The Sixth Commandment by Lawrence Sanders
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"You are as old as you feel? Bullshit. You're as old as you look. And you can't fake youth, not really. The pain is in seeing it go, grabbing, trying to hold it back. No way. Therefore, do not send to ask for whom the ass sinks; it sinks for thee."

With Lawrence Sanders one gets some winners, like the wonderful McNally series, for instance, McNally's Risk , and some stinkers, like the unbelievably bad Private Pleasures . The Sixth Commandment (1979) comes somewhere in between, fortunately a bit closer to the better side of Mr. Sanders (or whoever wrote his books; I really do suspect that he used to hire ghostwriters to produce the stinkers).

Samuel Todd works as a field investigator for the Bingham Foundation that gives away about 10 million dollars a year for scientific research. Mr. Todd is tasked to investigate Dr. Thorndecker, a Nobel Prize winner and an expert in the biology of aging, who has requested a substantial grant to study the effects of electromagnetic waves on human embryo cells in vitro. It is clear from the beginning that the case is anything but straightforward: as soon as Todd arrives in the town where the scientist lives, he receives a note that says "Thorndecker kills." Not only is the good Doctor the owner of a research lab but also he owns a nursing home that caters to rich patients. Todd suspects that the connections between the two institutions have been understated in the grant application.

From the beginning of the investigation the author is trying to convey to us Todd's sense of dread about what might be going on. "It's worse than you think!" says one of the characters. Yet Mr. Sanders is more successful in producing some nice prose (evident in his later, McNally novels). Here's a cool passage that refers to John Donne's famous poem:

"So I knew that if I did not do something, Europe would be the less."

He also manages to evoke some lyricism in his prose:

"It was a metallic mesh, wrapped around the physical world. [...] Beyond, even dimmer, the bare trunks of trees appeared, disappeared, appeared again, wavery in the hazy light."

There is even a smattering of social observations to accompany the plot: Dr. Thorndecker's little town, deserted by most young people, is "a village that was a necropolis of fractured dreams."

Far below the level of McNally series yet a readable, moderately interesting story, with a rather predictable ending.

Two-and-three-quarter stars.

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The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"He pulls the car over, switches off the engine, takes his mother in his arms. He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh. 'There, there,' he whispers in her ear. 'There, there. It will soon be over.'"

The article in Wikipedia about The Lives of Animals (1999) classifies the book as a metafictional novella, which is not an accurate characterization. The Lives is not a novella but rather a collection of diverse literary pieces: it contains two honorific lectures, a report of the audience reactions to the lectures (the only component that resembles a novella), and a set of essays on literary, philosophical, and scientific topics related to the lectures. Neither is the book metafictional, which usually means 'self-referential' or 'emphasizing its own fictional nature.' I would call the book 'parafictional', where the prefix 'para-' means 'beside' or 'beyond.'

For instance, it is completely unimportant whether the lectures are 'real' of 'fictional.' They are presented by Elizabeth Costello, a fictitious Australian writer created by J.M. Coetzee. But Coetzee had once read Costello's lectures as if they were his own. So now, were they real? Yes and no. Incidentally, the question whether something is real or not is grossly overrated. One should rather ask whether a literary construct is realistic. In that sense Costello's/Coetzee's lectures certainly are.

The lectures are about how we treat animals. How we torture them, slaughter them, and then eat them. Through the lectures Ms. Costello conveys her message: sympathy toward animals should be a moral and ethical imperative. Animals are not that different from us, she points out: they feel pain, they suffer, and - most importantly - they have their "sensation of being." She argues that since we are able to think about our own death we should also be able to "think ourselves into the being of [an animal]."

The notion of human reason is invoked: one could conceivably construe that Ms. Costello juxtaposes reason and sympathy. We learn about her "disdain for so many taboos of rationalism" while she stresses sympathy that "allows us to share [...] the being of another." Ms. Costello verbalizes one of the most famous Coetzee's quotes:

"There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason."

I am not a native English speaker yet I dare to doubt that the word 'sympathy' is the right one to represent how Ms. Costello wants us to treat animals. I would rather use words like 'compassion,' 'caring,' or 'kindness.' Or maybe even the more general term 'decency,' which J.M. Coetzee considers the highest moral imperative (I completely agree with him, see my review of his Waiting for the Barbarians .)

In the 'novella part' of the book Coetzee presents (almost verbatim) Ms. Costello's lectures, The Philosophers and the Animals and The Poets and the Animals, and portrays the reactions of the audience at the lectures. The reader will also find a slim thread of 'fiction' where the author quotes Ms. Costello's conversations with her son and his wife.

To finish on a personal note: I abhor killing of animals; I even try to walk carefully and never step on an insect or a lizard. When I have to kill a rodent maimed by my cat I strive to be most humane in the process. I despise hunters and would not shake hands with anyone who kills animals for "sport." Yet I eat meat. Similarly, but on a lower degree of violation of moral principles, Ms. Costello wears leather sandals and carries a leather purse. How dare I and Ms. Costello be like that?

Four stars.


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Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"For four hours, she'd sat up there, twenty-six stories above blue cement, and considered whether she'd go through with it or not. [...] At what moment had it all crystallized to the point where she'd hoisted her legs over that four-foot balcony wall and stepped into black space?"

Another disappointment and all so typical! An author whom I know from at least one good book in the past, interesting setup of the plot, realistic characters, skillful writing, all so promising until... At some point the novel begins to deteriorate to the extent that I barely have the patience to continue reading. Dennis Lehane's Prayers for Rain (1999) is a good example of the phenomenon. I very much liked A Drink Before the War that I had read over 20 years ago. That was the novel that began the Kenzie/Gennaro series of which Prayers is the fifth installment. The current novel is a well-structured, well-written, and captivating book until about one third into the story. Then the clichés of the genre take over and the plot loses its grip over the reader. Things get much worse about two-thirds into the novel: quality deteriorates to the degree that I have just been able to skim the pages to see if anything can hold my attention. A promising book turns into the dreaded page-turner: mob clichés, gun clichés, character clichés abound. The plot twists are implausible and just plain silly.

A brief synopsis of the setup: Kenzie and Gennaro are not together as a consequence of events from a previous installment. Karen Nichols, a young woman who is being stalked, hires Kenzie to convince the stalker to "lay off her." When the detective and his cliché sidekick Bubba Rogowski administer heavy corporal therapy to the offender, he promises to stop harassing Karen. Yet six months later, she jumps to her death from the observatory deck of a sky scraper. Kenzie is devastated: he feels heavy guilt - several weeks before her death Karen tried to call him and he was too busy to return her call.

The first third of the novel, maybe even a half, reads like real literature, well-written, and captivating. Karen Nichols emerges a fully realistic, tragic character, with all the usual human frailties and complexities. The unforgettable, well-written conversation between Kenzie and Karen's mother and stepfather makes it hard not to get angry at the degree of harm that parents can do to their children. The scene reminded me of some of the virtuoso dialogues in Denise Mina's novels. Yet the good stuff is balanced by gratuitous scenes of violence and brutality:

"[He] no longer had possession of his own hands. They were on the floor to the left of the silent motor, chopped off above the wrists and neatly laid, palms down, on the floorboards."

I will not mention what else was done to the victim who was carefully kept alive during the amateur surgery, read the book if you are into pornography of torture.

The beginning of the novel was evidently written by a good author. The ending could have as well be written by me or generated by a computer. I have not heard about mystery authors hiring ghostwriters to finish their novels, but I know nothing about the business of mystery literature. "Hook the reader on the beginning and then who cares about the rest," may well be the best business plan.

Two stars.


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Mokusei!: A Love Story by Cees Nooteboom
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"It was a passion that would burn him down to his roots and through which all that came before and after would fade, because this time it was love first and foremost and only secondly a story."

A slim and slight novella from my favorite author. Cees Nooteboom's Mokusei (1982) should really be called a short story as it fits on 86 largish-print pages with wide margins. Mr. Nooteboom focuses only on three motifs in the story, and they are some of the main themes in his opus: love, the nature of the past, and fascination with Japan.

The beautiful and beautifully told story of Mr. Presser, a Dutch photographer, who falls "head over heels" in love with a young Japanese woman, is a sweet tale of love predestined to fail, if one wants to equate not achieving the "happily ever after" with failure. But even so, and despite the memories and the pain, isn't having lived and not loved a greater failure?

The love story is intermingled with meditations on the contrast between a visitor's preconception of the country they visit and the reality of that country. Mr. Presser's friend, a Dutch cultural attaché in Japan, warns him that it is virtually impossible for a foreigner to understand Japan and it is not even the matter of "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." The visitors

"[...] know a little, which is really nothing, about Japanese culture, but that doesn't bother them, they have something better than knowledge, they have an idea about Japan."

Naturally, the passing of time and the way that the past exists never escape Mr. Nooteboom's attention:

"Long ago, and at the same time a sort of yesterday. For that kind of time no verb tenses exist. Memory flows this way and that between the perfect and imperfect, just as the mind, left to itself, will often prefer chaos to chronology."

Some time ago I reviewed here J.M. Coetzee's The Good Story where he writes about human relationships as interactions between projected fictions. Nooteboom mentions people's multiple masks instead:

"Three masks she was now wearing, one on top of the other, the Asiatic, that one of her own impenetrability, and the third, equally unrevealing veil of sleep."

One must praise the superb translation by Adrienne Dixon. To sum up: what would be a great book for most authors is just a good one for Cees Nooteboom.

Three and a half stars.


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The Watchman by Robert Crais
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Pike's mouth twitched, and Cole wondered if Larkin had noticed that Pike never laughed or smiled. As if the part of a man who could feel that free was dead in Pike, or buried so deep that only a twitch could escape."

Less than a month ago I reviewed here Chasing the Darkness by Mr. Crais. Although far from the class of his early The Monkey's Raincoat or L.A. Requiem I recommended Chasing as quite a readable and interesting novel. Well, I can only marginally recommend The Watchman (2007), primarily for the - quite possibly unintended - comedic value of Joe Pike's characterization. While Mr. Crais' early novels were often termed "modern So Cal noir," there is not an iota of noir in The Watchman. Instead we have fast action, frequent killings, and Joe Pike as the coolest, most bad-ass, awesomest warrior, a grotesquely exaggerated caricature of a supremely manly man of very few words and no laughs or smiles.

22-year-old Larkin Conner Barkley, a heir to an obscenely rich family, worth five or so billion dollars herself, is enjoying a four-am. ride on the streets of L.A. in her Aston Martin. There happens a collision with a Mercedes sedan whose occupants hurry to drive away before she calls 911. Apparently, one of the people whom Larkin has seen in the Mercedes does not want to be seen. She becomes a federal witness, due to testify before the federal grand jury since the guy in the other car may be an indicted murderer, with narco-trade connections. Federal protection bungles their job: there are two attempts to assassinate her. So it's Joe Pike to the rescue, the single most powerful protection agent in the entire universe.

Joe Pike is so manly, so masculine that he wears sunglasses at night.

"Cole had seen Pike do push-ups on his thumbs; push-ups using only the two index fingers. Pike popped walnuts like soap bubbles [...]"

He is in total control of his body and his mind (!)

"His heart rate slowed. His breathing slowed. His body and mind were quiet. He could wait like that for days [...]"

In the defense of the author, the reader will find a fragment in the novel where Joe Pike seems a little like a real person: we learn about events from Pike's past when he was an officer in LAPD.

On the other hand it is hard to forgive the author for inclusion of a comedy thread that features the forensic expert John Chen and his desperate struggle to get "poontang" and Pike's acceptance. The Chen thread makes it obvious that Mr. Crais still treats Joe Pike as a serious, plausible character, which amazes this reviewer. Also, writing sentences like

"[...] eyes showing the kind of pain you'd feel if you were being crushed, as if the last bit of love were being wrung from your heart."

indicate that the author relaxed the standards of his prose.

I am still recommending the novel, albeit just barely, because of the interesting plot. More Cole less Pike, please! Or at least have Pike stumble, please, just once, just for fun. It would make the novel better - there is nothing more human than failure.

Two and a half stars.

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Blue: The Murder Of Jazz by Eric Nisenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"This is why so much bland improvised music is popular now: the tinkling bells, liquid melodies, and vapid prettiness of New Age; the dentist's-office jazz of Kenny G. and Grover Washington, Jr.; and the reactionary and utterly predictable watered-down hard bop of the neoclassicists. It is improvisation without risk, without ecstasy, without soul."

I envy the author his writing skills! I wish I could pen phrases like "vapid prettiness of New Age," "utterly predictable watered-down hard bop of the neoclassicists," and so many others. I completely agree with the author, Eric Nisenson, in his 1997 grim diagnosis of the state of jazz in the mid-1990s. I dearly love jazz, mainly the 1960s' jazz, but also many earlier and more recent works. The only two kinds of jazz I cannot stand are the so-called "smooth jazz" - the "dentist's-office" music - and the soulless, riskless, ecstasyless mechanical "jazz" that Wynton Marsalis and his ilk used to produce

The blurb on the cover of Eric Nisenson's Blue. The Murder of Jazz very aptly describes the book: "A road map to the current jazz wars," a quote from the Wall Street Journal. And what a great road map it is! Of course, I am biased: I seem to love the same type of jazz that the author loves, yet even without the bias a careful reader cannot disagree with the author's line of reasoning and his clear, item-by-item, logical exposition of why the kind of music promoted by Jazz at the Lincoln Center had nothing to do with the supposed "resurgence of jazz." It is precisely the other way around: the neoclassicist ideology - as espoused in the writings of two jazz critics, Albert Murray (the "Karl Marx" of the movement) and Stanley Crouch (the movement's "Lenin") - and the neoclassicist practice of jazz - as implemented by Mr. Marsalis and other artists under the Lincoln Center's banner - killed jazz. The neoclassicist movement murdered everything what was valuable in jazz: the spontaneity, the creativity, the seeking of what has not yet been done.

For any jazz lover this is a great book to read, even if one does not want to take sides in the fight for the soul of jazz. From the introduction, where the author charmingly paints his lifelong love for jazz, through the quite detailed yet never boring or overwhelming history of jazz music - period-by-period, with chapters on swing, bebop, cool, fusion, etc. - to the clear exposition of the mid-1990s sad state of things, the text captivates the reader with clarity, depth, and good writing.

Let me now return to polemical mood and quote some of the issues that the author mentions but - in my view - does not emphasize enough. First is the fact that the neoclassicist movement is controlled by business interests and that much of it has little to do with art. Yes, Wynton Marsalis is a virtuoso, no one questions his enormous talent, yet the music he produces is evidently designed to sell not to inspire. Second - and the author is way too polite to state it unequivocally; I do not need to be polite - comparing Mr. Marsalis' music to that of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, or Sun Ra - is simply insulting. Yes, his musical skills may be comparable, but his music sucks because it has no soul.
Genuine jazz music has to be created "in and for the moment" and "reflect the lives and times of the musicians playing it." Its depth comes about "from the souls of the musicians" who create it at a particular moment in time.

To end on a less vitriolic note: I am thankful to the author for including quite a long passage on Sun Ra and his Arkestra - some of the greatest innovators in all music. I will look for further readings about Sun Ra and the band.

Four and a half stars.

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Revolution #9 by Peter Abrahams
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Blurting the answer to twenty-six across in the Sunday New York Times crossword was the first big mistake Charlie Ochs had made in twenty years. Playing Ben Webster was the second."

Peter Abrahams' Revolution #9 (1992) provides a black and white, textbook example of a mystery/thriller novel that is great at the beginning and absolutely unreadable at the end. From the wonderful first chapter - about a boy baseball player who accidentally leaves his mitt in his father's office - through captivating three chapters that introduce the main characters in the plot, to the outstandingly well written scenes of Charlie meeting Emily and falling in love with her, a most discriminating reader will have a feeling that the author is a "serious," accomplished writer. People seem to come alive from the pages of the novel.

The plot carries on fast. On the wedding day the young couple looking forward to a long and happy life meet an unexpected guest. A man, dressed in a gorilla suit, hands Charlie a magnum bottle of champagne decorated with a black ribbon around the neck and with a congratulations card from Uncle Sam addressed to a Mr. Wrightman. The next day Uncle Sam himself shows up and Charlie suddenly leaves Emily for a few days to straighten out some complicated inheritance business in his family. We now learn that Charlie Ochs might not be who he seems he is.

The story rewinds 22 years to 1970 and we get acquainted with anti-government activists of The Committee of the American Resistance grouping students opposed to Vietnam War. They are involved in armed resistance against the government policies. That part of the plot is well-written and truly captivating. The contemporary thread on the other hand begins to deteriorate. Charlie discovers a clue that totally changes the basic algebra of the story and things begin to break down on the plausibility front. Then comes page 275 of the hardback edition that I was reading when events lose any relationship to reality and the reader is served literary garbage.

I was not strong-willed enough to read the last fifth of the book, I just flipped through the pages, and - being Polish-born - I noticed a tiny yet funny fragment mentioning the leader of the Polish pro-Soviet government in the 1960s.

After the first hundred or so pages of the book I was contemplating a possible four-star rating. Now I am even hesitant to assign a two-star one. Yet I have to, since the author of the first part of the book is a good writer. Whoever - instead of Peter Abrahams - wrote the last part should be ashamed. I highly recommend the novel to all readers who love experiencing massive disappointment.

Two stars.

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The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"They often said they found it difficult to remember that the other was a separate person. [...] It was precisely this collusion that made them vulnerable and sensitive to each other, easily hurt by the rediscovery that their needs and interests were distinct."

I loved reading Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers (1981). Captivating plot that skillfully builds atmosphere of menace and dread, remarkable psychological insights, outstanding prose, and - maybe most important – very small volume (fewer than 120 pages) would usually guarantee an at least four-star rating from me. Yet toward the end of the novella, something happened to my reception of the book. I remember the moment when my enthusiasm - quite suddenly - waned and a feeling of disappointment crept in.

Colin and Mary, an unmarried couple who have been with each other for seven years, are on vacations in an unnamed tourist city (obviously Venice, Italy). They do touristy things, they smoke a joint now and then, they have sex. They are both attractive and have been in the acting profession. The unfamiliar city seems like a maze to them: they keep getting lost in the tangle of small streets and alleys and can never find the way to where they want to get. The author convincingly builds the atmosphere of a bad dream where nothing dreadful really happens, but the feeling of doom intensifies with each moment. The reality becomes more and more "off-centered" and tinged with shades of nightmare. One day Colin and Mary meet a stranger, Robert, and that meeting will change their lives forever. Obviously not in a good way.

The "off-centeredness" and the disturbing feel remind me of The Vanishing , Tim Krabbé’s great thriller, made even more remarkable by the Dutch author’s good writing. I believe, though, that Mr. McEwan aspired to something deeper than a thriller. One can find some first-rate psychological stuff in Comfort: Colin and Mary having difficulties with separating their identities, the passages about missing the comfort of daily routine of their non-vacation lives, or the thread about how they love each other but not necessarily at any particular moment. I only wish the novella focused more on these themes.

I also love the humor: some of it subtle and a little nightmarish like when Mary is thirsty and cannot get a sip of water in the middle of all these canals, and then finally gets to a restaurant where the waiter offers her an espresso. There are lighter moments as well, for instance, Mary and Colin spend four days not leaving the hotel, occupied mainly with having sex and talking about all things sexual. It is then when Colin invents for Mary

"[...] a large, intricate machine, made of steel, painted bright red and powered by electricity; it had pistons and controls, straps and dials, and made a low hum when it was turned on [...]"

I will stop quoting here so as not to be accused of prurient interests.

McEwan's prose is wonderful: precise and economical, with no unneeded words. Nothing like his newer books, which I find interesting and readable yet overwrought and bloated. I also enjoy the visuals: while the Venice-like setting reminds me of the equally disturbing and very good movie Don't Look Now (1973), the feel of being lost in a maze brings memories of the great 1961 film Last Year in Marienbad. All this is wonderful stuff.

So what don't I find wonderful? The "crime thread", even if it is its inevitability that is the main point rather than the events themselves. I strongly dislike Robert's story of his childhood; I find it superfluous and spoiling the structure of the plot. Yet what mainly caused my enthusiasm about the book to evaporate was that the author explains why things happen. By providing explanations, he robs the plot of its mystery feel. Like a magician who, having performed a spectacular trick, shows how exactly we have been had. Very disappointing to me! I felt almost exactly the same when reading the very ending of the superb On Chesil Beach (McEwan’s book that I like the most, so far). By explaining the motives of human actions, the author takes away from me the option of interacting with the fiction. As a reader, I love to be a co-creator of the fictions and participate in figuring out the reasons why things are as they are rather than being spoon-fed by the author.

To sum up, Comfort, while a very good book, is flawed for me.

Three-and-three-quarter stars

(With thanks to my Goodreads friend, Judith, for the recommendation. I also "borrowed" from her the word 'doom' that captures the mood – ‘doom’ is ‘mood’ spelled backwards - in the novella.)

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