Savage Summit: The True Stories of the First Five Women Who Climbed K2, the World's Most Feared Mountain by Jennifer Jordan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"By midnight Mrowka had not arrived. [...] The Little Ant, who had been strongest of the miserable cluster at Camp IV, digging out others' tents, bringing tea while there was still gas, getting Diemberger his boots, had finally worn herself out. The Black Summer [...] had claimed its last victim."

"Mrowka" (an ant, in Polish) is an affectionate pseudonym of Dobrosława Miodowicz-Wolf, a Polish climber, who perished on K2 (the "Savage Mountain") in the summer of 1986. Dobrosława had also been a friend of my wife and myself and I used to work with her husband, Jan Wolf (who also died in the mountains several years later), in a research institute in Warsaw.

This review is written in memory of Dobrosława but her climbing story is not one of the main stories is Jennifer Jordan's Savage Summit (2005). Ms. Jordan writes:

"I aim simply to share with you the stories of five remarkable women who chose to live at the edge of death and all of whom ultimately died there."

The five women are: Wanda Rutkiewicz, Liliane Barrard, Julie Tullis, Chantal Mauduit, and Alison Hargreaves. Of these five Wanda Rutkiewicz is featured most prominently. She is called a "climbing legend" and "the best female climber the world has ever seen," a woman with "enormous and stubborn personality," and also very isolated and lonely because of her intense drive to climb. I happen to know another Polish woman climber, not as famous, who knew Wanda Rutkiewicz personally and even did one or two routes with her. Everything I heard from my friend about Ms. Rutkiewicz jibes with the general tone of the story told in the book. One detail is wrong, though: the author claims that Ms. Rutkiewicz graduated from the Warsaw Polytechnic (which is my alma mater). That 's not true - she graduated from the Wroclaw Polytechnic. Probably the editor's fault.

There are a lot of interesting sociological observations in the book, both on the macro-scale - for example, about the cultural resistance to accept women in roles non-traditional for them - and in micro-scale, like personal inter-relationships in climbing teams. Probably the most interesting thread is the one that focuses on differences in climbing teams dynamics depending on the gender of the members. I find the following passage quite amusing:

"While the first two times women were included on K2 expeditions were wrought with internecine battles, ego wars, and sexual tensions, the next one would be exempt from most of those conflicts because of one simple omission: men."

And a truly hilarious diagnosis of what the standard topics of conversations among male climbers are:

"what goes in, what goes out, and what goes in and out."

The fun made of men is perhaps balanced by somewhat excessive attention to sexual aspects of high-altitude climbing, when the author writes about Chantal Mauduit.

Three-and-a-half stars.

In memory of Dobrosława Wolf.


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Still Midnight by Denise Mina
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Aamir raised his face to the God who had suffered him to live through children and work and meals, a million bloody meals, sleep, and changes of carpet and striving, endless pointless striving.
He turned his face up and muttered a final quiet prayer: "You bloody nasty bastard.""

I love reading Denise Mina's books. I am tuned exactly to her frequencies and her novels always deeply touch me. I know that in Ms. Mina's novels I read about real people and about the human striving, "endless pointless striving." The dark, grim, colorless world, where there is no fairness, no hope, no way out. No evil either, just the normal human stupidity of thrashing about in futile attempts to grab a tiny piece of happiness. And Ms. Mina's writing! Strong, never emotional or sentimental, economical with no wasted sentences or words. Her works by far transcend the crime novel genre and even more so the silly tartan noir label. So far, I have rated two of her books as masterpieces, Garnethill and The Dead Hour .

Still Midnight (2010) is the first novel in the Alex Morrow series. It begins with a captivating scene: three men in a van are watching a bungalow preparing for home invasion. The attack is described in gloriously chaotic detail. One of the men yells something about a payback for Afghanistan. Shots are fired, a woman is hurt, a hostage is taken.

Detective Sergeant Morrow of the Strathclyde CID is one of the detectives conducting the investigation where it soon turns out that the occupants of the bungalow have Ugandan Asian rather than Afghan roots. We follow Morrow's investigation in which not only the criminals are the enemy but also some of her scheming colleagues from CID. Ms. Mina wonderfully captures the ugliness of the office politics - the same dirty ticks are used in a police department environment as in a business corporation or a university department. And the language!

"[...] he had a leadership style that would be described with a lot of bullshit buzzwords: inclusive, facilitating, enabling."

Again, Still Midnight is less of a crime novel and more a book about people's hard lives. There are moving flashbacks from one of the main characters' past - recreating dramatic events on the road to Entebbe. We learn about DS Morrow's private life: the recent few months have been quite painful for her.

There is also Danny, Morrow's half-brother, a master criminal of sorts:

"He was on the cusp of legal, running a string of security firms that ring-fenced a territory and won the contracts in it through threats and sabotage."

While it is true that the Danny's thread adds to the richness of the plot, I do not quite appreciate the thread: it seems to me a bit of a contrivance, like an artificially created axis of conflict. That's why I can't rate the novel very high - it is below my "Mina average" rating. Still, a great and a highly recommended read!

Three-and-a-half stars.

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Coppola by Peter Cowie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"'It was a film about morality, and there's not much place in America for those kinds of themes.'"
(Francis Coppola's quote about his Apocalypse Now)

Most people, when asked to name a Francis Ford Coppola movie, would say The Godfather. Indeed, it is a great movie, one of the best in the history of world's cinematography. The Godfather Part II, while perhaps slightly less popular, is critically even more acclaimed. I admire all three parts of Godfather yet I prefer two other films directed by Mr. Coppola: Apocalypse Now and The Conversation. I wouldn't be able to say which of these two I love more, they are certainly among the 10 best movies I have ever seen. In my view, no movie directed by Mr. Coppola after the early 1990s comes even close to the greatness of his early masterpieces so Peter Cowie's biography of the great director, titled simply Coppola, which was published in 1994, is as timely today as it had been 25 years ago.

Coppola is a great biography, unlike the book about Janis Joplin that I reviewed two months ago Pearl or, particularly, the utter disaster of Led Zeppelin bio Stairway To Heaven . In addition to recounting Francis Coppola's life story, Mr. Cowie gives the reader a serious, deep (sometimes perhaps too deep!) and thoroughly captivating analysis of all his films on the background of the social, cultural, political, and movie business environment. The analyses of films are seamlessly merged with the portrait of the times.

We read about Mr. Coppola's Italian roots, his childhood, his overcoming polio, and - naturally - his early fascination with movie projectors and tape recorders. Then come his studies in the Theater Arts Department at Hofstra, graduate studies at UCLA, and the apprenticeship with Roger Corman, the "Z-movie director."

I am now jumping over to the chapter focused on The Godfather. Mr. Cowie writes:

"The notion of family as a paradigm for American capitalism - survival of the fittest, the ruthless annihilation of critics, and the amassing of money which in turn purchases power [...]"

I was eagerly waiting for the author's treatment of The Conversation and I am happy to report that he holds this movie in extremely high esteem:

"No more intense or impassioned film exists in the Coppola canon."

Then comes the chapter about Apocalypse Now. The dramatic story of making this movie, particularly the deeply traumatic events that happened on location in the Philippines are rather well known (by the way, I absolutely have to read Eleanor Coppola's Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now); I just have to emphasize how wonderfully understated the author's coverage of these events is: a lesser author could have offered pages and pages of salacious details. I absolutely adore this chapter and all the quotable passages the reader can find here, for instance:

"[...] the psychological plot from Heart of Darkness, the traumatic ordeal of an entire generation in the Southeast Asian conflict, Francis's own odyssey, and the melodramatic, pop-opera idiom so accurately reflecting time and place."

I have a minor complaint here: although a careful reader may draw the conclusion reading "between the lines" of the text, the author never explicitly compares the grossly under-rated performance of Martin Sheen as Captain Willard with the grossly over-rated performance of Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz. Well, it would be unusual to agree on everything with the author. Chapters on The Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, Bram Stoker's Dracula and several other movies follow.

The book is not only the story of Francis Coppola and his movies, it is also a story of Coppola's Zoetrope Studios. The book is very well written, and well researched, with its 40 pages of detailed filmography, references, and index. I have also found it compulsively readable. Very highly recommended!

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Plot it Yourself by Rex Stout
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'The [conclusion] resulted from my examination of the stories [...] They were all written by the same person. The internal evidence - diction, syntax, paragraphing - is ineluctable. You are professional word-and-language people; study those stories and you'll agree with me.'"

Another purely entertainment read and another installment in the magnificent Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout: Plot It Yourself (1959) is the 32nd novel in the series. The story begins with a serendipitous event: Mr. Wolfe is reading a book that he seems to quite like, written by a certain Philip Harvey, when the phone rings and who else but Philip Harvey is the caller.

The next morning a group of eminent book publishers, with Mr. Harvey serving as their spokesman, arrive in Nero Wolfe's office. The publishers summarize five cases of extortion where writers different than the official authors made charges of plagiarism; the cases did not go to court because of lack of sufficient evidence but the publishers had to settle for substantial amounts. They now want Wolfe to help them stop the extortions as their lawyers have not been successful in resolving the situation.

Wolfe takes the case and immerses himself in literary analyses. He discovers common features of various writers' vocabularies and phrasings. It is quite amusing to read about a writer's predilection for using 'aver' rather than 'say' or about a fondness for the phrase 'not for nothing.' Wolfe and Archie Goodwin have to read books like The Moth That Ate Peanuts, which gives Mr. Stout an opportunity to write about various things literary. Naturally, at some point the events get more serious and Mr. Wolfe gets quite exasperated with the difficulty of the case, which even leads to quite uncharacteristic behavior for him, like a fit of roaring and bellowing.

There are some twists in the plot - the most unexpected one happens in a cloister (this is not a spoiler!) - but the denouement is styled conventionally for Wolfe mysteries. The suspects are compelled to gather in Wolfe's office and he pontificates over the proceedings that lead to exposing the guilty party.

Alas, despite the initially fascinating setup of literary nature, this is not a particularly good installment of the Wolfe saga. The novel overwhelms the reader with too many details and too many characters, which prevents the natural charm of Goodwin/Wolfe stories from shining through.

Two-and-a-half stars.


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The Lemon Table by Julian Barnes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"When I was thirteen, I discovered a tube of contraceptive jelly in the bathroom cabinet. [...] the small print, flaked of a few letters, told me what I didn't want to know. My parents still did it. Worse, when they did it, there was a chance that my mum might get pregnant. This was, well, inconceivable."

Imagine the horror of an adolescent boy who learns that his parents - these sad antiques, relics of the past - still do it. The entire consciousness of an adolescent boy is focused on "it," wanting "it," dreaming about "it," imagining "it," and all the while these ridiculous old folks do it. It offends common sense. This is viciously funny, not even to mention the brilliant pun at the end of the quote. Yet the entire story, The Fruit Cage is way more serious; it is a story about discovering one's parents' secrets.

The Fruit Cage is the 10th of the 11 short stories that compose Julian Barnes' collection The Lemon Table (2004). As usual, I find it impossible to review a set of short stories in a meaningfully holistic way; I am only able to focus on these stories that struck me as highlights of the collection. The only common aspect that I can see is the evident mastery of Mr. Barnes' prose: the writing is wonderful.

From my choice of epigraph it may seem that the stories in The Fruit Cage are funny. Certainly not! In fact two of the stories - for me the best in the collection - are extremely and painfully sad. The beautifully written The Story of Mats Israelson is a tale of mutually unrequited love, stifled by rigid cultural norms in the late 19th century Sweden. The terse prose, devoid of any dramatics and histrionics, underscores the human tragedies of hopes dashed and lives wasted. The reader who likes the illusion of happy endings will be disappointed. Mr. Barnes writes about real life rather than about Disney's fake reality.

Hygiene is even more desperately sad. Wonderful prose emphasizes the tragedy of old age, of human insignificance and transience, of hidden tears shed by geezers when they are alone, of terminal loneliness and hopelessness. The "golden years" are exposed as what they really are - a sham: it's just waiting for merciful death to end the suffering.

The Real Journey, based on events from the life of Ivan Turgenev, is a meditation on love. A passage from that story struck me as one on the more bitterly cynical definitions of love:

"If love, as some assert, is a purely self-referring business, if the object of love is finally unimportant because what lovers value are their own emotions, then what more appropriate circularity than for a dramatist to fall in love with his own creation?"

Cynical or not, there certainly is a grain of truth in the observation that lovers may love their emotions more than the lovee.

I also remember that I quite liked Knowing French the story composed of a set of letters of a highly educated, intellectual woman in her 80s, residing in an old people home, written to a certain Julian Barnes. Yet the overall problem I have with this collection is that I liked the stories much more when I was reading them. Now, several weeks from the time I finished, I can't recall much about six or seven of them and I am hesitant to rate the collection highly even if the writing is outstanding and the sadness that the stories provide is true to life.

Three stars.

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The Burglar on the Prowl by Lawrence Block
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"I could have been there in ten minutes on the train, but I'd worked too hard stealing the money I was carrying to risk letting some common thief take it away from me."

Unfortunately, The Burglar on the Prowl (2004) confirms my fears expressed in the review of my previous book by Lawrence Block in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series, The Burglar in the Library . The newer installments of the series are noticeably weaker that the older ones. Gone is the charm of the novels that opened the series (like The Burglar in the Closet and only the conceptual continuity and the comforting thus boring familiarity of characters are left.

Bernie is preparing to burglarize the apartment of certain Crandall Rountree Mapes at the instigation of his friend, Marty. Mr. Mapes has stolen Marty's young girlfriend and the burglary would serve as revenge and punishment. Unfortunately for Bernie, he is unable to resist his addiction: instead of focusing on preparations for the planned Mapes caper he goes on the prowl. He finds a random brownstone, decides it makes a nice target and picks the locks to enter an apartment. Naturally, things don't go as planned and Bernie soon finds himself in a pickle. Not only does he face serious legal trouble but his apartment is burglarized and important stuff is missing. Even worse, there happens a murder and Bernie is involved in the case.

The plot contains such strange components as Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and ethnic Latvians. Gentle fun is made of John Sandford, the purported author of a bestseller Lettuce Pray. There are some trademark funny passages by Mr. Block, such as

"I told her not to worry her pretty little head, and she gave me a suggestion which, on the face of it, struck me as physically impossible."

I am not quoting the funniest passage so as not to deprave any under-18 readers. But coincidences in the plot begin piling up mile-high. Even the author himself makes fun of this when he writes "the long arm of coincidence." Neat term but a lame excuse for incoherent plot. And - to sum up - a lame installment in a series that began so promisingly with Burglars Can't be Choosers.

One-and-a-half stars.

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