novel already at 25, but being a poor typist he had to wait until word-processors become available. The book was published when he was 58.

It is 1947. A man (we never learn his name), an ex-intelligence officer with the OSS, comes to a small town in Texas, with his girlfriend Della, ostensibly to play a high-stake poker game. There obviously exists a more serious reason for his visit to the town, but the reader is only given small hints. Coincidentally, Mr. X and Della arrive in town almost exactly at the same time as the discovery of a huge oil field nearby. They take advantage of the oil frenzy (Della comes from an oil family and knows tricks of the trade), and get quite rich. The poker and the more serious and secret thing have to wait until later.

Three threads are intertwined in the novel: gradual revealing of Mr. X's real plans, the oil boom story, and the poker games story. To me, the second thread is by far the best - it has been fun to learn about the dynamics of oil frenzy: buying oil leases, paying with drafts instead of checks, and the "swiftness with which [an oil boom] unfolds or the speed at which fortunes are made."

The other two threads are not that interesting, in my view. The suspense novel component comes from piecemeal divulging of the truth about Mr. X's real high-stake game. While the insights into professional poker playing do not seem particularly deep, we get a bloody cockfighting scene as a bonus. The writing is competent, yet the characters are not portrayed deeply, and both Mr. X and Della are just too good to be true. But it is a feel-good novel and an extremely fast read.

Two and three quarter stars.


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Wake Up Dead: A Cape Town Thriller by Roger Smith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Roger Smith's second novel "Wake Up Dead" is definitely not in the same category as his great debut "Mixed Blood" (4 stars; my review is on Goodreads). Mr. Smith's first thriller, in addition to extreme violence and interesting plot, had depth and realistic characterizations. Both novels paint a horrifying portrait of Cape Flats, the Cape Town ghetto, but while the first book delivers acute social observation, "Wake Up Dead", also very brutal, is mostly about the plot and does not make connection between the violence and the social conditions.

Roxy, an ex-model and wife of an owner of a Cape Town agency that provides mercenary services, survives carjacking during which her husband is killed. Roxy's future is threatened by Billy Afrika, an ex-cop and a security contactor, back in Cape Town after being fired from his protection job in Iraq. A repulsive detective Maggott, one of the few non-corrupt cops, is trying to find the truth about the carjacking. These three as well as almost ten other main characters try to achieve their goals during a shaky truce between two powerful gangs. There will be blood - in mass quantities.

Everybody in Cape Flats constantly smokes meth (tik-tik), and meth-fueled vicious murders and rapes are common. Life of a black or a colored person has no value whatsoever. The violence is quite graphically described, although the climactic scenes toward the end of the novel are so theatrical that the brutality feels cartoonish. There are many well-written passages, but also several painfully bad sentences like, for example, "the elation he'd felt for the last day had drained slowly from him like stale piss down a backed-up urinal."

If you haven't read Mr. Smith, read "Mixed Blood" first. All there is in "Wake Up Dead" is the plot. The former is like a luxurious and nutritious dinner, the latter is just fast-food fare.

Two stars.


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The Guards by Ken Bruen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ken Bruen's "The Guards" is an attempt at an uber-cool and uber-noir crime novel. My guess is that most readers will either love it or hate it. The blurbs on the cover scream enthusiastic praise, even from good writers such as James Crumley or T. Jefferson Parker. Someone even compares Mr. Bruen's work to James Joyce - a ridiculous comparison. The novel reminds me a little of Don Winslow's "Savages" (my review is on Goodreads) because of somewhat unconventional writing.

Jack Taylor, fired from Garda Siochana for excessive drinking and insubordination, tries to work as a private investigator in the rare moments when he is sober and not on drugs. A woman whose sixteen-year-old daughter's death was treated as suicide hires him to find the truth. The plot tracks Jack through his boozing, beatings, rehabs, and feeble attempts at solving the case.

A private detective, in addition to be hard-boiled and often alcoholic, is required to have other quirks. Jack loves books, and has been a voracious reader since childhood. Alas, it does not ring true. It is a formulaic quirk, written into Jack's character straight from a quirk template. A substantial part of the novel takes place in pubs - I have never been able to understand why people drink in pubs rather than at home, which would be cheaper and would not force one to look at other drunks.

What I like about "The Guards" is that it is really a very short book (it took me less than three hours to read the 300 pages) because of enormous amount of whitespace on the pages - short lines, frequent lists, pages with just two lines on them, etc." The writing is economical and competent, if not inspired. The novel conveys some sense of location (Galway, Ireland). I like the grim ending. "The Guards" could have been a very good novel, if it weren't pretentiously insistent on being so uber-noir.

Two and three quarter stars.


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The Assault by Harry Mulisch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Harry Mulisch's "The Assault" is a short yet profound novel, powerful, sad and full of wisdom. In a sense, it may be categorized as a mystery because we learn the whole truth only at the very end. Mr. Mulish writes "Anton felt sick. The whole story was worse than the partial one he had known." And even then, when he thought he finally learned the whole truth, there was even more to learn.

The novel is built of five episodes in Anton's life. The first begins in Haarlem near Amsterdam in January 1945. Anton is 12 and Holland is still under German occupation. The chief of local police, a German collaborator, is killed by resistance fighters close to the house occupied by Anton's family. There is an additional nasty element of the plot that I do not want to disclose. Germans take instantaneous reprisals, burn the house and kill several people. Anton is not mistreated and is allowed to live with his uncle in Amsterdam The next episodes happen in 1952, 1956, 1966, and 1981.

Despite the first episode being focused on horrors of war, the novel is really about fundamental aspects of human life: randomness of fate, moral dilemmas that we may have to face and that have no right solution, how we are not able to escape from the past, and how dramatically one's perspective changes with age. The beginning of the last episode contains a stunning passage that takes a different interpretation of the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. "Nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute," writes Mr. Mulisch. The novel is also about human inability to live in isolation from politics. Anton is not involved or interested in politics, yet politics influences his life. The dirt inherent in politics defiles all of us.

"The Assault" is beautifully written (and translated from Dutch). Anton's conversation with a female prisoner in the first episode is deeply moving. To me, the novel would be an absolute masterpiece if not for the final piece of the cruel puzzle.

Four and three quarter stars.


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Mystery by Jonathan Kellerman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

What a depressing way to end my book year! "Mystery" by Jonathan Kellerman is the 115th book I read and reviewed in 2013. My "brain off" mini-marathon of Kellerman's works included "Twisted" (quite good, three stars), disappointing "Deception" (two stars), and outright weak "Mystery". No mystery about my star rating.

A luxury hotel in Beverly Hills goes out of business. Good Doctor Delaware and Robin go there for cocktails on the closing night. They are intrigued by one of the restaurant's guests - a beautiful, elegant, and mysterious woman. The next day, the woman is found murdered. The Fabulously Brilliant Doctor and his sidekick, Lt. Sturgis, solve the case, which involves Hollywood madams, sex for sale in a luxury escort agency, family secrets, and a very rare physiological phenomenon.

In addition to the implausible plot of tabloid type, the novel is quite un-Kellerman in the low quality of writing. The two climactic chapters that provide the denouement read like a bad parody of a bad novel. I had to force myself to finish reading. The novel has as much in common with decent mystery as the Kardashians with real people. One of my New Year's resolutions is to be Kellerman-free for the whole year.

One and a half stars.


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Deception by Jonathan Kellerman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Deception" continues my Kellerman mini-marathon (brainless entertainment for the holidays). In terms of the premise, plot, and literary value the novel is weaker than "Twisted", which I finished two days ago. Still, it is a relatively good read, interesting and more twisted than "Twisted".

A teacher from a super-exclusive prep school in Los Angeles is found dead, along with a DVD in which she accuses three fellow teachers of sexual harassment. The police chief's son is about to graduate from the school and the chief want Lt. Sturgis to work the case with utter discretion so that the junior's chances of being admitted to Yale are not jeopardized.

There is some good stuff in the book, for instance the sharp insights about personnel politics of police departments and utter amorality of the top guys. The chief's hypocritical and self-serving monologues are priceless. The idiocy of SAT-driven "education" is exposed as well as the misguided and backfiring efforts to achieve diversity. The very ending of the novel is surprisingly nice. My favorite is the bit where Myspace is searched before Facebook. No wonder, Myspace had so much better user interface so it was doomed to fail.

Unfortunately, bad stuff dominates. Good Doctor Delaware's smugness is a given. Dialogues between Alex and Milo fill about half of the book. Horrid. Milo's buying "word on the street" from a homeless person is painfully ridiculous. Implausibility of the premise and some bad writing (interviews with students on campus) are atypical for Mr. Kellerman.

One more Kellerman to go in 2013 and then let's hope for real literature in the New Year.

Two and a quarter stars.


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Twisted by Jonathan Kellerman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The time of holidays, with its glitzy cheer, overeating, and laziness, is not conducive to reading literature. The next book by J.M. Coetzee has to wait until the bleak days of January. It is YAK instead: "Yet Another Kellerman." Another nice book by the author, made even better by the absence of the oh-so-smart, sanctimonious, and boring Good Doctor Delaware (he is mentioned a few times, though) as well as his sidekick, Lt. M.S. This is a Petra Connor book, the second in the series, after "Billy Straight". I can live with a series whose length is two.

The plot interweaves two cases: a quadruple murder of teenagers, which is apparently a gang-related shooting, and a number of unsolved murders from several years ago, connected by the method of killing and the date on which they occurred. The connection is exposed by Isaac, a police intern, a young and brilliant graduate student, who comes upon it using multiple regression analysis, while working on his Ph.D. thesis. As a math person, I can attest that the title of the thesis is mathematically sound.

We are generously treated to details of Petra's love life. Isaac's as well, which is somewhat more interesting. I would definitely prefer to be spared the descriptions of Petra's and Isaac's emotional turmoil, formulaic and shallow. It is a penalty one has to pay for a really interesting plot, one of the best among zillions of Kellerman's books (well, at least the twenty-six that I have read). As usual, the supporting cast is better written than the protagonists of the story.

Great read for winter holidays or for the beach (or both, with 28 degrees Celsius weather in San Diego). No brain required. I think I'll have another Kellerman to help me digest the excess food.

Three and a half stars.


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Code 61 by Donald Harstad
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I tend to assume that any literary or cinematographic work that involves vampires is not suited for adults. For me, vampires, zombies, witches, etc. belong in children's books. There has been one exception to my blanket disdain for the vampire genre: the movie "Let the Right One In", which is about vampires, but in a totally non-adolescent way.

Donald Harstad's "Code 61" involves vampires in rural Iowa, where Carl Houseman is the department's investigator and senior officer of the Nation County sheriff's office. The novel begins with a strange case of a young woman calling sheriff's deputies because "a white man with teeth" peeked at her through the window. Soon, Carl and his team are faced with two deaths with similar neck wounds, one of the victims being the sheriff's niece. The case soon becomes even more bizarre.

I rated Mr. Harstad's two first works, "Known Dead" and "Eleven Days " very highly (4 stars, both reviews are on Goodreads). The author spent 26 years as a deputy in a sheriff's department in Iowa, and in these two books he wrote about things he was familiar with. These books are pure police procedurals with strong emphasis on the procedure. The author does not mention the deputies' private lives at all, and the books read, basically, like police reports.

Unfortunately, in "Code 61" Mr. Harstad tries to add a "human interest" aspect, and it just does not work. Also, the plot has many weak moments; for instance, the deputies' pursuit of the bad guy resembles a bunch of nine-year-olds playing hide and seek, and the appearances of Mr. Chester conveniently further or stop the plot, when needed. The quality of dialogues in the conversation between Carl, Hester, and Harry is dismal. The silliness of the whole vampire shtick does not help. I had to force myself to read the final two chapters, which show the solution of the mystery.

Two stars.



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A Firing Offense by George Pelecanos
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"A Firing Offense" is the first novel by George P. Pelecanos, one that started the Nick Stefanos trilogy. The author has not yet developed the "D.C. noir" style so characteristic for his later novels, and his pen is not yet as assured as in "Right as Rain" or "The Night Gardener".

It is the early 1990s in Washington D.C. Nick Stefanos is an advertising director in a consumer electronics and appliances store chain. A young man who worked in the company's warehouse has disappeared and his grandfather asks Nick to play a private detective and find his grandson. The plot moves at a leisurely pace until about three-fourth into the novel, when it takes a rather dramatic turn, which leads to some frenzied action.

The main weakness of the novel is the implausibility of its premise (Nick taking the PI job). Moreover, based on what we have learned about the characters, the climactic scenes towards the end of the novel are preposterous. Mr. Pelecanos, a master of dialogue writing in his later books, is not on a sure ground here; for instance, the conversations with the skinheads and their ideologist sound artificial. The detection method based on the "word on the street" reeks of "Starsky and Hutch".

On the positive side, there is one wonderful fragment of prose where Nick feels total exhilaration after beating someone to pulp. The novel well conveys the sense of location for Washington D.C. and the Carolinas. The references to the music and films of the Eighties are aplenty, and I particularly enjoyed the mention of Sonic Youth as well as The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The title of the novel is a clever play on words.

All in all, a very fast and pleasant read, but it does not have the usual Pelecanos class.

Two stars.


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A Perfect Crime by Peter Abrahams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have recently embarked on a project to reread and review some of the mystery/suspense/detective novels that I found outstanding when I read them for the first time (between late 1960s and early 2000s). Double letter 'A' makes a good beginning: "A Perfect Crime" by Peter Abrahams. When I first read the novel about 10 years ago, the masterfully clever plot made a huge impression on me (at that time, its rating would be at least four and a half stars out of five). As a result I have read almost all books by Mr. Abrahams, and quite liked most of them.

Francie, Roger's wife, sleeps with Ned, the husband of Anna, who becomes Francie's tennis partner. Francie admires Anna, and having no children herself she adores her daughter, Em(ma). This sounds like the worst kind of tripe from daytime TV soaps. Indeed, the first sixty or so pages balance on the edge between literature and drivel. Mr. Abrahams' writing saves the day. The characters are portrayed vividly and they come through as real and interesting people. The author is a keen observer of human behavior and a skillful interpreter of psychology.

The set-up is completed about page 70 and the plot takes off. Roger concocts a plan to commit a perfect crime and get rid of his unfaithful wife before she divorces him. From this moment to almost the very end, the novel is riveting. The botched burglary scenes, though a little gruesome, are some of the most hilarious in my memory. Also, anyone with experience in academia will be amused by the portrayal of Roger's infatuation with his own intellectual brilliance.

Mr. Abrahams' light touch, humor, and assured writing make the novel a pleasure to read. No, it is not a masterpiece of the genre that I used to think it was. It does not have much depth other than being psychologically realistic. Yet it certainly has one of the best constructed plots in the genre.

The novel falls into the grey area between three and four stars. 'Tis the season to be generous, so I am rounding my rating up

Three and a half stars.


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A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ira Levin's "A Kiss Before Dying" is a classic, one of the most acclaimed novels in the suspense/thriller genre. Published in 1953, it does not feel 60 years old; its plot could as well be happening in 1970s.

The protagonist (the bad guy, let's not mention his name to avoid spoilers) is a handsome young man, adored by women. He is a ruthless manipulator, who will do absolutely anything to further his goal of becoming rich and powerful. Unfortunately, his girlfriend Dorothy gets pregnant, which may ruin his plans. Not to worry, though - the bad guy knows that Dorothy's suicide would solve the problem. That's how the masterfully woven plot begins.

The deliberate pacing of the scenes preceding the Bad Deed is delightfully suspenseful, so much better than the breakneck tempo of today's idiotic thrillers. The first half of the plot is enthralling and its logic is unassailable. Not being able to stop reading long into the night, I was ready to claim that "A Kiss Before Dying" is the best suspense novel that I had ever read. Alas, the plot begins losing its sharp focus somewhere about the 60% mark. The author's high-wire act of plot construction proves to be unsustainable. Too much of a good thing, perhaps.

The deliciously vicious ending redeems the novel from temporary weaknesses of the plot. Also, the last sentence of the book is something special. All in all, this novel, while completely depth-free, is highly entertaining.

Three and a half stars.


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The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really wanted to like Inger Ash Wolfe's "The Calling". It has good writing, interesting plot, and a refreshingly different main character, whom I can relate to because of my age. However, this police procedural suffers from a major implausibility, detection shortcuts, and overly theatrical ending.

Hazel Micallef, a 61-year old Detective Inspector, serves as an acting commander of a police detachment in a small town in Ontario, Canada. After a very long marriage she is recently divorced, has to take care of her elderly mother, and struggles with a severe back problem that causes her constant pain. Used to handling only minor crimes, her department suddenly faces a major challenge - a terminally ill woman is murdered in a gruesome manner. The victim is partially exsanguinated and her mouth is arranged in position of a silent cry.

Soon, another victim is found, posed in a similar death tableau. Hazel and others in the department decide to handle the case themselves, without notifying RCMP and Ontario Police Services. Through intuition they soon discover that they are dealing with a proficient serial killer. Even if we set aside the improbable speed with which Hazel's team figures out the killer's actions, it is just plain impossible that a maverick small-time police chief would handle the case of probably the worst serial killer in Canada's history on their own, without involvement of provincial or national police forces. I am not saying that a small and understaffed provincial police department would not do a better job than the entire RCMP force. In fact, they might. I am just saying that they would not be given a chance to do that in our imperfect real world.

"The Calling" has some strong points. First of all, Hazel's character is believable; I perceive her as a real person. Also, because of my profession, I love the fragment on "digital visetics" (computer visualization of lip movements based on input sequences of phonemes), which is a somewhat hot research topic in computer science. Many supporting characters are portrayed vividly (with the exception of Raymond Greene, who is pure paper). Still, the weaknesses of the novel, aggravated by a routine, thriller-like climax, prevent me from rating it higher than

Two and a half stars.


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Dusklands by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

J.M. Coetzee's first book, "Dusklands", is the fifth I have read by this author. To me, it is the weakest of the five, but the term "weakest" means "less excellent" (or "not as obviously outstanding"). It does not have the crystalline clarity and wisdom of "Disgrace" or "Waiting for the Barbarians", and it does not quite reach the depth and beauty of "Boyhood" or "Youth". It is still better than 99% of fiction out there, though.

The book is comprised of two separate short novellas, "The Vietnam Project" and "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee". In the former, the narrator is a researcher working on a report about the effectiveness of psychological warfare against the North during the Vietnam War in the 1970's. The researcher's supervisor is a Mr. Coetzee. The plot of the latter novella takes place in 1760's, when Jacobus Coetzee, a South African farmer, an explorer, and elephant hunter, embarks on an expedition to Namaqua to trade with the local tribe of Hottentot (now called Khoikhoi) people.

One obviously looks for a common denominator in two novellas. So-called professional reviewers point out the theme of colonialism: the European colonization of South Africa in the 1600-1700's is compared to U.S. attempts to prevail in the Vietnam war. I think the colonialism connection is tenuous. The only connection I can see is that of a "superior culture" destroying (or attempting to destroy) another culture. The first story, to me, is about one man's descent into madness. Whether his madness is caused by issues related to Vietnam war is a matter of interpretation. In fact, I much prefer the first novella because of its obliqueness. The second story is too direct; it is told in a straightforward fashion, yet it is quite hard to read because of passages that describe unspeakable atrocities people commit against each other.

People do not only kill people. Jacobus Coetzee kills wild animals to feel alive. His is also a "tireless enterprise of turning the wild into orchard and farm." The business aspect is particularly repulsive. Not only "the savage must clothe his nakedness and till the Earth because Manchester exports cotton drawers and Birmingham ploughshares", but the "savages" are exterminated en masse so that the business can flourish. The author also addresses one of the topics that he is most sensitive about (recall dramatic fragments from "Disgrace"): the topic of animal suffering. The killings of animals shown in "Dusklands" are cruel, prolonged, unimaginably painful, and graphically portrayed.

Even in his first work, J.M. Coetzee proves that he is an absolute master of prose and style. On the pages of "Dusklands", in addition to all the cruelty, one can find passages of sublime beauty, like the dream scenes and the "forking paths of the endless inner adventure" monologue. The fragment of the report that presents mathematics of bombing is hysterically funny.

Do not read “Dusklands” if you look for uplifting, positive themes in literature. However, if you tend to agree that the emergence of human race is one of the worst plagues that have happened to Earth, this book is perfect for you.

Three and three quarters stars.


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Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Amelie Nothomb's "Fear and Trembling" is a good read, a captivating and funny novella, even if it pales in comparison with her masterpiece, "Loving Sabotage", and does not quite reach the quality of "The Character of Rain" or "Hygiene and the Assassin".

Ms. Nothomb writes about herself in the first-person narrative. Belgian by nationality, she was born in Japan and she has worshipped the country since early childhood. She grabs an opportunity to come back to the country of her dreams and secures employment at Yumimoto Corporation. Her European (she calls it Western) upbringing and the Japanese business culture are not compatible in the slightest. The clash of cultures causes the trajectory of her employment to take a rather unusual path.

"Fear and Trembling" may not be very deep, but it is certainly funny. The story of Amelie's struggles with numbers in her short-lived attempt at accounting is hilarious. The repulsiveness of sweating is discussed in great detail. Amelie tries to discover what a person is eating while talking, from the distorted sound of words spoken. There is naked dancing on office desks. In addition to the humor, there is sharp sociological observation, for instance, "existence, in Japan, is an extension of The Company." One might laugh at the description of rules that govern the lives of Japanese women, alas, the account seems to be rooted in reality.

Ms. Nothomb's novella is not quite a trifle it may seem at the first glance. It presents a new take on the East-West divide - irreverent, sharp, and fresh. I am looking forward to seeing the 2003 movie based on the book.

Three and one quarter stars.


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Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir by John Paul Stevens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Books about the United States Supreme Court belong to my favorite genre of non-fiction. The nine justices wield enormous power, surpassing that of most, if not all, politicians. The results of their deliberations affect the country in a much deeper way than the election of a particular president, Carter or Reagan, Bush or Obama.

John Paul Stevens, retired since 2010, is one of my most admired justices, probably because of his lifelong tradition of moderate views and opinions. He had been considered a member of the more liberal wing of the Court, but his liberalism was of the kind I believe in - pragmatic and open-minded rather than doctrinal and extremist. Mainly though, I envy him that he could retire at the age of 90 in full command of his intellect. He published "Five Chiefs. A Supreme Court Memoir" at 91. A great majority of us will be enriching the soil at that age, and even if we are still vertical, we will be incoherent, incapacitated, and incontinent.

The main topic of the memoir is J. P. Stevens' assessment of five Chief Justices he knew personally or worked under: Fred Vinson, Earl Warren, Warren Burger, William Rehnquist, and John Roberts. The best quality of Justice Stevens' writing is again his moderation. He is not an admirer of his own intellectual brilliance (the trait displayed for instance by Justice Scalia). He praises the achievements of each Chief, and the criticisms of their decisions do not overweight the overall positives.

Of course, this is mainly a book about making the law of the country. Justice Stevens writes about the most important decisions reached under each of the five Chiefs, which makes it a great read for people interested in judicial history. The serious tone of the book does not exclude funny moments like one where Justice Stevens writes that "in [Rehnquist's and Scalia's] view, a life sentence in prison for overtime parking would be constitutional." The comment about Chief Justice Rehnquist putting four gold stripes on each sleeve of his robes is hilarious. And I love the psychological observation that during Mr. Stevens' oral argument before the Supreme Court in 1962 (13 years before he became a justice himself), the justices seemed to loom just inches away from him, while in reality they were seated over six feet away. So huge was the perception of their stature.

Good book and a worthy read.

Three and a half stars.


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