Savages by Bill Pronzini
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Other marks were visible on the wrists and arms. Rodent bites. That was what he'd been trying to fight off in his delirium... rats, mice, attracted by the blood, making sharp-toothed forays in the dark."

Well, I've had it for late installments in Pronzini's famous series about the detective who should be called "Unnamed" rather than "Nameless." I am not interested in the soap-opera-style continuity of events in the lives of Kerry, Tamara, Jack Runyon, and other companions of Mr. Unnamed. The early books in the series had more of the "one off" flavor, which I definitely prefer. Alas, they are more difficult to find.

Mr. Unnamed has a repeat client: four years ago he was hired by a woman whose sister had been planning to marry a rising software industry executive. The woman requested a detailed background check on the guy whom she considered ruthless, pathologically ambitious, and interested only in her sister's money. At that time the detective did not find any dark spots in the man's past, and the couple got married. Now, however, the woman's sister died in a fall, and she is convinced that the husband did it.

Meanwhile Jack Runyon - the "Nameless" novels seem to become more about him - is trying to deliver a subpoena to a man in a small town in Northern California. While the subpoena target is nowhere to be found Mr. Runyon discovers a dead man hung from a crossbeam in a barn.

The two threads proceed in parallel and perhaps the most interesting mystery for the reader is whether they will merge at the end. There are some pretty lame scenes in the novel, for instance the bad comedy of two cops interrogating Runyon: the reader can't be sure whether the comedic elements have been intended by the author or are inadvertent results of his sloppy prose. Deputy Kelso is a caricature of a policeman. On the other hand, the denouement is quite surprising and I very much like the last page of the novel.

Considering that the novel was published in 2007 it is hard not to like the following passage:

"Profits up fifteen percent [...], expansion plans in the works, looks like they're going public pretty soon. Another Donald Trump in the making."

But, all in all, this is not a very good novel, and it is hard to recommend.

Two-and-a-quarter stars.


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Bach by Martin Geck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] a modern composer who wanted to explore the realm of music in every direction must make his own laws and be ready, instead of using the simple numerical series denoting the oscillating relationships of the overtone series 1:2:3:4:5, and so on, to turn to the irrational number √2 in order to divide the octave, with strict rationality, into 12 equal but no longer 'natural' semitones."

This year we are celebrating the 333rd anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's birth. As a matter of fact, when I was reading Martin Geck's book Bach it has been almost exactly 333.33 years since the most eminent composer of all times was born. Exactly a third of a millennium! Bach's music today is as relevant and as contemporary as it was 300 years ago. To me, a quasi-mathematician, the timeless nature of Bach's music, the fact that it always sounds fresh and not dated, is the result of it having deep mathematical structure. Bach's music transcends the conventions of the times when it was written and - again, to me - is abstract rather than figurative. Exactly like mathematics, which abstracts from limitations imposed by the real world.

Geck's book is a rather standard-style biography: it outlines the major events in Bach's life and intersperses the chronology with analysis of the music composed in the corresponding periods. The biography's volume is very modest, just about 170 pages, including various appendices, yet readers unfamiliar with Bach's life will learn a lot from it. We read about the composer's schooling, his first professional post in the Neukirche in Arnstadt, and the following sequence of gradually more important and prestigious jobs - court organist and Konzertmeister in Weimar, Kapellmeister and Director of Chamber Music on Prince Leopold's court in Köthen, and Kantor at St Thomas's in Leipzig.

The reader may be amused by tidbits about Bach's presumed insubordination "at the office": one time he was reprimanded for playing too long, the other for overstaying his leave. In Weimar he was in fact confined to detention "for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal." I found the syllabus of his prima class in Lüneburg the most interesting: the boy had to study: Latin grammar, theology, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, and versification. No wonder the students were better educated in 1700 than in today's high schools.

As a total layperson in music I will not attempt to analyze the author's discussion of various compositions by J.S. Bach but it certainly felt great to read about some of my most beloved music like Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin (to me some of the most "abstract", in mathematical sense, art ever created), preludes and fugues from Well-Tempered Clavier, violin concertos, and both Passions (St Matthew and St John).

I actively disliked the author's commentary to his own text, where - instead of traditional footnotes - he uses text boxes, which the publisher printed in annoying red. The inserts break continuity of the text and often obscure the main points. Not to mention that two of the inserts were misplaced (not the author's fault, I suppose).

Three stars.


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Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The sky was a beautiful crystalline blue, as bright as any I had ever seen, but a certain darkness could blot the sky [...] The darkness frightens me, but what it does to us frightens me even more. Maybe this is why I do what I do. I chase the darkness to make room for the light."

About quarter of a century ago I had read Robert Crais' The Monkey's Raincoat and loved the novel. Since I also remember another good book of his, L.A. Requiem, I decided it is time to get reacquainted with the author through some of his newer work. I chose Chasing Darkness published in 2008. Well, it is a great, compulsive read, yet not exactly of the same caliber as the two older novels. I certainly need to re-read them because maybe it was only my immaturity - at barely 40 years of age - that made me love those two books.

The setup of Chasing Darkness is enthralling: fires are raging in the Greater Los Angeles area and police officers assigned to inform residents about the evacuation order make a gruesome discovery: the body of a man who apparently killed himself. Between his feet they find a photo album, entitled My happy memories. The album contains horrifying pictures of several women, victims of brutal murders. Everything points out to the murderer reliving his thrills before committing suicide. Well, Elvis Cole assisted by his awesome sidekick, Joe Pike, will find the truth.

From Mr. Crais' two early books I remember Joe Pike as a purely cliché character: infinitely honest, infinitely macho, and invincible. He would defeat the whole battalion of Supermen and the entire army of Chuck Norrises just by lifting the little finger of his left hand. Luckily, in Darkness we do not need to deal much with his invincibility. Elvis Cole, a human-like character with all his faults and a good sense of humor, is clearly the protagonist.

Mr. Crais' writing reads more like screenplay for a movie rather than a full-fledged novel: the characters lack inner complexity and are shown through the prism of their single defining feature, but since we know this is not supposed to be a realistic narrative but rather one that implements a convention, the deficiency does not matter much. For example, in one of the first scenes two police officers visit Cole and Pike and the entire situation is a desperately silly macho game of trying to outcool and outmasculine each other. I do not believe readers can take any of this seriously so the scene has its comedic value (I tend to visualize macho characters doing their macho things almost naked, wearing only incontinence diapers).

Despite the laughable masculine clichés and screenplay-like feel this is quite a good novel. Mr. Crais paints a realistic thus grim portrait of city politics and scumbag city politicians. I also like the cynical thus truthful commentary on the role of attorneys in a criminal trial - the role that is not much about law and certainly not about justice. Many readers will probably like the major twist in the denouement. Overall a good read and a positive recommendation from me.

Three and a half stars.


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Spirit Catcher: The Life and Art of John Coltrane by John Fraim
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Like many members of my generation I gauge the climate of the times by the music created. Once the music meant something but now that time is past. Now it seems forced on us solely for the profit of record companies."

I belong to the generation for whose members music indeed meant something. My youth happened in the 1960s and music - rock, jazz, or avant-garde - meant everything to me: it captured the zeitgeist and embodied the spirit of rebellion, the feeling of the great social and cultural change about to happen. Even now the music that I love (works by J.S. Bach, John Coltrane, and many others) is one of the most important aspects of my self-identity. To my 20-year-old students in 2018 the sole function of music is to provide entertainment and when asked what music they like they will likely answer "whatever they play on the radio." I am not being judgmental: it's simply that the times they are a'changing.

John Fraim's Spirit Catcher. The Life and Art of John Coltrane (1996) is the fifth biography of John Coltrane that I am reviewing here on Goodreads (the links to my four previous reviews are listed at the bottom). Alas it is not one of the better ones, although it does have good points other than the wonderful quote shown above about what music means to different generations. There is the intriguing story of the mysterious "drone sound" that Coltrane heard in his dream when he was kicking his heroin habit in 1957:

"[...] the search for the mysterious sound began. It was a search that would continue throughout his life and would cause him to create some of his most intense and emotional music."

The reader will find a very interesting passage about chaos vs. order:

"For those two great forces in jazz and life, order and chaos, now waged their greatest battle [...] inside the spirit of John Coltrane."

Readers more fluent in the analysis of music than this reviewer may be interested in the author's claim that the first signs of the 'Coltrane sound' may be heard on Kind of Blue, the famous album recorded by Miles Davis group with John Coltrane. Perhaps the most interesting is the author's suggestion that the interplay between John Coltrane and Elvin Jones (the drummer in the classic Coltrane quartet) on My Favorite Things is a harbinger of Coltrane's future interest in free jazz - a suggestion which on the face of it seems farthest from reality in such a melodic work as My Favorite Things.

The author is unusually fond of metaphors which tend to obfuscate rather than emphasize the points he makes. For instance, on one page we read "punches out at the listener in one of the strongest jolts of musical electricity that Coltrane would ever record," and then "pounds away at the listener like the surf of some great ocean." But the elaborate phrase on page 173 wins the Most Pretentious Metaphor contest:

"What remains is a sparse, wintry sound which stands against nature's forces like a stately old Victorian mansion along the treeless Mendocino coast of northern California."

I also found a factual error in the book: Eric Dolphy did not die of "coronary problems" but of diabetic condition. And the correct name of the Jefferson Airplane singer (misspelled on page 180) is Grace Slick. I recommend the book, alas with little enthusiasm.

Three stars.

Ascension by Eric Nisenson: a great, great book!
John Coltrane by Bill Cole: not worth the effort.
Coltrane. The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff: good book!
John Coltrane. His Life and Music by Lewis Porter: a definitive biography by a Coltrane scholar.



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Mourners by Bill Pronzini
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"[...] his strange pattern of conduct had escalated at about the same time as the murder. It could be a coincidence, of course. It could also be that the crime has somehow triggered his mourner obsession, dormant or subdued in him since his childhood trauma."

Mourners (2006) is the 33rd book (by my own, obviously incorrect count) in the famous series featuring the unnamed detective. I definitely prefer much earlier novels in the series: they do not have the feel of a literary soap opera where in each installment we meet the same characters and participate in their everyday lives and emotional relationships. To paraphrase the famous proverb, I believe that "familiarity breeds boredom." I would much prefer the consecutive novels to be stripped of the characters of Kerry, Tamara, and Jake Runyon, or at least - if the author wants to mention them - have their appearances reduced to incidental. Obviously, my preferences are not in the mainstream.

The detective watches Mr. Troxell, a well-off financial consultant, attend a funeral in the Bay Area. Just the day before Troxell watched two other funerals. The detective has been hired by the fervent mourner's wife, alarmed by significant changes in her husband's behavior. We learn that Troxell underwent a deeply traumatic experience in his childhood. The setup of the novel is promising and I hoped that Pronzini would display his usual solid handling of the story.

The plot indeed becomes quite interesting when Troxell is seen in a cemetery placing a wreath on the grave of a woman who had recently been a victim of rape and murder. Naturally, the investigation focuses on exploring possible connections. Alas, Mr. Pronzini decides to switch to the soap opera mode and the reader is treated to several side threads. Two of them feature Kerry (the detective's wife) and Jack Runyon (an operative in the detective's firm) both of whom face really serious life problems. In another thread, written in a slightly comedic mood, we follow the tribulations of Tamara (the de facto boss in the detective's firm), who seems to have been dumped by her boyfriend. There are references to Kerry's distant past and the detective has a failed "birds-and-bees" conversation with his daughter. Readers who thrive on conceptual continuity of novels in a series will love this stuff.

Luckily for me, the denouement avoids sharp twists and turns, yet it might be the reason that it feels too anticlimactic. I intensely dislike two items in the novel. While the whole Russ Dancer's thread is annoyingly cliché the gratuitous inclusion of Tamara's incident with Mr. Clement is even worse - it would take a much better writer to successfully pull it off.

I have one more of the new installments of the series on my shelf, but then I will return to the older ones. Reading about the same characters over and over again, may be a harmless way of spending time but I prefer to spend it with a new set of characters in each book.

Two stars.

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Ascension: John Coltrane And His Quest by Eric Nisenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"[...] the more one listens to Transition the more one hears a diamond-hard beauty unlike anything else in music. That something so roiling can also have such beauty is one of the paradoxes of Coltrane's art. A lot of great twentieth-century art, since it reflects its time, seems to confront and challenge its audience: Guernica, Finnegans Wake, The Rite of Spring. Like those modern masterpieces, much of Coltrane's work [...] has a modern grandeur unlike anything that has come before it.

Just last month I reviewed here Bill Cole's John Coltrane - a pseudo-research book full of New Age mumbo-jumbo and Fela Sowande's gibberish - which escaped the minimum rating on the strength of possibly interesting musicological analysis. Since I love John Coltrane's music and unreservedly admire what he stood for and what he tried to achieve in his art, I had to erase the anger caused by Mr. Cole's painful failure of a biography. In the ultimate contrast Eric Nisenson's work, Ascension. John Coltrane and His Quest is a totally wonderful book - deep, balanced, thoughtful, and focused.

I vividly remember the day (in 1966, I believe) when I first heard John Coltrane's music: I can see the room in my mother's small apartment when suddenly manic saxophone shrieks and wails came on the radio, immediately followed by utterly beautiful music. I remember my total fascination with the sound and with the raw power and deep passion of the music. Eric Nisenson begins his wonderful biography with an account how he first saw and heard John Coltrane live with his classic quartet (McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Jimmy Garrison) at the Half Note:

"Coltrane [...] played roiling arpeggios alternating with ribbons of intense lyricism often accentuated by saxophone cries and wails. [...] He seemed to be not in this world, and I, as well as most of the audience, [...] felt we had long left it far behind, too. [...] My body felt exhilaration, transport, even as much as my mind and spirit."

The story of Coltrane's life and his music is told traditionally, in a chronological manner. The author focuses in more detail on transcendent and timeless masterpieces in Coltrane's opus, such as A Love Supreme or Transition. Mr. Nisenson has the courage to call out failures as well, such as the audacious yet unsuccessful attempt to enter the realm of free jazz, Ascension or the bizarre artifact of the Sixties, Om.

The passages about A Love Supreme are some of the most compelling writings about music:

"[...] the last section on A Love Supreme [...] creates the impression of perfect stillness, like a man on his knees with his head bowed. It is utterly radiant and transcendent, at times pleading, almost sobbing in its need to be with God. It is one of the few works of art that, like the Sistine Chapel or Chartres Cathedral or Bach's St. Matthew's Passion is itself a religious experience."

The subtitle of the biography refers to Coltrane's quest, which - as most music critics agree - was the "quest to reach and find God through seeking within." Yet the author is careful to explain that Coltrane was not worshipping any particular God but rather "a personal synthesis of [...] ideas basic to all religions," Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and others. Mr. Nisenson also points out that Coltrane's quest was more of spiritual than religious nature and that it might have been a search for the universal truth.

Coltrane's personal statements about wanting to be a "force for good," his continual search for that perfect sound, and the fact that never in his career had he made any concession to popular taste or cared what the audiences wanted to listen to tell me that his quest was for the three Transcendentals: Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Certainly not for things that we, mere mortals, crave: Money, Power, and Fame.

A great biography! I will round the rating up.

Four and half stars.


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Sentinels by Bill Pronzini
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"These mountains, they got secrets nobody can find out."

Continuing with my Pronzini Binge I have just read Sentinels (1996), the twenty-fifth installment in the now forty-six-year-old series featuring the Private-Detective-Whose-Last-Name-Is-Never-Mentioned. It is a readable mystery, albeit a completely unremarkable one. It also reminds me of some more recent novels by John Shannon, and not in a good way.

The Detective-With-Unmentionable-Name is hired by a woman whose daughter, Allison, a university junior, disappeared on her way home to Bay Area from Eugene, Oregon. Allison was traveling with a young man, presumably her boyfriend whom she planned to introduce to her mother. They took a scenic way south and their car broke down in Creekside, a little town in the northeastern corner of California. They have not been seen since.

The author has a bit of metafictional fun: the detective refuses to use the services of Sharon McCone, a detective friend of his, who could fly him to the remote part of California in her plane. The funny part is that Ms. McCone is a protagonist of detective novels written by Marcia Muller, who is Mr. Pronzini's wife in real life. Anyway, the detective drives to Creekside and gets to talk to the mechanics in the garage where the car was fixed. He also interviews the owners of a small motel and a waitress in a diner. None of these people know much about the couple and - what's worse - they seem to be quite unwilling to talk to the detective, resenting the Big City intrusion into their rural lives.

While the publisher, for once, partly resisted the urge to spoil the denouement in the blurbs on the cover, a hint is given there, one that makes the solution of the mystery easier to guess. It is indeed difficult to describe the outline of the plot even in vaguest terms without providing automatic spoilers. The readers who enjoy the familiarity of characters populating the plot will no doubt be amused by passages featuring Kerry and Tamara Corbin. The comedic space filler about Kerry's friend, Paula, who picked up a new fad - Alida's workshops on the Holy Sexual Communion - would be quite funny were it not so cliché.

The detective's conversation with one of the main characters that directly precedes the final scene is psychologically naive and implausible. The very last fragment of the novel features the probable topic of the next installment in the series - a Shameless Detective Sequel Plug. All in all, Sentinels is quite a weak entry in the series. The unnamedness gimmick may well be its strongest point.

Two stars.


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Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion"
(Francis Bacon, Essays "Of Beauty", 1625)

Some 50+ years ago I liked to pretend I was way more mature than my fellow teens: I shunned the so-called Young Adult fiction, and read only "grown-up" books. Ever since that time the YA genre has seemed to me simplistic, naive, overly didactic, and generally a waste of time that could be better spent on really heavy stuff by, say, Faulkner and Joyce, or Coetzee and Nooteboom, to mention contemporary authors. So when a student of mine recommended Uglies (2005) by Scott Westerfeld as the best book she has ever read I was a bit skeptical even if I trust that student's judgment a lot. What's more, the novel may be classified as science fiction, which definitely is not my favorite literary genre. Imagine my surprise then, when the book turned out to be well written, intelligent, thought provoking, and compellingly readable. Well, so much for preconceived opinions! I am also happy that there still exists some commonality of worldview between myself and at least some of my students who are now not that far in age from my grandchildren.

The plot happens in the future, several hundred years from now, when our current civilization (we of now are then called "the Rusties") is a thing of the distant and shameful past:

"It was hard to think of the Rusties as actual people, rather than as just an idiotic, dangerous, and sometimes comic force of history."

(Hey, this describes our civilization quite well!) At the age of 16 all young people undergo a prettification operation that transforms their non-standardized - meaning ugly - physiques into perfect body shapes and perfectly beautiful faces. In addition, technology has made such progress that once prettified the young people do not have worry about much - they can focus on having fun.

Tally, the protagonist of the story, is about two months away from the operation. She still lives in Uglyville and one night she sneaks out to New Pretty Town looking for her boyfriend who has already been prettified. The caper almost ends with her getting caught by safety wardens but Tally manages to escape and in the process meets Shay, a rebel girl of exactly the same age. Tally's meeting with Shay sets up a wonderfully captivating and complex plot, which most readers will have great fun to follow. One portion of the plot has made a strong impression on me - Tally's long journey to the place called the Smoke, guided only by a cryptic note coded by Shay. The passages are powerful and haunting, they seem to transcend the genre and evoke feelings not unlike one has when reading the story of you-know-who returning to Ithaca.

Not only is the plot enthralling but also Tally is a well-written character with wonderfully and plausibly rich personality. She feels like a real person as opposed to, unfortunately, some other characters, particularly Shay. There is even a smidgen of nice love story in the novel, appropriately muted for young readers, yet well portrayed and in fact very sweet. Science fiction fans will appreciate various details of the future technology. I particularly like the flying on hoverboards and the "bungee jackets."

On a serious note, one of the three things I like the most about the novel is the sharp yet not quite in-your-face critique of social engineering. The other standout is the underlying motif of what beauty is and how it relates to symmetry and averaging: I am so grateful to Mr. Westerfeld for providing the Francis Bacon quote that I used, following his lead, as the epigraph. (The continuation of the Bacon's quote is shown after the rating.) And finally, the novel may make the reader think about that special time in human life - mid- to-late teens - when people construct their identities and their personalities.

To sum up, despite the Young Adult genre, despite some over-explanatory passages and the ending that blatantly sets up a sequel, Uglies is not in any way inferior to many very good "serious" books that I have reviewed here. My student deserves huge extra credit.

Four stars.

"A man cannot tell whether Apelles, or Albert Durer, were the more trifler; whereof the one, would make a personage by geometrical proportions; the other, by taking the best parts out of divers faces, to make one excellent. Such personages, I think, would please nobody, but the painter that made them."
(Continuation of the epigraph quote by Francis Bacon from Essays, 1625)

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