Adam's Rib: A Rocco Schiavone Mystery by Antonio Manzini
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"A man has every season while a woman only has the right to spring."
(Jane Fonda's quote used by Antonio Manzini as the epigraph to his novel.)

Adam's Rib (2014, Italian original) is the second novel in Antonio Manzini's series featuring Rocco Schiavone. Like the previous book, Black Run , I have read it in (very good) Polish translation (Żebro Adama). The plot happens in Aosta in northern Italy, where Rocco Schiavone, a Deputy-Chief of police, has been banished as a result of his unprofessional behavior on the Rome police force. In fact, in this novel we learn the nature of Rocco's misdeed: if one were sympathetic to this type of behavior - I am definitely not - one would euphemistically characterize it as 'violating the law to administer justice.' The reader also learns about painful events from Rocco's personal past.

The plot begins when Irina, a Belarussian emigrant working as a cleaning woman, finds the apartment of her employers burglarized. She alarms the police and Rocco with his cliché sidekick, Italo, find a woman hanged from a chandelier in the bedroom. Various clues point to suicide but Rocco - a phenomenally shrewd detective - obviously knows better and suspects the suicide has been staged. The denouement is really clever and readers who like plot twists will not regret carefully following the story to the very end.

Rocco is as women-crazy as in the previous installment:

"An obviously attractive woman's body was concealed under the drab policewoman uniform. Pity that the overcoat hid her butt, but Rocco had been able to rate it earlier, when she was wearing uniform pants."

Beating suspects during interrogation will probably not endear Rocco to the readers, unless they subscribe to the belief that "suspects are always guilty of whatever they are accused of," in immortal words of Monty Python.

Like in the first book in the series the thread about Rocco's wife, Marina, is to me the best thing in the novel. The prose in this storyline reads authentic and fresh, not as clichéd as in the procedural thread or in descriptions of Rocco's interactions with other people. The affecting exchange between Rocco and a pathologist performing an autopsy caught my attention:

"'I assure you these are wonderful patients - quite calm and uncomplaining.'
'Alberto, they are dead. How could they complain?'
'Maybe not. But if you listen very carefully, sometimes you will hear their quiet pleas to cut their bodies delicately.'"
(This reviewer's translation of Polish translation of the Italian original.)

The author is much more subtle than Rocco, his thug protagonist. It is hard not to like the epigraph quote, either.

Two and three quarter stars.


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Opowiadania bizarne by Olga Tokarczuk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"He has a feeling of strange suspension like in the childhood, when the spaces around him had not yet been filled with meanings and each event seemed unique and nonrecurring."
[My own translation from the short story titled Serce (Heart)]

A few months ago I reviewed Olga Tokarczuk's Run Your Plow Through the Bones of the Dead. The great Polish writer has since received the prestigious International Man Booker Prize for Flights (Polish title Bieguni). I haven't yet read that novel but have received a copy of Tokarczuk's newest book from Poland. As far as I know, the book does not yet have an English title and it is a bit challenging, at least for me, to find a fitting one. In Polish the title is Opowiadania bizarne whose English equivalent would be Bizarre Stories, except that there is no such word in Polish as "bizarne." Ms. Tokarczuk borrowed it directly from French or English, maybe attempting to make the title sound a little peculiar. Anyway.

There are ten stories in this collection and indeed they all are wonderfully 'off-center.' To me they are kind of like literary equivalents of surrealist paintings. Some aspects of the reality that they present - not all! - have been distorted in certain ways. Almost like that famous René Magritte's picture, Time transfixed showing a locomotive, at full steam, jutting out of a fireplace - everything is superbly realistic except for the combination.

Because of my advanced age I passionately love one of the stories, titled Seams (Szwy in Polish). An elderly widower notices one morning that the socks he is putting on his feet have seams along their whole length, from toes, through the instep, to the cuff. He has never seen such socks before. He also notices that the postage stamps are round, there are no pens that write in blue, there is a 0 on the face of the clock instead of 12, etc. Alarmed, he asks a neighbor about his strange discoveries. The woman patiently explains that he must be wrong, there have never been socks without seams, stamps have always been round, things have always been like that and to calm the man's nerves she offers him home-made liqueur. I can imagine hearing the man's terrified scream "Where is my world?" His entire universe of memories is gone. His past is gone. Only his body remains in this world. It would be hard not to shed a tear reading the distressing last paragraph. The emotional impact is almost as strong as in the saddest story about human impermanence I have ever read, The Foxes Come at Night by Cees Nooteboom.

Two other stories get "honorable mentions" from me. In Transfugium Ms. Tokarczuk makes it clear that despite all the advances in technology, human loneliness and suffering is always the same. All Saints Mountain, the longest story in the collection, almost novella-size, is narrated by a renowned psychologist, author of a popular psychological test. Applied to children the test quite accurately predicts the directions of their further development. The psychologist - contracted to use her test on a group of children housed in seclusion in Swiss Alps - is lodged in a convent, serviced by a group of nuns. Ms. Tokarczuk offers gorgeous visuals but the tale makes quite an unexpected detour into religious territory and the author amuses the reader with odd ideas such as 'manufacturing of saints' and trade in holy people's relics.

While some of the other stories do not seem to convey a particular moral or ethical message or alert the reader to the world's injustices and bleakness of human condition they demonstrate the power of literature in building surrealistic yet internally consistent worlds in the stories.

Three-and-three-quarter stars.


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Black Run by Antonio Manzini
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] came back with a bottle of gin and two glasses.
'Is it true that policemen on duty do not drink?'
'Yes', Rocco answered and poured himself a drink."

Ha ha. By the way, how does one translate a sarcastic emoji into written English? Black Run (2013) is my first novel by Antonio Manzini, the Italian author compared, among others, to Andrea Camilleri, Donna Leon, and Henning Mankell. I have read the book in Polish translation (Czarna Trasa). The blurb on the cover enthuses over the author's mastery in creating an "amazing" protagonist. Unfortunately, as usual I disagree with the blurb: if anything is amazing it would be the degree of psychological implausibility of the portrayal. Yet, the criminal plot is indeed interesting and the reader will find some amusing observations of the Italian society.

As a result of unspecified past misdeeds Rocco Schiavone, a police Deputy-Chief from Rome, has been transferred - "banished" would be a better word - to Aosta in Northern Italy. The plot begins with a body of a man, badly mangled by a snow groomer, found on a ski slope near the alpine resort of Champoluc. The investigation poses quite a challenge for Rocco: he does not understand the local culture in this mountain village where all inhabitants seem to be related to each other. His progress is hindered by ineptitude of lower-level police officers and micromanaging meddling by his superiors; the only help he receives comes from a cliché sidekick, a young, locally-born police inspector, Italo Pierron. Despite all obstacles Rocco solves the case: in a cleverly designed denouement he provides a stage for the guilty party to be revealed.

There are several other threads in the novel, parallel to the rather standard police procedural story. When Rocco learns from his friends on the police force about an incoming transport of marijuana he enlists his sidekick Pierron to seize the load; the thread has a rather surprising ending. Rocco's love for his wife is a separate story, which I find quite touching, even if it is printed in italics.

The Italian male author seems to lampoon the stereotypes of an Italian male: to use a euphemism, Deputy-Chief Schiavone considers every encountered woman a sexual target. Is it satire, though, or perhaps just a sociological observation?

Rocco is a truly unconventional policeman. In addition to his unspecified past misdeeds he has a custom of hitting suspects during interrogation, following the rule established by Monty Python: "if he is a suspect, he must be guilty." Moreover, the author does not avoid one of the most common clichés of the detective genre: a detective must have one strange characteristic. Rocco cares deeply about his shoes. Clarks shoes are mentioned many times. Was the author paid by the company?

All in all, a marginally recommended read, mainly because of the affecting thread about Rocco's wife.

Two and three quarter stars.

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J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event by Derek Attridge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The argument I am making has two levels. First, I want to suggest that all engagements with literary works [...] benefit from what I have been calling a literal reading: a reading that defers the many interpretive moves that we are accustomed to making in our dealings with literature, whether historical, biographical, psychological, moral, or political."

Besides Cees Nooteboom, J. M. Coetzee is my most favorite writer. I have already reviewed 20 of his works here on Goodreads and rated six of them with five stars, among them incontrovertible masterpieces such as Disgrace , Waiting for the Barbarians , or Boyhood . No wonder then that I have been quite eager to read a monograph on Coetzee's opus. Derek Attridge, the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004), is a renowned literary scholar; the book is an advanced-level study in the theory of literature, a scholarly work rather than a biography or an analysis of literary themes or techniques. The difficult text requires total focus and concentration from the reader: it has taken me almost 20 hours to read the 200-page volume.

It would take me probably 40 hours to write a full-fledged review of this extremely demanding work so I will only refer to a few of the topics examined in the book. The epigraph points to one of the main emphases: the author defends literal reading of a literary work of art. Literal as opposed to allegorical that takes "the literal meaning of the text to be a pathway to some other, more important meaning." I found Chapter Two, titled Against Allegory, particularly fascinating, with its discussion of allegory, allegorization, and the experience of allegoricity. Dr. Attridge mentions Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation which, according to Attridge, is

"a protest against all commentary implying that the point of an art-work is to say something.

The topic interests me a lot - also, I am probably biased in favor of the author's argument - as I read literature mainly to experience it as an art form. I read books to enjoy the writing and be awed by magnificent prose. I am not that interested in the stories conveyed in books and I am certainly not interested in literature as a vehicle for social advocacy. For me the form trumps (excuse me!) the message.

Another major topic of Dr. Attridge's study, in fact related to allegoricity in literature, is the criticism that J.M. Coetzee frequently faces for avoiding immediate references to political situation in his country, South Africa. (Without the politically correct Newspeak one could rephrase the previous sentence: Mr. Coetzee has been criticized for supposedly not being a forceful enough opponent of apartheid in his country.) Dr. Attridge points out that Coetzee's novels are about human condition in general, that they deal with universal moral and aesthetic values as opposed to contingent propaganda about particular political situation.

Chapter Four focuses on Coetzee's Age of Iron - in my view a much underappreciated novel - and Mr. Attridge points out Coetzee's understanding of the dichotomy between the "ethical" and "the political" and his alignment with the former. The fascinating relationship between Mrs. Curren and Vercueil from that novel is deeply immersed in the "universal humanness."

The Epilogue titled A Writer's Life focuses on the fictional character of Elizabeth Costello and her lectures. In the 2000s J.M. Coetzee tended to challenge his audiences during his speeches and public lectures with self-referential presentations that completely mixed the so-called "fact" and so-called "fiction." For instance, at a Nexus Conference on "Evil" that was held in Holland, he offered a fictional account of Elizabeth Costello's participation in a conference held in Holland on the question of evil.

Many more enthralling topics in this monograph await the reader; despite the advanced level of this work I strongly recommend it to anybody interested in Mr. Coetzee's opus.

Four stars.


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California Girl by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"'Listen to me, Nick. Everything we thought about Janelle Vonn was wrong.'"

San Clemente, California, summer 2004. 66-year-old Nick Becker meets his four years younger brother. "An old cop and an old reporter." Andy tells Nick, the cop, that they did not know the truth about momentous events that happened in 1968. This is a wonderful setup of a wonderful novel. T. Jefferson Parker's California Girl deservedly received the Edgar Award for the Best Novel in 2005. To me it is one of the best mysteries I have ever read. Not only is it a first-rate crime novel but also a great book about the 1960s Southern California. For once I have to agree with the blurb on the cover which screams "A gripping, atmospheric saga... An unforgettable book." Indeed. If not for the slightly bungled ending I might have even considered the extremely rare maximum rating.

The novel tells the story of the four Becker brothers whose lives were forever intertwined with the lives of the Vonns - three brothers, two younger sisters, one of them Janelle. We meet the kids in 1954, next to a packinghouse in Tustin, California, as the boys fight - the Beckers versus the Vonns - and the girls watch the fight. A powerful, unforgettable scene! Next, the author takes us to 1960 and then 1963 to portray the lives of orange growers community around Tustin, a sort of microcosm of Southern California. Evocative and masterfully written passages capture the sense of the times and make the readers feel they were present to witness the events.

Most of the plot happens in October 1968 when Nick is a freshly minted Homicide Detective in the Laguna PD and catches his first case. Andy is a newspaperman on an Orange County paper. Vietnam War rages in the background. The cultural revolution of the late 1960s has already begun. Real people from these tumultuous times - Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon, Charles Manson - appear on the pages, seamlessly woven into the tangle of fictitious events.

Several passages in the book will impress the readers with their realism and depth of psychological and sociological observation. Reverend Becker, one of the four brothers, is getting blackmailed by an FBI agent who wants him to become the agency's informant about the budding labor movement in California. In an arts store in Laguna Dr. Leary talks about "Coming Together in the Psychedelic Age," toiling on his signature task of expanding consciousness. The conversation between Reverend Becker and a "televangelism guru" exposes the unavoidable entanglement of religion and business.

I believe one of the reasons why the novel is so believable and compelling is that the author worked in his youth as a journalist for several Orange County papers, like The Newport Ensign. It's not difficult to guess that Mr. Parker writes about himself when, as Andy, he says

"All he ever wanted to do was write a decent book someday and stick by the people he loved. Not accomplishing either of those, he thought."

Well, Mr. Parker has certainly accomplished the first goal. California Girl is way more than just a decent book. If not for the overwrought ending, with its truly idiotic gimmick, it would be quite close to a great California novel.

Four stars.

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John Coltrane by Bill Cole
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"... I want to be a force for real good... I know that there are bad forces, forces put here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the force which is truly for good."
(John Coltrane, as quoted by Frank Kofsky

John Coltrane, one of the greatest artists in history, creator of many pieces of music of unparalleled beauty, compositions that transcend the usual human limitations and have inspired thousands and thousands of listeners to be forces for good as Coltrane himself set out to be, deserves a better biography than Bill Cole's John Coltrane (1976). This is a horribly dated book, full of obsolete New Age claptrap and pseudo-intellectual gibberish, stuffy, pretentious, and hardly readable. It avoids the bottom rating from me only because it contains quite a lot of musicological theory ruminations and being a complete dummy in this area I have to give the author the benefit of the doubt: at least in the theory of music he may be saying something worthwhile. I trust that when he writes about "vertical" (chordal) vs. "horizontal" (melodical) playing, he knows what he is writing about.

The first sentence of the Preface is quite promising:

"There are two things in particular that I would like to get at in this book: John Coltrane as a musician, and John Coltrane as a religious person."

But then, already on page 15, the reader is offered a diagram of four concentric circles that represent the "four worlds of the traditional man," the worlds of "Action," "Formulation," "Creation," and - wow - "Emanation." Even worse, on the next page the author begins to quote fragments of research works by Fela Sowande who treats us with such groundbreaking concepts as John Coltrane's "western lobe or the intellectual side of [...] brain" as opposed to "eastern lobe or the intuitive side."

The author continues quoting Sowande all the way through the entire book. We have to suffer the New Age mumbo-jumbo on "central energy" (the "life force" in Coltrane's music), on intuition vs. intellect, moving from Zodiac period of Pisces to the Aquarian period, and - that's a good one - masculine vs. feminine elements of Coltrane's mind and how his compositions depend on their proportions. The gibberish reaches its apex in Sowande's diagram (page 158) that supposedly illustrates "how art is connected with will, content, form, idea, and imagination."

The reader gets all this blather instead of a portrait of John Coltrane, a great artist and true innovator of contemporary music. Since the book is a reworking of the author's doctoral thesis I suspect that Mr. Sowande was on the committee that decided whether Mr. Cole would be granted a PhD degree. Alice Coltrane's short yet wonderful quote that opens Chapter 17 adds more to the text than all passages by Sowande combined.

Another telling detail is that the author heavily praises Om, a late album recorded in 1965, called by many critics the worst album in the composer's career (Coltrane himself seemed to be ashamed of that work and did not want the album to go public - it was released only posthumously). Mr. Cole writes more about Om, a piece of heavily dated curia, than about, for instance, one of Coltrane's masterpieces, Transition.

At least the author has enough common sense to dwell on how unique in the history of music John Coltrane's so-called "classic quartet" was. How the four great instrumentalists composed a unit that far transcended the sum of their individual talents.

Two stars.

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The Fallen by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Although we call ourselves America's Finest City, there is a long tradition of collusion and corruption here in San Diego. Some of it once reached high enough to taint American presidency - Richard Nixon's. Some of it is low and squalid and oddly funny - a mayor in bed with a swindler, councilmen taking bribes from strip-club owners [...]"

I have been a San Diegan since January 1983 so I love reading books that convey the locales, moods, and feel of this beautiful city. T. Jefferson Parker's The Fallen (2006) does that very well. This is a re-read: I am coming back to the novel after about 11 years and liking it a little less than I had then, but I still think it is an outstanding police procedural with a touch of psychological crime drama.

The set-up is outstanding. During a hotel fire Detective Brownlaw attempts to save people trapped in their rooms but a man whom he tries to help throws him out of the hotel window. Thanks to falling on an awning over the hotel entrance Brownlaw survives, just barely, and after a long rehabilitation returns to work. The accident causes him to acquire synesthesia, a neurological condition that produces responses in a different sensory path than the one from which the stimuli come. He sees people voices as colored shapes.

The body of an Internal Affairs cop, who has recently been working for the Ethics Authority Enforcement unit, is found in his car near Cabrillo Bridge in Balboa Park. The cop has been shot at close range. Det. Brownlaw and his partner, McKenzie Cortez, are assigned the case. Virtually each step forward they make in their inquiry widens the scope of the investigation. For instance, the detectives discover a high-class prostitution ring whose clients include top officials from the city government and police force.

The author convincingly shows the deadly embrace between money and government. Elected politicians, city bureaucrats, commissioners, police captains and other notables are involved in elaborate and interlocking schemes of corruption that bring them money, power, and sex with beautiful young women. The corruption schemes increase their chances to win congressional or state assembly or senate seats that will allow them to get even more money, power and sex. Obviously, corruption is the engine that makes world go 'round and occurs whereever people lust for money, power, and sex - meaning everywhere. In this novel the corruption schemes involve underfunding city employees pension fund and tinkering with municipal bond ratings - this is clearly based on factual material; I remember reading about such schemes in the local paper.

The procedural thread in the novel is first-rate but the characterizations of the protagonists - the "good guys," meaning the detectives - lack strength, though. Particularly the portrayal of Det. Cortez is paper-thin and does not read as a real person; the entire thread of her affair with a hi-tech entrepreneur lacks plausibility.

When I read the novel 11 years ago I liked the synesthesia thread. Not any more. I mean synesthesia is obviously a real and fascinating phenomenon (for instance, Nabokov writes about it in Speak, Memory, see the review ), but here the author uses it as a cheap literary device - a lie detector. Uh-oh. Not good.

"The red squares of deception rushed out of him. They were bigger than most I'd seen, and their sides were slightly dipped, concave, [...]"

In 2006 I would have rated the novel with over four stars. Now it is just

Three-and-three-quarter stars.


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Annapurna South Face: The Classic Account of Survival by Chris Bonington
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Our ascent of Annapurna was a breakthrough into a new dimension of Himalayan climbing on the great walls of the highest mountains of the world - this represents the start of an era, not an end. Climbers will turn to other great faces, will perhaps try to reduce the size of the party, escape from the heavy siege tactics that we were forced to employ and make lightweight assaults against these huge mountain problems."

There is only one degree of separation between the author of the book, the famous British mountaineer and adventure writer, Chris Bonington, and myself. He had once made a difficult route in Alps partnering with Jan Wolf, a Polish climber and a friend of mine with whom I worked for four years in the same office in the late 1970s and early 1980s (more about it in this review ) I remember Jan Wolf making fun of Bonington smoking cigarettes while climbing at very high altitude. Anyway, it is not because of the personal connection that I like Annapurna South Face (1971) so much. To me it is the best book about a mountaineering expedition out of about 40 that I have read.

The 1970 Annapurna expedition opened a new chapter in the history of Himalayan mountaineering. Earlier expeditions had aimed at reaching the top using the route that promised the greatest chances of getting there. This is the first major expedition that purposefully selected one of the most difficult routes to the summit. Yet from the organizational point of view the assault resembled previous Himalayan endeavors: it was a monumental logistic undertaking. Let me quote just one number - the total of 240 porters were employed to carry the expedition loads.

Ironically, some of the major difficulties had been encountered before the entire team reached Nepal. Numerous delays caused by unexpected events almost made it impossible to reach the base of the mountain before the beginning of the monsoon season. The account of how Mr. Bonington had to deal with the delays and improvised temporary solutions reads as a suspense story.

The story of the climb itself is plenty suspenseful as well. The logistics of rotation of the climbers' teams to transport loads between the camps (base and six altitude camps) was a monumental task for Mr. Bonington. He writes about the most difficult decision he had to make: which pair of climbers to put in front at the time most opportune for the summit push. He sacrificed the principle of fairness to increased chance of success. And succeed he did. Dougal Haston, one of the two climbers who had made the summit, wrote the chapter recounting the actual summit push.

From 2018 perspective it might seem incredible that many members of the expedition smoked cigarettes at high altitude:

"Mick had a passion for Gauloises and had brought 7,000 with him, most of which he managed to smoke himself."

Truly impressive! Most of us, readers, would have extreme difficulty breathing at all at these altitudes while the extreme sportsmen on Bonington's team smoked several packs a day!

The author provides 108 pages of appendices with detailed statistics of the expedition: data about equipment, bottled oxygen, food, communications, photography, medical issues, and also a nice section on people of Nepal. An informative supplement to the extremely captivating book.

Four stars.

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