Thursday, November 30, 2017

McNally's Trial (Archy McNally, #5)McNally's Trial by Lawrence Sanders
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"I won't label [her] as Rubenesque, but she was abundant and all the more stirring for it. Her body was vital, overwhelming. I hung on for dear life and, in addition to my pleasure, had the added delight of being a survivor."

Having just finished Inside Mr. Enderby a rather dark and serious novel I decided it was time for some mindless entertainment and a pure leisure read. Lawrence Sanders comes to rescue and the always dependable Archy McNally, of McNally & Son, a debonair, gourmet, dapper, and a very manly private investigator responsible for conducting discreet inquiries in his fathers law firm. We are reminded that Archy is not a lawyer himself as he had been expelled from Yale Law for streaking naked across the Philharmonic stage in a Richard Nixon's mask: can one not love such a character?

The firm's client is Ms. Fogarty, a high-level employee of a funeral-home chain (Mr. Sanders allows himself to chide the euphemism 'grief counselor', thank you!), who has noticed an unusual uptick in the company's business in recent months, and wants to make sure nothing illegal is going on. Obviously, Archy is the one to conduct his trademark discreet inquiries, alas this time he is burdened by having an apprentice helper: his acquaintance Binky Watrous needs a job. The case quickly grows to involve some serious crimes and really bad people; even special agents of the FBI make their entrance. Of course, it is Archy who figures everything out but not soon enough: quite serious things happen, serious enough not to fit the light-hearted mood of this story.

Archy in his role as the narrator is again using florid language full of cute periphrases, which to me is perhaps the best feature of McNally's novels. The language is artificial yet somehow, magically, it does not sound artificial. The prose is perfectly suited to depiction of sex scenes. The descriptions do not use physiological terms, do not rely on heavy metaphors, and do not sound awkward and embarrassing as most of such writings do in non-top-shelf literature. They are simply funny:
"Zing! Went the Strings of My Libido."
or further on the same page:
"She owned a body as solid as the figurehead of a Yankee clipper [...] but there was not an ounce of excess avoirdupois on her carcass. Believe me; I searched."
On the negative side, I like this installment the least of the three I have read so far (two others being McNally's Risk and McNally's Luck ) Binky Watrous, a dweeb and an expert in imitating birdcalls, is not an interesting character at all. Not worth all that focus. In fact, most characters are caricatures, including the FBI special agent Kling, except for two strong female characters, Ms. Fogarty, and Mrs. Sarah Whitcomb, the funeral-home owner's wife. I also liked the mention of Boleslaw the Bashful, the king of Poland (1243 - 1279). Overall, not too bad as pure entertainment.

Three stars.


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Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Inside Mr. EnderbyInside Mr. Enderby by Anthony Burgess
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Anthony Burgess is mainly known as the author of A Clockwork Orange , which I reviewed here on Goodreads, and which owes a large part of its popularity to the outstanding film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick. While Inside Mr. Enderby (1963) may not convey equally powerful artistic vision, it is still a remarkable novel and, to me, it deserves almost as high a rating.

A truly magnificent chapter opens the novel. Children from the future, on their Educational Time Trip, visit a great poet of the past, a Mr. Enderby, who is sleeping in his rented flat. They explore his body and also his bedroom, kitchen, and - most importantly - his bathroom: this the only place where Mr. Enderby is able to create poetry. The Muse visits him only when he sits on his "poetic seat."

After this remarkable introduction we follow events in Mr. Enderby's life in a relatively linear fashion, beginning with him receiving a notice of winning a small poetry prize. The award ceremony is an unforgettable scene, with its speeches and poetry readings punctuated by Mr. Enderby's emissions of wind. He meets a journalist from a women's magazine; she will play a significant role in his later life. We follow comical adventures related to Mr. Enderby's inebriation in London, a wonderfully demented story that concludes Part 1 on the novel. Two other parts take place mainly in other locations: in Italy and in the north of England. The ending is in a way similar to that of Clockwork Orange, as improbable as it may seem.

While this is a very funny novel - I was laughing out loud many, many times - it is also extremely dark. It offers a pessimistic view of contemporary culture (contemporary in 1963, but then we only went downhill thanks to TV and Internet), yet the main message seems to be the damage that broken childhoods inflict on people. Mr. Enderby had been traumatized by his stepmother, from whose intimidating specter he has been trying to escape all his life.

It is Mr. Burgess' prose, though, that I find the main value of the novel. From its breathtaking beginning through many unforgettable passages - for instance, Mr. Enderby's horrific experiences in Castel Gandolfo - I have been savoring the author's writing. The text is richly sprinkled with fragments of poetry, mostly of Mr. Enderby's authorship. Many passages are truly hilarious like the one where the poet is trying to ascertain whether he is in command of his male qualities:
"He stealthily felt his way down to find out what was his body's view of this constatation, but all was quiet there, as though he were calmly reading Jane Austen."
On the other hand, I am not a particular fan of Mr. Enderby's (or perhaps the author's) severe obsession with the non-decorative aspects of human physiology: burps, farts, dandruff, urine, belching, boil-scars, vomit, ear wax, teeth-picking and the like, which permeate the novel. Yet Mr. Burgess' brilliance in handling the language, the syntax, the sound, and the vocabulary are so masterful that they can carry whatever content is thrown there, even the ugly detritus of our body works.

Three and three quarter stars.


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Saturday, November 25, 2017

The Broken PennyThe Broken Penny by Julian Symons
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

"[...] an awful conformity of the human spirit. [...] Draw the curtains close, turn out the lights, pretend that knocking at the house next door does not exist, put cottonwool in your ears against the screams, be thankful above all that it is not your turn, perhaps it will never be your turn."

What an exasperating read! A few morsels of wisdom - like the above passage that reminds me of Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous quote "Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me" - and few fragments of good prose are buried in a ridiculous story. It is hard to believe the plot so silly comes from one of the "grandmasters of British mystery", Julian Symons, the author of the very good The Progress of a Crime that I rated above four stars. I have read and reviewed here on Goodreads nine other novels by Mr. Symons; they are all better than The Broken Penny (1953).

The protagonist of the story which takes place in Europe in the early 1950s is Charles Garden, once a sort of "professional revolutionary." He had been connected with various leftist causes such as the fight against Franco's regime during the Spanish Civil War. Mr. Garden is summoned to meet his acquaintance at the "Central Liaison Organization", an obvious front for one of the departments of British intelligence. He is supposed to convince a certain Professor Arbitzer, a deposed and exiled head of a coalition government in an unnamed European country, to return there and lead the popular upraising to overthrow the Soviet-imposed Communist government.

Treachery and murder, all connected with politics, begin to happen while the plot is still located in the UK. But soon the group of main characters leave on a secret plane flight to Prof. Arbitzer's country. By the way, they take a dog with them for this secret mission; yeah, the plot is that ridiculous! There are more killings and treachery when the story moves to that unnamed country, somewhere in southeastern Europe, where the Soviets installed their puppet governments after World War II.

I find the utterly idiotic plot offensive. The author tries to convey some deep thoughts about the human cost of political struggle and revolution yet his sincere and well-expressed humanistic concerns are completely defiled by silly sequences of plot events. I love demented novels, but only when intended by the author; here it is clear that the author does not know how preposterous the story is. The two final monumental plot twists undo all previous plot twists and leave the readers twisting with anger.

I am also angry about offensive clichés: for instance, anything that is wrong with a woman can be cured by two strong slaps on both sides of her face. A woman thus righted will then begin to behave properly and fall in love with the slapper. Obviously. All that cr.p from a really good author who can write beautiful sentences like:
"How the past overwhelms us as soon as it comes washing through any gap in the high wall we have made to keep out the seas of memory, what a mistake it had been to turn left instead of right."
Other than a few good sentences the best thing in the novel is the character of good old Mr. Goldblatt, Mr. Garden's employer. Readers beware: the blurb on the cover "High grade thriller" is a barefaced lie!

One and a half stars.


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Thursday, November 23, 2017

Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme CourtSupreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court by Jan Crawford Greenburg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[The Court] was jurisprudentially unmoored. During Rehnquist's reign, the justices were in a constant struggle over which of their competing legal theories was most relevant. They had their own philosophies about the law, so the Court could legitimately be characterized as liberal one day and conservative the next."

Another good book on the workings of the Supreme Court of US - likely my most favorite non-fiction topic. Jan Crawford Greenburg's Supreme Conflict (2007) is one of the best works in this particular niche that I have read. I like it as much as the great The Nine and more than my most recent "Supreme read" David Hackett Souter , but maybe only because I am a complete ignoramus in the area of constitutional law. (After the rating I list the links to my reviews of five other Supreme Court studies that I have read recently.)

Ms. Greenburg's book starts - with a literary flair and suspense - on the last day of the 2004-2005 court Supreme Court term, when everybody is expecting the gravely ill Chief Justice W.H. Rehnquist to announce that he is stepping down. This does not happen and it is Justice Sandra O'Connor who soon announces her retirement. The reader will learn the reasons for this unexpected turn of events.

The subtitle of the book, The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court, aptly describes the content. The author states that her work has been based on more than one hundred interviews, which included nine justices, many federal courts judges, and other high-ranking officials. Almost all of these interviews have been conducted "on background", meaning that the interlocutors might have been more willing to say things that have not been well known publicly.

Any history of Supreme Court between 1980s and 2000s will necessarily emphasize the influence of three justices: Rehnquist, "the boss", Sandra O'Connor, and Anthony Kennedy. Ms. Greenburg particularly focuses on Justice O'Connor, and in my view based on six other books about the highest court during that period, rightly so. I do not think any other justice had more impact on the eventual court rulings than Justice O'Connor. The author shows the mechanisms of her tremendous influence, based on her being a pragmatist rather than an ideologue. With seven out of nine justices nominated by Republican presidents, the Court was neither conservative nor liberal. Ms. Greenburg writes:
"The Court was ideologically adrift, and its course usually depended on which way O'Connor - and to some extent, Kennedy - chose to go."
Later in the book the author quotes a clever metaphor of "hedgehogs and foxes." Hedgehogs "who know one big thing" and foxes, "who know lots of small things."
"[They] bring different skills and perspectives to the Court. The foxes understand compromise and consensus. [...] The hedgehogs [...] think there are right answers in the law. Scalia is a classic hedgehog who is guided by an overarching theory [...]"
Ms. Greenburg uses Justice Breyer as an example of a "fox", but Justice O'Connor would be a more fitting example. My personal view is that the foxes are right: There are no right answers, not in the law and not anywhere else. Compromise and consensus are the only ways of achieving something.

There is a lot of interesting background information on the failed nomination of judge Bork and on the intense disagreements between justices O'Connor and Thomas (the author tries to defend Justice Thomas, but I do not find it very convincing: for me a pragmatist is always right and a dogmatist always wrong). The successful nomination of Justice Roberts (later the Chief Justice) is well portrayed and the best fragments of the book are about the frenzied search for a female candidate when W.H. Rehnquist dies. The convoluted, nasty, and eventually failed process of nominating Harriet Miers shows one of the uglier aspects of politics. A really interesting, very informative, and well-written book!

Four and a quarter stars.

John W. Dean The Rehnquist Choice
Jeffrey Rosen, The Supreme Court; The Personalities and Rivalries that Redefined America
John Anthony Maltese, The Selling of Supreme Court Nominees
Martin Garbus, The Next 25 Years: The New Supreme Court and What It Means for Americans
John Paul Stevens,Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir


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Tuesday, November 21, 2017

One for the Money (Stephanie Plum, #1)One for the Money by Janet Evanovich
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

""I lined my eyes in midnight blue, gunked them up with mascara, painted my mouth whore red, and hung the biggest, brassiest earrings I owned from my lobes. I lacquered my nails to match my lips and checked myself out in the mirror.
Damned if I didn't make a good slut.
"

Janet Evanovich's One for the Money (1994) is the first novel in her long-running series featuring Stephanie Plum, a bounty hunter. The series that always uses numerals in the titles has now reached the 24th installment but I am not sure whether I will read another one. While the protagonist is a relatively interesting character, the prose is marginally competent, and there are some smidgens of socio- and psychological observations, the literary convention completely puts me off. The novel is set up as a "light-hearted mystery" yet it deals with such light-hearted events as deaths, beatings, and torture. While I quite like "light prose" and am certainly interested in books that deal with life-and-death events I do not think that mixing the two conventions works.

The novel begins with the following cool passage:
"There are some men who enter a woman's life and screw it up forever. Joseph Morelli did this to me - not forever, but periodically."
Then Stephanie reminisces playing "choo-choo train" with Joe Morelli when she was six years old. Several years later their paths cross again, "behind the case filled with chocolate éclairs". And then again, three years later, when Stephanie tries to run the guy over with her car.

Well, Stephanie has now been laid off her job as a lingerie buyer, anything that could be sold or pawned is gone from her apartment in the predominantly Italian neighborhood of Trenton, New Jersey, and she desperately needs a job. She blackmails her cousin Vinnie to get a skip tracing job in his bail bonding company. And guess what: her first case is to track Joe Morelli, who became a cop in the meantime, as he did not show for a court appearance in a case where he is suspected of killing an unarmed man.

Well, this light-hearted, rather inane caper involves an ex-special-forces operative schooling Stephanie in the craft of bounty hunting (yeah, right), her grandma shooting a heavy gun over dinner, a whitish substance - probably not tapioca - smeared on her door, and two well-intentioned prostitutes telling Stephanie what the "word on the street is" (ugh). Several people die, some are tortured, but Stephanie keeps strutting her light-hearted stuff. Sweet!

Other than the rather plausible and well-portrayed relationship between Stephanie and Joe and their interesting "story" one thing I really liked in the novel is the reference to how Stephanie removes the distributor cap from her car's engine to render it safe from stealing. This reminded me the days over 30 years ago when I needed to do it every evening when parking the car in front of our apartment building in San Diego.

Two stars.


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Saturday, November 18, 2017

Bagombo Snuff BoxBagombo Snuff Box by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

"My longtime friend and critic Professor Peter Reed, of the English Department at the University of Minnesota, made it his business to find these stories from my distant past. Otherwise, they might never have seen the light of day again. I myself hadn't saved one scrap of paper from that part of my life."
(Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in the Introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box.)

I am not sure that the collection of early short stories Bagombo Snuff Box by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., one of my favorite authors, should have been published. I suspect that the publisher's eagerness to make a buck off the great author's name may be more to blame than Dr. Reed's zeal. Mr. Vonnegut himself seems to be aware of literary weakness of the stories: he writes in the Coda:
"Rereading [some of the stories] so upset me, because the premise and the characters of each were so promising, and the denouement so asinine, that I virtually rewrote the denouement before I could stop myself."
Further in the Coda the author is even more critical of these early stories that date back to the 1950s when they were published in such magazines as Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Argosy, Redbook .

Most of the 23 stories collected here are completely unremarkable and instantly forgettable. They are overtly and overly didactic, aimed at readers with teenager-like worldview, and just plain sophomoric. The endings, clearly meant to be "surprising", are quite predictable. The weakest story, A Night for Love is trite and unbelievably syrupy. This Son of Mine aims at psychological depth yet what we receive is a maudlin, sentimental mess. And this mess comes from my beloved author of Slaughterhouse-Five !

Some stories in the set are a little better. Souvenir rings true as it is based on Mr. Vonnegut's experiences as a prisoner of war in Germany, yet it is marred by atrociously cheap ending. A Present for Big Saint Nick is partially redeemed by being just nasty enough at the end. The only story that I like is Der Arme Dolmetscher, again referring to the author's war experience, but maybe I like it just because of the phrase "Where are your howitzers?" (Vo zint eara pantzer shpitzen?), which reminds me of Monty Python's Hungarian Tobacconist's Sketch.

Dr. Reed points out two interesting aspects in his Preface: the stories feel quite dated because the women play secondary roles in all of them and the men are completely defined by jobs they have. Well, these observations are way more interesting than the stories themselves.

Also, to be clear, my one-star rating is relative: what merits one star for Mr. Vonnegut, would bring a much higher rating in the case of a less talented author. This set of stories ranks nowhere near even the weakest entries in Vonnegut's literary output, such as, say, Deadeye Dick or Mother Night . To compare it with the author's great books such as Bluebeard or Breakfast of Champions is absurd, not even mentioning his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five .

One and a half stars.

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Monday, November 13, 2017

DeceptionDeception by Denise Mina
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"She lets out a sigh so small, so intimate, it makes me want to cry. It's as if she's brushing her lips past my ear, a small breath easing from my throat, past the palate, brushing between her lips, and out. She takes in a tiny rasping breath to compensate before she carries on, and when she does, her voice has changed. "

What a phenomenal writer Denise Mina is! It's been quite some time since I last reviewed her novel Blood Salt Water . And I still am due the re-read and re-review of her masterpiece, Garnethill, one of the best mysteries I have ever read, and a piece of high-class literature. Deception (2003) is a stand-alone novel and a wonderful one at that: aren't we all a wee tired of Alex Morrow? Ms. Mina and Ms. Karin Fossum are by far my favorite current writers in the genre. I love to read their prose, rich, subtle, evocative, and astute psychologically (both of them) and sociologically (Ms. Mina).

Deception is framed to appear as a true crime novel. The bulk of the book is the set of diaries of Lachlan Harriot whose wife Susie has been pronounced guilty of murdering Andrew Gow. Gow had in the past been convicted of serial murders of five prostitutes, but then released on appeal since similar murders happened while he was in prison. Susie was a psychiatrist in the mental hospital where Gow had been under observation after confessing to his crimes. She was fired when she took home the prison documents related to the case and then accused of murdering Gow when she had found out that he married another woman.

The plot is captivating and I lost the proverbial "many hours of sleep" not being able to put the book away. But to me the super interesting plot is the least important aspect in the novel. Also, I am not quite convinced by the logic of the surprising denouement. The two extraordinary aspects of the novel are Ms. Mina's outstanding prose (see the epigraph) and the psychological truth of characters she's portraying on the pages. The five-page scene of Lachlan's second visit to see Susie in prison is a masterpiece of prose that overwhelms the reader with psychological depth. This is the actual, real life, captured by a master writer who knows the subject. (Let's not forget Ms. Mina's research in the areas of criminology, criminal law, and connections with mental illness in female offenders when she was working on her PhD thesis). Also, the whole passage of Lachlan's family descending upon him to help is very well observed. And so hilarious! The family row scene is almost on par with the unforgettable four-actor scene from the same author's Gods and Beasts

All the main characters, Lachlan, Susie, Yeni, are rich, life-like portraits of real people. Lachlan, the narrator, is an off-center, peculiar, idiosyncratic character yet I recognize in him various people I have known and I feel I have known him for a long time. His trajectory in the plot is really well designed and what happens at the end is really obvious when it does happen, in the hindsight.

And finally, one of my main reasons of being on the verge of a five-star rating of this book: the stunning thread that provides a solid psychological and sociological analysis of the phenomenon of women's emotional investment - sometimes leading to marriage - in male prisoners who have been convicted of heinous crimes, like serial murders or rapes. This theme dovetails nicely with the motif of people selling the sordid stories of their relatives' lives for money, and the whole repugnant feature of the human race: the interest in celebrities of WHATEVER kind, murderers and rapists included. The author writes, in a fictitious article from Guardian:
"[Stevie Ray] has given up his job at the minicab firm where he met Gow and is dedicating himself full-time to managing Gow's career as a serial killer and celebrity."
Are there more despicable creatures on Earth than humans?

Four and a quarter stars.


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Friday, November 10, 2017

JailbirdJailbird by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"She believed, and was entitled to believe, I must say, that all human beings were evil by nature, whether tormentors or victims, or idle standers-by. [...] We were a disease, she said, which had evolved on one tiny cinder in the universe, but could spread and spread."

I am ambivalent about Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird (1979). On the one hand the author pushes many of my hot buttons and I agree with his choices of human failings to lampoon - human race as a disease affecting the universe is a brilliant metaphor - but on the other, the diagnoses and solutions he offers are way too simplistic and naive. There are some brilliant passages in the novel but many others are ridiculous, childish, or just plain silly.

Jailbird can be divided into two, quite disjoint parts. The first is a memoir of one Walter F. Starbuck, the son of a Polish chauffeur and a Lithuanian cook working for an American millionaire. Thanks to his parents' employer's sponsorship Mr. Starbuck graduates from Harvard, but then - during the grim days of the Depression - he becomes a Communist. Much later he is interrogated by Richard Nixon himself during congressional committee hearings. The future president remembers him and Starbuck obtains a job in Nixon's White House, as a Special Advisor on Youth. He becomes one of the scapegoats in the Watergate affair and goes to prison.

I find the first part realistic, almost "historical", and captivating. Vonnegut focuses on the issues of labor movement in the US. He writes:
"Labor history was pornography of a sort in those days, and even more so in these days. In public schools and in the homes of nice people it was and remains pretty much taboo to tell tales of labor's sufferings and derring-do."
One of the most dramatic fragments of the novel is the depiction of the fictitious Cuyahoga Massacre where the soldiers killed fourteen protesting workers of the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron, wounded scores of others, and - the worst of all (sarcasm!) - caused serious stutter in Mr. Starbuck's future employer. Another dramatic fragment depicts the factual story of executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists convicted of murder, but guilty only of "dangerous radical activities."

The novel's second, present-time part that begins on the day of Starbuck's release from prison is a sort of fantasy tale:
"This is just the dream of a jailbird. It's not supposed to make sense."
Here we encounter The RAMJAC Corporation that owns 19% of the entire wealth of the United States and the story focuses on Mr. Starbuck's connections with the mysterious Mrs. Graham who is the majority stockholder. I am not enthusiastic about that part of the novel, not only because I dislike fantasy in literature, but mainly because it dissolves the stronger message of the novel's "historical" part. Although I burst out laughing over the hilarious commentary on the average American level of literacy: Vonnegut writes about an invention needed in the times when "it was getting harder all the time to find employees who understood numbers well": images of products are put on the keys of a cash register rather than numbers.

Vonnegut's trademark sarcastic view of humanity is made clear by the numerous references to the Sermon on the Mount, a collection of teachings attributed to Jesus Christ in which he predicts that the poor in spirit would receive the Kingdom of Heaven, the meek will inherit the Earth, that the merciful will be treated mercifully, and so on. I wonder why the author does not quote the most striking phrase from the Sermon: "You cannot serve God and wealth" because "no one can serve two masters." Would the author be not bold enough to say that capitalism and Christianity cannot coexist?

Infuriatingly uneven work by the author of the great
Slaughterhouse-Five
. Here Vonnegut editorializes way too much and does not let the power of his fiction speak for itself. The beautiful passages about Starbuck's wife and his girlfriend virtually disappear buried deep in well-meant yet inept propaganda.

Two and a half stars.

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017

The Lady in the Lake (Philip Marlowe, #4)The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips."

Raymond Chandler's fourth novel, The Lady in the Lake (1943), is not as remarkable an achievement as The Long Good-bye or the popular favorites The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely. Yet it is a solid, engrossing, and very readable mystery with some well-developed characters, and also a novel that conveys the sense of the times.

Philip Marlowe is hired by a well-to-do businessman, Mr. Kingsley, to find his wife, Crystal, "who has been gone a whole month." She sent him a telegram from El Paso telling him that she is going to Mexico with a man she met and that she plans to get a divorce. But the man in question denies going anywhere with Crystal and her car is found in San Bernardino. Marlowe quickly discovers a connection with Kingsley's wife doctor, whose wife committed suicide some time ago. There are hints of excessive drug prescriptions.

Marlowe goes to Kingsley's cabin on the fictional Little Fawn Lake (maybe modeled on Big Bear Lake) where he meets the caretaker, Mr. Chess, who tells Marlowe that his wife also disappeared. They go on a walk around the lake and accidentally discover the drowned body:
"Then the face came. A swollen pulpy gray white mass without features, without eyes, without mouth. A blotch of gray dough [...]"
Mr. Chess recognizes his wife. I am not giving any spoilers as this is just the beginning of a very complicated plot that involves many characters and an intricate tangle of connections between them.

Several characterizations, for instance Sheriff Patton's and Miss Fromsett's, are well written: the characters are not caricatures but almost feel like real people. Even Philip Marlowe is not as cartoonishly perfect as in The Long Good-bye. On the other hand, the characterizations of Captain Webber and Lt. Degarmo are one-dimensional and not psychologically plausible.

The sense of place and time is well rendered. The fictional Bay City is obviously modeled on Santa Monica (I seemed to recognize the place even though I was there for the first time 40 years later than the time of the story). Most memorable are the references to World War II. Marlowe has to cross a dam at the end of the Puma Lake to get to Kingsley's cabin. There are sentries on the dam and the drivers are told to roll up car windows. After Pearl Harbor attack, the protection of water systems and dams was a national priority. They were military zones and to prevent sabotage twenty-four hour protection was in place; the criminal plot of the novel takes advantage of the circumstances.

On the negative side, there is an awkward, implausible scene with Ms. Fallbrook. Also, the author uses some truly cheap tricks in the denouement, like for instance:
"[...] went back to the house the next morning. That's just one of those things that murderers seem to do."
Sure, the murderers in mystery books often do things convenient for the plot. Despite the weaknesses, I recommend the novel.

Three stars.


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Friday, November 3, 2017

Kurt Vonnegut. Great Writers.Kurt Vonnegut. Great Writers. by John Tomedi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] an essentially pessimistic outlook is advanced in almost all of Vonnegut's novels. [...] One of the few bright spots on the dim palette of Vonnegut's fiction is the place of decency, humanity, and kindness in a modus vivendi."

Since I am slowly working through Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s literary opus I thought it might be interesting to read the great author's biography. The first of the two that I found in my university library is a "critical biography" Kurt Vonnegut (2004), written by John Tomedi and published in the Great Writers series. This is a serious book, a monograph with a clear research bent. The author focuses on the analysis of the writer's work rather than on his life story.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my most favorite authors even though I really like only few of his books and do not care much for several others. So far I have reviewed here on Goodreads 10 out of the author's 30 works (14 novels and 16 other books, including both fiction and non-fiction) and the average rating is not impressive. But then I think a writer who has created a masterpiece like Slaughterhouse-Five deserves all his works to be read even if most of them are failures of some kind.

I share several of Mr. Vonnegut's concerns that the author of the biography identifies as main themes in Vonnegut's work: dark pessimism about the nature and future of the human race, total randomness of life, skepticism as to the power and role of science in society. Moreover, in almost all of his works Vonnegut attempts to determine "what's wrong with America", and I agree with many of his diagnoses: the culture of greed and commercialism, the glorification of violence, and the cult of guns. Mr. Tomedi's book also made me realize that my identification with Vonnegut's ideas is not only based on the commonality of negatives. As shown by the fragment I used for the epigraph Vonnegut offers human decency and kindness as the rays of hope, "bright spots on the dim palette" of his fiction. There is nothing that I value more in people than the notion of decency and that's one of the main reasons why I cherish works by authors such as Coetzee, Macdonald, or Vonnegut.

I also share the author's outrage at the fact that Slaughterhouse-Five was "banned from several school district's libraries and reading lists, and even burned in a few communities." Grim is the future of a country where great books are burned while commercials on TV poison people's minds 24 hours a day. Speaking about TV, Mr. Tomedi offers the following great observation:
"[...] people try to imitate the unrealistic world of stories in reality. One result is the expectation that reality will behave like a story. Television is a prime culprit."
An interesting tidbit I learned from Mr. Tomedi's book is that Vonnegut's rejected Master's thesis, Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales, attempted to provide a graphical description of structure of stories from wide-ranging cultures, which reminds me of the famous (for an Eastern European like myself) study by Vladimir Propp, Morphology of a Folktale.

To sum up, the biography is a worthy read, and I recommend it, although it suffers from frequent repetitions of themes and it reads more like a collection of essays about individual books by Kurt Vonnegut rather than as a synthesis of analyses.

Three stars.

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