The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"It was a pink slip of paper three inches wide and seven inches long, and it told the First National City Bank to pay to the order of Nero Wolfe one hundred thousand and 00/100 dollars."

Well, these are the 1965 dollars and the equivalent amount today would be almost one million. We meet the obese genius, Nero Wolfe, and the suave and manly Archie Goodwin - Wolfe's intrepid secretary and right-hand man - in the detective's office, where a rich widow, Mrs. Bruner, has just signed the check. She is hiring Wolfe to do what "perhaps no other man alive can do" - take on the FBI. With this cool setup The Doorbell Rang (1965) begins, Rex Stout's 41st novel in the Nero Wolfe series.

Mrs. Bruner had sent 10,000 copies of the book The FBI Nobody Knows (an actual 1964 book, currently available on Amazon) to cabinet members, senators, representatives, executives, district attorneys, and other public personages. As a result, she is now followed day and night by FBI agents and her family as well as the employees of the Bruner Corporation are harassed. Thus Mrs. Bruner hires Wolfe to compel the FBI to stop the intimidation.

Mr. Wolfe takes the case, no doubt enticed by the huge check. During the investigation a connection is discovered to an unsolved murder of a free-lance writer who had collected material for an article on the FBI. It will not be a spoiler when I write that Wolfe succeeds: the denouement involves quite a clever masquerade. I also like quite an interesting coded conversation between Wolfe and Archie. Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn plays some role in the story and the passages like

"'I've decided women under fifty are - what are they?'
'Well, jejune's a good word.'
'Too many Js.'"

must have served as an inspiration for Archy McNally's dialogues from Lawrence Sanders' novels.

Rex Stout's problems with FBI are widely known. The Bureau had him on a list of 'persons of interest' because the author had always been committed to liberal causes, participated in anti-fascist activities before World War 2, and later continued as an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism. Rex Stout always was a fierce critic of J. Edgar Hoover.

The Doorbell Rang is certainly not among the stronger installments in the series but it provides a better way to spend time than watching commercial garbage on TV. A marginal recommendation.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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J. S. Bach by Calvin R. Stapert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"When asked whether the St. Matthew Passion is the greatest work ever composed, Masaki Suzuki, conductor of the Bach Collegium Japan, responded affirmatively [...]"

While attempts to identify "the greatest work ever composed" are rather frivolous, if one were to treat them seriously no other composer would be more frequently mentioned by musicologists than Johann Sebastian Bach, and the St. Matthew Passion would certainly be close to the top, if not at the very top of their choices. The Erbarme dich, mein Gott aria for contralto from Passion is certainly the most beautiful piece of music I know, transcendent and sublime (look for Delphine Galou's performance on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBeXF... ). And, of course, Bach is my favorite composer.

J.S. Bach (2009) by Calvin R. Stapert is the second Bach's biography I have recently read, after Geck's Bach. Life & Times and I like this one a bit more, mainly because the author does not offer annoying running commentary to his own text as the other book does. Still, the author (or maybe it is the publisher) insists on typographical affectation of frequently repeating the most important sentences of the text at the top of the page.

The main emphasis of this biography is on religious roots of Bach's music. The author writes:

"I have made the assumption that Bach's thinking, indeed his whole being, was shaped by theology [of the Lutheran Reformation], a theology that he inherited from his ancestors and was given expression in the texts he set to music."

When discussing vocal works the author focuses on the theological content of the texts. He writes that he takes the theology expressed in those texts as "the key to Bach's own thoughts and feelings."

It is obviously very difficult to try to summarize Bach's tremendous opus in a few short phrases, yet the author does a good job when he states that the composer had always been working towards the goal of "well-regulated church music," and repeats this phrase in two different places of the text. Another key feature of Bach's work is noted as well

"[... these works] exhibit Bach's 'summa' mentality, that is his drive to do something comprehensively, to provide a 'summation', or to bring something to the 'summit' of its development."

I like the author's treatment of Bach's cantatas - the chronology, complexity of their form, and intense involvement with the chorale. My most favorite cantata (BWV 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme) is mentioned as well. I have also enjoyed some personal tidbits about Bach's life: the funny story about his troubles with students in Arnstadt, and even funnier incident of Bach being reprimanded for having a young woman visit him in the choir loft. I also like the author's perhaps surprising observation in the Epilogue:

"The extraordinary quality that posterity has heard in Bach's music makes a stark contrast not only with how most of his contemporaries heard it but also with the ordinariness of Bach's life."

An interesting, worthwhile read, and a "must read" for any J.S. Bach fan.

Three-and-a-half stars.

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The Investigation by Dorothy Uhnak
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I am very convictable right now [...] People want to convict me of something. After all, I haven't behaved the way 'people' think I should, the way a 'mother' should have reacted [...]"

A very good police procedural, one that might seem a bit dated - the novel was published in 1977 - yet very relevant for today's times because of the underlying theme of 'trying a case in the court of public opinion'. Dorothy Uhnak's Investigation is the first book of this author that I have read but certainly not the last. Amazon's prices for other used books by Ms. Uhnak are exorbitant so it's time to run for the library.

The detectives on the DA's Investigating Squad take a call from the precinct about missing Keeler's kids. Kitty Keeler is a young mother, an attractive woman, married to a middle-aged husband. There is a history of marital problems and of using children as hostages in resolving conflicts between the spouses. The bodies of two kids are soon found; they have been strangulated and shot. Detective Joe Peters leads the investigation.

The procedural thread is totally captivating and very well written. Ms. Uhnak used to work for 14 years as a detective for the New York City Transit Police Department and not only does she convincingly convey the details of police activities but, most importantly, she also portrays the police department politics. Even without the criminal plot it could make great reading:

"Aside for splits based on politics, racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds and specific personality differences, we're just one cohesive team."

But two other themes dominate the novel. Ms. Uhnak paints a compelling psychological portrait of Kitty and manages to make her feel like a real person, not just a character in a plot. She behaves like an actual human being rather than as embodiment of how the majority of people imagine other people should behave. Kitty has a strong and distinctive personality so, obviously, she 'rubs other people' wrong, to use a cliché phrase. The scene of Kitty being interrogated by the detectives is superb. No clichés there!

Finally, perhaps the most important theme of the novel: trying criminal cases 'in the court of the public opinion.' Remember the Casey Anthony's case of 2011 - 2014? It gained wide attention in the media, including social media. Most everybody had their opinion on the issue of guilt or innocence. People devoured hours and hours of TV coverage and basked in the self-satisfied and disgusting glory of being able to judge other people. Were the Kitty Keeler's case to happen now there would be even more coverage, and every single interest group would try to "own" the case with the use of social and other media. Ms. Uhnak's novel offers a warning sign.

In the novel we learn the so-called "truth" about what happened at the end. I could live without the explicit solution since to me it softens the impact of important issues raised by the author. Now, attempting to be facetious: this was 1977 after all, when the existence of truth was implicitly assumed unlike now, in the era of "post-truth." Anyway, a very good novel, highly recommended!

Four stars.


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Round About Midnight: A Portrait Of Miles Davis by Eric Nisenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[Keith Jarrett] said that Miles would rather play music that was new and innovative than play older music even if the newer music was far less perfect. For perfection was never Miles's goal. It was the journey itself that his music was about, the process of growing and constantly arriving."

I have to admit that I have never been a fan of Miles Davis's jazz. While I almost immediately fell in love with John Coltrane's music and admire many works by Eric Dolphy and Sun Ra, Miles Davis leaves me quite cold, with the exception of Bitches Brew (but then many listeners would not exactly count that album as jazz) and Sketches of Spain. So when Eric Nisenson, the author of 'Round About Midnight. A Portrait of Miles Davis (1996) writes:

"[Kind of Blue] is one of the most beautiful works of art of this century. I am certain that this piece of music will still be listened to on the day the sun implodes. [...] It is amazing how it continues to stir my soul every time I hear it [...]"

I suspect that something is very wrong with me, with my reception of music. It must be my fault that I do not appreciate Kind of Blue.

Anyway, even if I am unable to share Mr. Nisenson's admiration of Miles Davis's works, I certainly appreciate the book. The author is passionate about the topic and writes very well, which makes this one of the best biographies I have ever read. This is almost as great a read as the Ascension. John Coltrane and His Quest that I have reviewed recently.

Maybe because of my lack of enthusiasm for Miles Davis' main works the early parts of the biography made strongest impression on me. Mr. Nisenson offers fascinating glimpses into Miles Davis' youth: his childhood in a well-to-do black family in East St. Louis, his first break with the Billy Eckstine band, the "apprenticeship" with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, a stint at Juilliard School of Music, and then the times of Birth of the Cool, meeting J.P. Sartre in Paris and an affair with Juliette Gréco.

By mid 1950s, Miles Davis - not even 30 years old - becomes a living legend. He carefully creates his own enigmatic persona: arrogant, opulently dressed, driving a white Ferrari. Miles as the embodiment of Ultimate Hip, the epitome of Ultimate Cool. Then comes the universally acclaimed album Kind of Blue (1959) as well as beautiful Sketches of Spain (to this day I remember how in the early 1980s, on Delaware Street in Berkeley, I listened to that album for the first time). Then the adventures with fusion (to oversimplify: fusion is a cross between jazz and progressive rock) and Bitches Brew with John McLaughlin, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, and other famous musicians.

About 1975 Miles Davis retires to come back in 1980 for his 10 final years during which he is, unfortunately, mostly cashing on his fame and catering to pop tastes of the then audiences:

"Glamor and money meant everything in this age of Reagan. Miles had always had a heightened awareness of the currents of American life."

That period produced some of the least interesting music I have heard in my life, among others the album You Are Under Arrest, which even the critics consider a catastrophic failure.

To sum up, 'Round About Midnight is a compelling read, well-written and rich in detail. The author even manages to mention how my favorite rock band, Sonic Youth (1980s - 2010s) had been influenced by Miles Davis. Highly recommended!

Four stars.

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Nerve Damage by Peter Abrahams
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

" ROY VALOIS, SCULPTOR, DIES AT 46
by Richard Gold and Myra Burns
Roy Valois, a sculptor whose large works are displayed in many public spaces around the United States and at several prominent museums, died yesterday at his home in Ethan Valley, Vermont. He was 46."

We first meet Roy Valois when he dreams about his wife, Delia, who died 15 years earlier. A PhD in economics, she used to work at Hobbes Institute, an economic think tank. Roy has just finished a new sculpture, called Delia, an artistic homage to his wife whom he loved so much. Roy is now with Jen and has been planning to propose to her. Yet having experienced alarming medical symptoms he consulted a specialist who offered a grim prognosis. Roy becomes morbidly interested in his obituary, which - like for all famous people - is written well ahead of time in New York Times. The obituary is flattering but it contains incorrect information about Delia's employment history. Roy sets out to correct the info but the data he uncovers makes him lose confidence as to Delia's work record. Where did she work? Who was she? Did he know his beloved wife at all?

Nerve Damage (2007) is a suspense novel slash thriller by Peter Abrahams. The setup is intriguing but having been burnt by the same author's Revolution #9 , with its fantastic setup and complete fiasco of the latter parts of the plot, I was quite apprehensive. Well, indeed, the plot does deteriorate a bit, and much earlier than in Revolution, but it remains marginally interesting; so I kept reading on to the very end, which is too sappy for my taste and relies on a cliché literary device. But the reader will probably enjoy tense scenes like:

"First, he cleared the top of the coffin. Then he dug a little side cut, a place to stand. [...He] stepped into the side cut, bent forward, got his hands under the lid of the coffin. Then, straightening his back, pulling with his arms, he slowly raised the lid and laid it aside."

Peter Abrahams' prose is very readable without being shallow so I can forgive him several implausible turns of the plot. Paper-thin characterizations of Skippy, Jen, and Mr. Truesdale are harder to forgive, though.

A marginally recommended read, far from the three-and-a-half-star quality of A Perfect Crime , yet serviceable when nothing's better around.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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Looking for Alaska by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to support her every endeavor."

A beautiful sentence from a wonderful book. A few months ago I reviewed Uglies, a very good novel in the Young Adult genre, recommended by a student of mine. I was astonished by how much I liked the book and became quite embarrassed of my generally disdainful attitude towards the genre. So when the same student highly recommended another YA novel I could not wait to read it. John Green's Looking for Alaska (2005) is a terrific book; although it is addressed to young people, it treats them as they should be treated - as adults.

We meet Miles Halter as he leaves his "family and Florida and the rest of [his] minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama." He refers to François Rabelais' last words when he says

"That's why I am going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps."

Miles' adventures at the Culver Creek Preparatory School provide the plot of the novel. His roommate, Chip, aka "the Colonel," introduces him not only to the school's social structure but also to Alaska, "the hottest girl in all of human history." The plot is riveting and amazingly plausible to the very end.

This is a wonderfully mature book in how it handles serious topics and would do well as mandatory reading for all teenagers. Had I known the book twenty-something years ago, when my daughter was in her early teens, I would have wanted her to read it. I haven't found anything naive, cheap, condescending, overly simplistic, or brazenly didactic in the novel. It is amazing how much good stuff, how much common sense it packs with regard to life advice. And how well it handles the topics of sex and sexual initiation for which - as I understand - it got into some trouble with the self-proclaimed guardians of morality who attempt to perpetuate their own sexual hangups in their children. No vulgarity, no titillation with the subject, no guilt; just the healthy way of treating Things That Need To be Dealt With.

Completely unexpectedly I found a passage that touched a theme which would naturally belong to the type of Books for Very Old People that I love to read but which I would never expect to find in a YA novel. Take the quote that seems to come straight from Cees Nooteboom, the greatest scholar of human impermanence:

"Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow.

The novel is imbued with the love of books. It mentions so many great authors: François Rabelais, Gabriel García Márquez (a quote from The General in His Labyrinth provides a sort of motif for the entire novel), Kurt Vonnegut (his Cat's Cradle is one of Alaska's favorite books), poetry of Auden. While the author provides a charming description of Alaska's physical beauty - from which I took the epigraph - it is her love of books that adds a more important dimension to her "hotness."

Many wonderful passages in the novel: let me just mention the touchingly sweet Thanksgiving scene at the Colonel's mom. Then, there is all the humor, which made me laugh out loud so many times. True, I like to laugh and I probably laugh much more than an average person but I do not remember ever in my life laughing as hard as when I was reading the scene of the Great Prank during the Speaker Day at Miles' school. When Lara, the Romanian student, tells the speaker to "subvert the patriarchal paradigm" and he proceeds accordingly I got a hysterical attack of laughter which lasted 10 minutes and almost ended in suffocation. Oh, how I wish I were a part of a prank like that!

A beautiful love story whose poetry will be understood by young people, yet a mature and wise story. I am not quite sure what's going on with me: while always so stingy with the rating stars I am going to round up my 4.5 rating, even though the novel has not been written by any of the usual suspects like Joyce, Coetzee, Nabokov, Vonnegut, García Márquez, White or Nooteboom. Thank you, EK!

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'I doubt it,' Reacher said. 'I read it in a book once. It worked on the page. But in the real world I imagine it would have exploded and blinded me [...]"

Exactly. That's the problem with Lee Child's Bad Luck and Trouble (2007), except that many components of the plot are so ridiculous that I doubt that for most readers they would even work on the page. This is the eleventh installment in the long-running Jack Reacher series and either it is significantly weaker than the earlier books or this reader has become much more picky. I had read two or three of the first four books in the series in the late 1990s or early 2000s and generally liked them.

The novel opens with a strong and memorable prologue: a horribly suffering man with both legs broken is flown in a helicopter to his execution. At the height of 3,000 feet he is thrown off the stretcher into the night air for the final 20-second terrifying flight towards the ground.

The plot proper begins when Jack Reacher, who is living the life of a transient in Oregon, notices an unexpected deposit of $1,030 in his bank account. Obviously (sarcasm intended), it must be a message - a cry for help - from one of his pals with whom he had served as a special investigator in the military police. And although Reacher is not told where to meet his old friend (it turns out to be Sgt. Frances Neagley whom he respects a lot), he manages to find her immediately. The author again seems to self-mock his reliance of serendipity in the plot:

"Where in the vastness of LA would she be comfortable? There were twenty-one thousand miles of surface streets to choose from.
Reacher asked himself. Where would I go?
Hollywood, he answered."

Silliness like that abound in the novel, including the horrible cliché of cleverness in guessing a password, and so on and on. Everything that happens to Reacher and other "good guys" is miraculously convenient for them. They have friends in very high places who owe them favors. They have access to unlimited cash. Virtually everything that could go right in the plot does. But then it is just a silly fairy tale for "adults" so one should not expect any semblances of realism.

What I truly dislike is the author's fascination with guns, ammunition, calibers, and other technical details of weapons. Adolescents boys and adolescent "grown-up" men with weapon-centered lifestyles will be really happy with this novel. Also, they will get really solid hard-ons when they read the slow-motion descriptions of physical damage to human bodies inflicted by bullets and other weapons. They will love the truly manly language:

"We investigate, we prepare, we execute. We find them, we take them down, and then we piss on their ancestors' graves."

On a positive side the reader will find a reference to John Coltrane on Miles Davis albums. And the writing is pretty competent for the fairy tale for "men" genre.

Two stars.


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Late Essays : 2006-2017 by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"This modest but beautifully composed little ten-page episode does indeed provide a good education, and not just for older persons: how to dig a grave, how to write, how to face death, all in one."

Late Essays 2006 - 2017 is the 22nd book by J.M. Coetzee that I am reviewing here and the fourth collection of essays by the Nobel Prize winner in literature, after Stranger Shores , Inner Workings , and Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship . The collection is a totally wonderful, serious, demanding read, which could well be used as a learning tool for students who intend to become literary critics. The set contains 23 essays; I am only providing unorganized thoughts on some of the essays. I wouldn't be able to synthesize these impressions into a full-fledged review of the entire collection.

In the essay on Philip Roth's Nemesis Coetzee demonstrates superb sense of humor when he writes about certain character being a virgin "in a Clintonian sense." But it is really a serious essay about serious issues. We read "God is just another name for Chance," and Coetzee provides a strong ending for the essay when he writes about an episode from Roth's Everyman, which I quote in the epigraph.

In the essay about a story written in the early 1800s by Heinrich von Kleist Coetzee addresses one of my hot-button subjects. Suppose an author, on purpose, does not clearly state what happens to characters in the story at some point of the plot. Consider a reader's question "What has really happened?" Coetzee counters with his question "What does 'really' mean?" To me it touches upon the readers injecting their own fictions into the author's fiction in order to make it more realistic to them.

I love the essay titled "Antonio Di Benedetto, Zama". I have not read that novel, apparently one of the major works of Argentine literature and I have now put it on my "To read" list. In the next essay Coetzee writes about Leo Tolstoy's works and focuses on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, one of the best novellas I have ever read, a relentlessly realistic and thus terrifying account of a man dying. He ends the essay with a powerful quote:

"In both of these stories Tolstoy pits his powerful rhetoric of salvation against the commonsense scepticism of the consumer of fiction, who like Ivan Ilyich in his heyday looks to works of literature for civilized entertainment and no more."

I have been tremendously impressed by Coetzee's essay on the Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert. The South African/Australian writer shows deep understanding of the political situation in the Soviet-controlled countries in Eastern Europe after the Second World War, and particularly of the more benign yet no less morally corrupting Polish brand of Soviet-style ideology.

Two essays are dedicated to works by the great Australian writer, Patrick White, two of whose novels are among the best books I have read in my life, The Eye of the Storm and The Aunt's Story, which I reviewed here on Goodreads. In the first essay Coetzee focuses on White's Vivisector and in the other on The Solid Mandala, a novel that is on my "Read Immediately" shelf.

Strongly recommended jewel of literary criticism.

Four stars.

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