He Who Fears the Wolf by Karin Fossum

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"He wasn't made like other people, though this wasn't plain to see. [...] He had always moved in a different space, seeing the world through a murky veil that took the sting out of the light and the sounds coming from outside. He held the veil in place by concentrating hard."

It comes to me as a shock that I have just read a Karin Fossum's novel that I am a little hesitant to recommend. She is one of my absolutely favorite authors and I have rated two of her novels ( Black Seconds and The Murder of Harriet Krohn ) with rare five stars. Yet now comes He Who Fears the Wolf (2003, English translation), a psychological thriller that I do not believe is strong on psychology.

I have to offer a disclaimer though: readers who enjoy Ms. Fossum's books because of the characters of Chief Inspector Sejer and officer Skarre may like the novel a lot. But since I am not in the least interested in Sejer/Skarre but instead look for Ms. Fossum's trademark acute observations of human behavior, I am a bit disappointed.

After a "teaser" with hints of supernatural the story begins with an elderly, widowed woman found brutally murdered on her farm in a remote rural area of Norway. Kannick, a 12-year-old boy from a "boys' home" who has found the body saw Erkki near the woman's farm. Erkki is a convenient suspect: not only is he a Finn but also he has escaped from a psychiatric institution.

Inspector Sejer who is investigating the case notices a suspiciously looking man walking towards a bank in a nearby town. He follows him but nothing happens for quite some time. When the inspector leaves the bank he hears shots and screams. Witnesses say that the bank robber has kidnapped a woman. The two cases become intertwined in a rather unexpected way.

The book is not a police procedural, though. The major part of the novel focuses on Kannick, Erkki, and another young man. Their behaviors and the dynamics of relationships between them are observed in minute detail, which would normally be the strongest aspect of a novel by Ms. Fossum's. Alas, I am unable to find the portraits of the characters psychologically plausible. They feel custom-made by the author to illustrate her theses about people unable to adjust to life in society. The author also seems to be inattentive to detail: for instance, the bottle of whisky from which the three main characters partake for quite some time would have to be really huge.

On the positive side, I like the somewhat ambiguous ending, and I love one of the most oddball sentences I have ever seen in prose, which may be the author's joke or the translator's clumsiness:

"[he] was not a hamster. He was a father!"

And, of course, the sarcastic take on American police is worth noting:

"It's better in the U.S. The police just shoot them dead, and show a lot more consideration for the community."

Despite the good bits I am rounding my low rating down.

Two and a half stars



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Smut by Alan Bennett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Standard sexual intercourse was a procedure with which even Mrs Donaldson was relatively familiar though pursued here with more vigour and variation than she had ever experienced herself."

Note: I apologize for overuse of the word 'hilarious' and its derivatives in this review.

My wife highly recommended Alan Bennett's Uncommon Reader, which right now is checked out in my library, so I took some other titles by the author and am delighted to have done so. Smut (2010) is a wonderfully light, intelligent, and extremely funny read. A jewel of typically understated British humor. In addition, it is a very short book (only 152 small-format pages): what could ever be better? Everything became clear when I checked the author's biography and learned that this is the same Mr. Bennett who was one of the creators of British TV show Beyond the Fringe, a precursor of Monty Python Flying Circus, the best show in the history of television.

Smut contains just two short stories: I am unable to decide which one is better. They are both similar in that they both have a hilarious premise, funny plot, and non-trivial yet also hilarious ending. In the first story, The Greening of Mrs Donaldson, we meet 55-year-old Mrs. D., a widow, who supplements her income and fills her time by serving as a Simulated Patient, a part-time demonstrator for medical school students. She also rents rooms to students in her three-bedroom apartment. As hilarious as the patient simulation is, the lodgers inability to come up with rent money at the end of the month provides the readers with even more entertainment. The students come up with a novel way of providing service in lieu of the rent, which helps Mrs. Donaldson acquire "certain boldness" after the incident. The ending of the story, again dazzling with hilarity, is perfectly fitting for Goodreads: the pleasures of reading top any other type of pleasure in life.

The protagonist of the second story The Shielding of Mrs Forbes is Graham Forbes, "a handsome man" who chooses to marry someone not nearly as good looking as himself and even slightly older." But the reader is up for a surprise: the night before his wedding Graham is - as usual - in bed with a young man: they talk about Graham's upcoming marriage during intermissions in their sessions of carnal delights. Well, some readers may be surprised but the marriage works perfectly and Graham truly enjoys sex with his wife even though for him she is not of the right gender. The enjoyment seems to come from the novelty and

"[...]unfamiliarity with the geography of the region and the function of its components. Women, he found himself thinking, had to be investigated."

To me the funniest aspect in the second story is that amid all this hilarity the author proudly conveys wholesome and didactic messages such as:

"... how much better... how much healthier... had all these persons, these family members, been more candid with one another right from the start."

The reader will enjoy delightful twists at the end of the story and the interesting character of the younger Mrs. Forbes. Smut is not a great work of literary art but an extraordinarily entertaining read. I can't wait to read more from the "grandfather" of Monty Python.

Four stars.




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Don't Look Back by Karin Fossum

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"'Up until the day someone kills for the first time, he's not a murderer. He's just an ordinary person.'"

To say that I have been disappointed with Karin Fossum's Don't Look Back (2002) would be going too far. But since I love her writing and have rated two of her novels with five stars - which for me is an exceedingly rare rating - I am obviously biased and I expect a masterpiece from her every time. Alas, this novel is quite far from a five-star material. Ratings are relative, though: had I not known other books by Ms. Fossum and had I read this novel first, I would most likely have rated it higher.

Norwegian country side, a remote village. A little girl is walking back home from a sleepover at her friend's house. A van stops and a man offers her a ride. When the girl does not show up home long after the expected time the mother is sick with worry. At the same time body of a very young woman is found near a lake, with no visible signs of violence. Inspector Sejer and officer Skarre (in his first appearance in the series) arrive on the scene. The dead woman is soon identified to be Annie, a 15-year old girl, mature and wise beyond her age, active in sports, and an overall wonderful person. While Annie's eighteen-year old boyfriend is an obvious suspect the neighbors are also uneasy about a young man with Down syndrome: he is different and thus not to be trusted. Connections to events from the past also emerge and the list of suspects grows.

Too much happens in the novel for my liking. I adore Ms. Fossum's later novels where few events happen and the reader is instead offered a depth of psychological insights of what it takes for an ordinary person to become a murderer or how ordinary events in an ordinary life can result in major tragedies. This novel, the second in the Sejer series, seems to me a sort of trial run before the author's more mature works.

The thread where Sejer is trying to 'reconstruct Annie,' to understand her personality and her motives, is the best in the novel. I like a sort of symmetry that the author creates when Annie's boyfriend also tries to reconstruct her via files on her computer. Everybody is trying to understand why Annie's personality seemed to undergo a drastic change about a year ago.

Ms. Fossum's writing does not read as masterful as in her later novels: there are some awkward passages. Quoting Sejer's thought process (in italics!) is a glaring example: the readers should be able to figure it out on their own. There are also traces of naïveté in several fragments. On the plus side I have greatly enjoyed the author's teaser at the beginning of the plot as well as the "flies on the window pane" segment. The reader will likely find the passages about Sejer's daughter and his adopted grandson touching and sweet.

I really enjoyed reading this novel. It is a very good book, just not nearly as good as the author's masterpieces.

Three and a half stars.




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A Court Divided: The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law by Mark Tushnet

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"The story of the Rehnquist Court is the story of a court divided not simply between liberals and conservatives but, more important, between two types of Republican."

The role of the US Supreme Court in shaping the country and the recent evolution of the court are my favorite topics: I believe that no other institution, not the President, not the Senate, and not the House has a more significant impact on the life of US citizens. Mark Tushnet's A Court Divided (2005) is the eighth book dealing with the Rehnquist era of the US Supreme Court that I have read in recent years. (The links to my reviews of these works can be found in this review .)

The main theme, as shown in the epigraph, and the main dramatic axis of the book is the struggle between "traditional Republicans" on the court, like Justices O'Connor or Souter, and the "modern Republicans", shaped by Ronald Reagan and primarily by Barry Goldwater, represented on the court by Justices Scalia and Thomas. The modern conservatives had hoped for a judicial revolution that would overturn the liberal legacy of the Warren Court: it did not happen. The "centrist" traditional Republicans almost always managed to tip the balance of power away from the "revolutionary" modern Republicans by siding with the more or less liberal wing of the court.

I am an ignoramus in legal issues, particularly in the areas of constitutional or business and property related law, so a lot of the author's good work has been wasted on me. I am mostly interested in the social issues and I have found a lot of material in Mr. Tushnet's work that I have not seen before. Also, some material seems to be presented with more clarity here. The in-depth discussions of the First Amendment cases, affirmative action, gender equality, and gay and minority rights are presented exhaustively and convincingly, even for a legal dilettante such as this reviewer.

Most of the book is as compulsively readable as good fiction. The profiles of individual justices that include biographical sketches and studies of their judicial philosophy are particularly interesting. I have learned something new about justices Rehnquist, O'Connor, Souter, Scalia, Thomas, Ginzburg, and Kennedy. Even the less exhaustive portraits of justices Stevens and Breyer are illuminating.

Several themes caught my attention. I find it hard to agree with the author's convoluted interpretation of the Anita Hill's case during Thomas' confirmation hearing. The author seems to be backing away from what he had written in an earlier book on that subject, where he concluded that judge Thomas had lied. The whole issue has suddenly gained a lot of currency these days with the recent wave of sexual harassment accusations. On the other hand, it is also interesting how merciless Mr. Tushnet is in debunking Justice Scalia's image as an intellectual giant on the Supreme Court. The reader will find a lot more good stuff. A highly recommended read.

Four stars.



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The Other Side of Silence by Bill Pronzini

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"You could stay in one place all day, from dawn to dusk - Zabriskie Point, say, or the sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells - and with each ten-degree rise and fall of the sun, the colors of rocks and sand hills changed from dark rose to burnished gold, from chocolate brown to indigo and gray-black, with a spectrum of subtler shades in between."

Bill Pronzini, winner of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, is mostly known for his "Nameless Detective" series. The Other Side of Silence (2008) is a non-series book, classified on the cover as "a novel of suspense." I find it a good read, if not remarkable. The clichéd plot and uninspired writing are balanced by the choice of Death Valley, one of the most magnificent places on Earth, as the locale of a significant portion of the plot.

Rick Fallon, an ex-Army MP and a security specialist, spends vacations in his beloved Death Valley, far from the noise and madness of civilization. His wife left him after their little son had died in an accident. Traveling in the Warm Springs Canyon area he turns off the main road and in a secluded canyon comes across an empty passenger car. In the car there is a woman's suicide note, which mentions her missing son. Mr. Fallon locates the woman, close to death, and thanks to his military experience saves her life. It appears that her ex-husband kidnapped their son and his accomplice assaulted and raped her. Mr. Fallon, thinking about his dead son, decides to help the woman find her child.

The case gets much more complicated and a murder occurs. The pursuit of the boy's captor takes Mr. Fallon from Death Valley to Las Vegas, then to Laughlin, San Diego, and finally Indio. A dramatic ending brings a major plot twist. Yet for me the locales of the plot are the most interesting aspect of the novel: my family and I have lived in San Diego for 35 years, and Death Valley is one of our most favorite locations: it is the place where we used to camp each spring for many, many years. The author manages to convey the sense of locations that I know so well.

While the events happen fast the story is structured along predictable patterns and the reader will certainly anticipate some plot turns. One can find many cliché passages like:

"The explosion rocked them both. Shock is one of the hardest things to fake; the open mouths and staring eyes were genuine."

(How does the author know that they were genuine?) One will also find inexplicably numerous references to powerful Carl Zeiss 7X50 binoculars. I wonder why the website address where to buy the product is not provided. On the other hand, the beautiful cover picture showing the desolate yet magnificent stretch of California Highway 127 is worth mentioning.

A good read despite clichés and commercials.

Three stars.




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The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around us to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves."

The Sense of an Ending is my first novel by Julian Barnes and it looks like I have found another favorite author. I agree with the critical acclaim and the prestigious Man Booker Prize the book received in 2011. Sense is a literary masterpiece: an extremely well written, serious, mature novel by an author who knows people and understands human nature. I am exhilarated by the fact that the book is so short and yet so deep and complete. On mere 170 pages of simple, lucid prose the author manages to say everything that he wants to say and does not waste even a single word for any extraneous stuff.

Tony, the narrator, now in his 60s, describes his youth in the 1960s. During his university studies Tony dates Veronica: he spends one weekend at her parents' house and the account of that humiliating weekend is one of narrative high points of the novel. Tony and Veronica eventually break with each other. The narrator quickly goes over the intervening years of Tony's life and brings us to the 2000s. A letter from a firm of solicitors sharply brings into the present the 40-year-old past that Tony has now to confront: the time warp experience deeply affects him. The dramatic scene of the near-denouement is unforgettable and - along with the "weekend in the 1960s" - forms an extraordinary narrative axis of the story.

Ostensibly the novel tells a cleverly constructed and compellingly interesting story, but the book really is about vagaries and unreliability of human memory. We think we remember the past but we really only remember our memories of the past, memories that we have perhaps unconsciously created. In this sense Mr. Barnes' novel is a wonderful complement to J.M. Coetzee's The Good Story (which I have just reviewed here), where Mr. Coetzee explains how we create our past rather than actually remember it, how our memories are reconstructions rather than reproductions. Moreover, I love the Mr. Barnes' insights about the elusiveness of psychological truth and - even more so - about the elusiveness of reality whose perception is always filtered through the story of ourselves that we have created.

And the wonderful ambiguity of the title! One could argue for three completely different interpretations of the word 'sense' in the title: Sense as in 'making sense'? Or sense as perception or feeling? Or sense as the 'meaning of'. If the latter, then the author is playfully self-referential, in the best post-modern style. I sincerely hope that the ambiguity was the author's goal and that we will never know what he "really meant."

Why am I rounding the 4.5-rating down for this extraordinary book? My criticism relates to the sense of the ending. I find the ending too 'neat', too 'reader-friendly', too 'perfect'. To me, the ending makes too much sense. I love not to be told everything at the end of a novel because I prefer to live with my vision of the sense of the book and I do not need an "official version"! Also, I find it ironic that the author seems to negate his own message: he who tells us that we do not really know our past eventually tells us what the past really was. Or does he?

Regardless of my picky criticisms, I enthusiastically recommend this adult, mature novel. Another wonderful quote that will strongly resonate with people of certain age follows the rating.

Four and a half stars.

"What did I know of life, I who lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realized? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels?"



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Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"No, Archie. It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust to inertia. It is the greatest force in the world."

Just a few days ago I re-read and reviewed here A Family Affair , the last book in the Nero Wolfe series, published in 1975. It seemed interesting to re-read the very first installment in the series Fer-de-Lance (1933). The time now is quite appropriate as the series that includes 46 novels and sets of novellas spans 42 years in the middle of the 20th century, and it is now exactly 42 years since the last novel was published in 1975.

May 1933. Prohibition has just been effectively repealed and Nero Wolfe decides to give up the bootleg beer and is looking into the legal 3.2 beer trying to find something potable. Fred Durkin, one of Wolfe's men, comes to ask the detective for help as the brother of his wife's friend has disappeared. The obese genius of crime solving is goaded into taking the case when the connection between the missing man and the murder of Mr. Barstow, the president of Holland University, is discovered. Mrs. Barstow offers a $50,000 reward for information leading to discovery and punishment of her husband's murderer (the amount would be equivalent to almost $1 million currently). No wonder that Wolfe and of course the narrator, the intrepid Archie Goodwin try very hard to find the guilty party.

Aided by Goodwin and others, Wolfe succeeds in solving the crime, and the ingenious plot involves several interesting and uncommon elements, like offering a bet to a law enforcement official about results of an autopsy, the biomechanics of golf, the Bothrops atrox species, and some aviation-related passages. While both Mr. Wolfe and Archie already exhibit most of their characteristic personas, they are not exactly the same as in the later novels. Yes, Mr. Wolfe is unbearably condescending, but much less pompous. Archie is rather crude, not as refined and debonair as in the later books. Well, people do change. Of course, actual people would change much more over the period of 42 years, but in the Nero Wolfe world "literary time" only a few years have passed between 1933 and 1975. I like the character of Sarah Barstow - the most colorful and well-drawn in this novel.

My experiment with comparing the 1933 Nero Wolfe time with that of 1975 has been rather inconclusive, but I definitely feel that more time elapsed between 1933 and 1975 than between 1975 and 2017. It is probably related to the fact that I was born closer to the first than the second date. On the other hand it is so satisfying to read about the world not only without Internet but also without TV. It was so much more difficult to enslave minds of millions of people in the olden days! Radio was virtually the only tool of mind control.

Fer-de-Lance is very far from the excellence of Murder by the Book but it is quite readable and feels much less dated than its mature age of 84 years would suggest.

Two and three quarter stars.



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Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych by Olga Tokarczuk

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"[...] I think that the purpose of human mind is to defend us from seeing the truth. [...] The mind is our defense system [... otherwise] we would not be able to bear the knowledge. Because every particle of the world, even the smallest one, consists of suffering." (my own translation)

Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych (Run Your Plow Through the Bones of the Dead, as Google translates the title) is a 2009 novel by one of the most prominent Polish writers, Olga Tokarczuk. Although Ms. Tokarczuk's books have been widely translated into many languages, English version of this novel has not yet appeared; I am sure it is just a matter of time. I am writing this review in English as a recommendation for future readers.

This is a unique work in Ms. Tokarczuk's literary opus generally perceived as "serious and heavy" as it usually deals with topics such as the cultural and national identity. This novel is written in a detective story convention and can be considered a murder mystery: a "morality thriller," screams a blurb on the cover. Of course the mystery is the least important aspect of the novel.

Janina, a retired civil engineer and teacher, lives in a mountain valley in southwestern Poland. She fills her retirement taking care of neighbors houses in their absence and has two major hobbies: astrology with which her preoccupation borders on insanity (e.g., she ruminates how the configuration of planets influences schedule of TV programs) and translating poems by William Blake, where she is more mainstream, and successful too.

But her main trait is the respect and care for our "lesser brothers and sisters" - the animals. In a touching stylistic device the author uses capitalization when talking about the Animals so we have Hares, Badgers, and Deer. Janina greatly suffers when she sees the Animals suffering and dying. When several mysterious deaths occur among local hunters and poachers she is convinced that the Animals are exacting their revenge on people who torment, torture, and kill them.

To me killing animals for fun and entertainment is also an outrage and I find the fascination with guns and killing one of the basest (hu)man instincts; in the so-called grown-up men it is a relic of infantile mentality and a sign of insecurity. What fun do these men - and sometimes even women, the givers of life - find in killing defenseless animals with high-precision rifles and sophisticated mechanical traps? I share the author's repulsion at killing animals as a social ritual, a barbaric relic of the past. The author viciously ridicules the participation of Catholic clergy in blessing of hunters. I would like to remind the words of Pope Francis from Laudato Si':

"[...] we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures.”

A wonderful book but certainly not for everybody. Despite the dark and heavy themes the novel contains some hilarious passages: after the rating I am enclosing two quotes - in Polish as I do not have the talent to provide an adequate translation - that illustrate the author's sense of humor.

Four and a quarter stars.

"W nazwie 'myśliwy' jest zawarte słowo myśl, co oznacza, że swoje powołanie dbania o ten dar boży, jakim jest przyroda, myśliwi realizują świadomie, rozumnie i roztropnie."

"Zwierzęta powinny rozpierdolić to wszystko w piździec.
- Właśnie tak. Rozjebać w pierdoloną nicość - podchwyciłam, a mężczyźni spojrzeli na mnie ze ździwieniem i szacunkiem."




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