Fatal Flaw by Frank Smith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'I know it can't change what happened, but I've changed. They helped me in there -- they really did. There was this psychiatrist who used to come once a week...'"

A remarkably unremarkable novel!

Frank Smith's Fatal Flaw (1996) begins with a man pleading for forgiveness for something terrible that he had done to a woman. Then we read about a burglary, where, curiously, nothing seems to be missing. A man is assaulted after leaving a pub. The three seemingly unrelated events are probably designed to pique the reader's curiosity.

The actual setup of the plot appears to have no connection with these events. On Christmas Day, Monica, a 17-year-old student of a Thornton Hill School for Girls is found dead of apparent suicide. While all other girls have gone home for the Christmas break, the victim had to stay on school grounds because her mother was abroad on government business.

Detective Chief Inspector Neil Paget, helped by Detective Sergeant Tregalles, leads the investigation. (I have now discovered that this is the first novel in the DCI Paget series.) Not much is learned during the first days other than that Monica was unhappy and generally unpopular girl. While at the outset it seems that her death had to have something in common with her visit to the nearby stables, the lead does not bring any progress, and suicide seems to be the obvious conclusion.

On a seemingly lighter note one of the threads involves Paget's romantic interest in Andrea, a local doctor. Yet the lightness does not last as the author hints at some dark secrets in Andrea's past.

This procedural/psychological crime novel is as British as they come! Shropshire county is the location, social class plays a significant role in everything that happens, and there is even a hunt event organized at the stables - I wish it were described in greater detail. DCI Paget is very British in his reserve and general demeanor. Yet for me everything is a bit too cliché: the plot, the situations, and characterizations. The detectives, the school personnel - particularly the headmistress and the housemistress - and the stables crowd feel like characters in a crime novel rather than real people.

Alas, the writing is average too, pedestrian and uninspired. I have found only one short passage in the entire novel that made me go "Wow! Nice!":

"For a moment she had the strangest feeling that the walls of the room had vanished; that there was nothing; she was alone in the universe.
The feeling passed, and she just felt empty."

Yes, I know the feeling. Marginal recommendation.

Two-and-a-half stars.



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Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa by Pauline Butcher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] no one had played his records on the radio and yet over twenty years, he'd sold enough records to make him a rich man. Even John Lennon, when he visited Frank, had been deferential. 'I may be popular, but he is the real thing.'"

Yes, Frank Zappa was the real thing in music. He was also a man of many contradictions so it probably is not astonishing that while most of his life he wanted to make "serious" music he built most of his fame and made most of his money in the "unserious" rock genre. He was, or at least tried to be, a real artist, yet many people know him only for outrageous, shocking performances, associations with various "freaks", and occasionally puerile behavior and offensive sense of humor.

Pauline Butcher's FREAK OUT! My life with Frank Zappa (2011) is a very good read: unpretentious, not gossipy, and, in fact, quite serious. It begins in 1967 when Ms. Butcher, 21 years old at the time, was hired as a temp to type some lyrics for Frank Zappa when he was visiting London. Not only did he tremendously impress her when they met, but he liked her too. It is quite possible that he liked her exactly for what she says he did: she was a straight-laced, forthright, prim young woman: a marked contrast with people who usually surrounded him - his "entourage of freaks."

I do not like the misleading publisher's trick on the back cover: one sentence of the blurb is emphasized in big font:

"'Do you think if we f**ked, you could still work for me as my secretary?' - Frank Zappa"

thus implying that there is a lot about sex in the book. Blessedly that's not true! A reader who is looking for salacious details of freak orgies will be severely disappointed. Yes, there is a bit about Cynthia the Plaster Caster (Wikipedia has a nice article about her), but that's basically it.

Ms. Butcher worked as Frank Zappa's secretary from 1968 to 1972, and lived with Zappa family and his entourage in the famous Log Cabin in Hollywood Hills for most of that period. The reader gets a glance into the everyday life of the admittedly strange group of people occupying the residence, of which Mr. Zappa and Ms. Butcher seem to be the most "normal", whatever the word may mean.

This is really a good read - I am repeating myself - the writing is refreshingly amateurish (in a good way!) and the descriptions of events and characters quite believable, even such details as Ms. Butcher's tribulations with hearing the f-word and resisting its use herself. I have learned a lot of new things about Frank Zappa even though I have already read several books about him including a great biography that I reviewed here on Goodreads Zappa. A Biography (other titles of books on Zappa are included in that review). Ms. Butcher's great characterization of Frank Zappa is included below the rating

Three-and-a-half stars.

"He could delight in ribald tales of travels with the band, but complain with the coldest cynicism about their performance. He welcomed people into the house, and then groused when they hung around. He could be a sympathetic listener, or a mocking tease who ripped at your beliefs and enjoyed the flap. He collected people and then behaved like they were not around. He voiced libertarianism but ruled his band with an iron rod. He feted the disenfranchised and outcasts, yet coveted a capitalist's lifestyle for himself. He scorned the American people for their ignorance while criticising the establishment for treating them like children. He stood in judgement on almost anyone in the outside world - and yet I knew no other man more unassuming, humble or compassionate."

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The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] black ribbons uncurled and stretched themselves across the white expanse, extending from top to bottom, from left to right, forming a random rectangular grid. Then one of the enclosed spaces of white blushed and reddened, and another spontaneously took on a faint sky tint that deepened all the way to a rich cobalt blue, and another red square began to bleed in on the lower right, and --
By God, my mind was painting me a Mondrian."

Three months ago I reviewed here The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling by Lawrence Block, and in the review I wrote:

"[...] there are some similarities between Bernie R[hodenbarr]. and Archie G[oodwin]. (I wish someone could write a story that would allow them to meet)."

and look what happens! On page 38 of my hardcopy edition of The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian (1983), we read

"'Archie,' she said. 'They've kidnapped Archie Goodwin.'"

I feel prescient! Also, what a contrast: I did not much care about the Kipling book while I very much like the Mondrian one!

Anyway, about the plot. Archie Goodwin is not really the Archie Goodwin but still, the current installment of the Burglar series starts strongly: Bernie has an interesting day in his used book shop. A customer tries to sell a book that belongs to a library while another customer reads poetry aloud from a tome she is buying. Later Bernie visits the apartment of another customer who hired him to appraise his book collection. Yet... Bernie has his set of burglar tools with him! Then a lot happens: kidnapping, murder, and more. Piet Mondrian's paintings provide anchors to fix the narrative axis of the plot. Mondrian's paintings disappear, reappear, and get stolen to order.

Wonderful, light, delightful prose! Bernie and his friend, Wally, run in Central Park and do 9:20 miles. Well, at their age, I could do a 7:15 mile! The account of a brief affair between Bernie and Andrea is totally charming. As are further passages dedicated to sexual attraction:

"'Especially since you'd like to verb her again.'
'Well ---'
'And why not? She's got a nifty pair of nouns.'"

(By the way, I have just found out that these cute phrases are now a part of the contemporary Urban Dictionary. Did the Dictionary take it from Mr. Block? Or the other way around?) And what about the following hilarious fragment:

"'Performance art,' Denise was saying. 'First you paint a picture and then you destroy it. Now all we need is Christo to wrap it in aluminum foil. Shall I wrap it up or will you eat it here?'
'Neither,' I said, and began removing my clothes."

Mondrian is a very funny book, in altogether higher class than the Kipling installment. If not for the extremely lame denouement setting, where all suspects are gathered in one place, and the murderer is exposed, I would've give the novel a four-star rating. Even with the lame ending it is a great read!

Three-and-a-half stars.

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Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The only truly infinite thing is our ignorance."

I love reading works by Carlo Rovelli, one of the world's top physicists, and - in my view - the best ever popularizer of modern physics. Statements like the one I used in the epigraph, about human infinite ignorance, resonate with me. I teach mathematics at a university, I have quite an extensive exposure to classical physics, yet my ignorance about modern physics is certainly limitless. (By the way, there is no better way to understand the vastness of one's ignorance than being a professor.)

While I will not rate this book by Dr. Rovelli as a masterpiece like Seven Brief Lessons on Physics , it is still a great read and I have learned a lot from it - not only about my lack of knowledge. The author begins with a story about Anaximander of Miletus (450 BCE) whose work contributed to the foundations of Western science and philosophy.

"The Milesians understand that by shrewdly using observation and reason, rather than searching for answers in fantasy, ancient myths, or religion - and above all by using critical thought in a discriminating way - it is possible to repeatedly correct our worldview and to discover new aspects of reality that are hidden to the common view."

Progressing through time, we read about Democritus, then through Copernicus, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, we follow the evolution of human models of reality. Then come Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Dirac - fathers of the modern physics - and we arrive at the "two pillars of twentieth-century physics - general relativity and quantum mechanics." General relativity is "a simple and coherent vision of gravity, space, and time." Quantum mechanics unveils the three aspects of reality: "granularity, indeterminism, and relationality."

Part Three, Quantum Space and Relational Time is to me the most fascinating part of the book. General relativity and quantum mechanics, "the two jewels that the twentieth century has left us," seem to contradict each other. "They cannot both be true, at least not in their present forms." Chapters 5 through 7 provide an introduction to the loop quantum gravity theory in whose development the author has played one of the key roles.

"[...] the world described by the theory is far from the one we are familiar with. There is no longer space that "contains" the world, and no longer time "during the course of which" events occur."

Part Four, Beyond Space and Time, discusses such aspects of cosmology as Big Bang and black holes. I found the chapter Information the most illuminating. Information is defined as the number of possible alternatives, connections to Boltzmann's statistical mechanics are shown, and the author presents yet another crucial idea - thermal time and its connection with the concept of irreversibility. The author's succinct summary is stunning:

"Time is an effect of our overlooking the physical microstates of things. Time is the information we don't have. Time is our ignorance."

I absolutely love the powerful final chapter, Mystery, with its convincing argument why nothing but science can be reliable:

"The answers given by science [...] are not reliable because they are definitive. They are reliable because they are not definitive.

This is the most powerful argument I have ever heard against all kinds of mumbo-jumbo that ignores science, which is particularly important in the times of a pandemic.

The author provides two fascinating historical vignettes: the first about a "race" to formalize Einstein's theory between David Hilbert, one of the most famous mathematicians in history, and Albert Einstein. The other vignette is about a little known Belgian priest, Georges Lemaître, who showed that both Einstein in his skepticism about the expansion of the universe as well as pope Pius XII in his declaration that the Big Bang confirms the account of Creation given in Genesis were wrong.

Fascinating read!

Four-and-a-quarter stars.

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I is for Innocent by Sue Grafton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The sun wasn't quite down yet, but the light was gray. The days were marked by this protracted twilight, darker shadows gathering among the trees while the sky remained the color of polished aluminum. When the sun finally set, the clouds would turn purple and blue and the last rays of sun would pierce the gloom with shafts of red."

Uh-oh! I am unable to recommend Sue Grafton's I Is For Innocent (1992). In the entire 330-page volume of the paperback I could find only one nice fragment of prose - about the colors of California twilight - that would be suitable for the epigraph. So I am now quite hesitant to continue my "Re-read Sue Grafton's Opus" project. I more or less liked installments from "A" to "G" (all are reviewed here on Goodreads), missed "H" (will find it soon), but "I" was a clear disappointment. I read it just a few weeks ago, did not find time to write the review then, and now I completely forgot what it was about. (Yes, I am old, but I do remember good books that I read even a few years ago!)

Kinsey Millhone is hired by Mr. Voigt, the ex-husband of a woman who had been murdered. The suspected killer, the woman's next husband, had been acquitted, yet Mr. Voigt is absolutely sure of the man's guilt and is suing him for wrongful death in a civil suit. Kinsey is supposed to collect evidence to support their case.

First 50 or 60 pages are quite readable; I like Kinsey and her one-of-a-kind perspective on things. Yet Ms. Grafton's writing soon begins to irritate me. There are too many words, too many sentences that do not convey any value: they do not move the plot, they do not contribute toward characterizations. They have no literary value, unlike the descriptions of nature or landscapes. They are just empty filler stuff. I do not want to copy the empty passages but, say, on page 177 of the paperback we have an almost half-a-page description of how a fast-food worker hands out the order to a customer. On page 224 we have a half-a-page discussion of soup variations.

There is a comedy thread that involves two of the series supporting characters: Henry's (Kinsey's landlord) brother, William, and Rosie (the Hungarian restaurant owner) are having a romantic affair. I find the humor a bit strained. The denouement, with the standoff and shooting, is extremely silly. Ughhhh. My rating should not really be as high as it is, but I like Kinsey so much that I am grudgingly assigning a mercy rating of

Two stars.

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Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Gail had a gift for intentness. She could caress shapeless moments [...] as if she was stroking a puppy, until they wriggled into life and sucked your fingers."

[This review is dedicated to EVK, my outstanding student, who gave me this book.]

Lorna Sage's Bad Blood (2000) is an extraordinary literary work! I could not believe that it is non-fiction. I felt everything was so real as if it were a work of fiction by a great writer. Non-fiction books almost never feel real to me because they do not transcend the particular, the specific, the individual. Their meaning and reach are constrained by the connection to concrete facts, like a balloon that wants to soar high in the sky but is tied to a child's hand. Fiction books are able to much better convey the truth since they allow the reader to focus more on the humanness in general rather than on particular people or concrete events.

Ms. Sage's prose is fabulous! She is an extraordinarily accomplished writer with a wonderful turn of the phrase. Just take this "caressing shapeless moments until they wriggle into life" phrase from the epigraph. Reading this I instantaneously recalled people who had this gift. How many of us, though, would have the talent to describe them in this apparently frivolous yet extremely precise way? A metaphor like that carries more meaning than a faithful and detailed account of real-life behavior.

But wait, there is more: Ms. Sage has written one of three best accounts of childhood and adolescence that I have ever read, along with J. Joyce's and J.M. Coetzee's (which are perhaps more universal and realistic as they are at least in part fictional). Playing doctor in the bushes, the horror of braces, schooling torture and malevolent teachers, like the one in the following, unforgettable passage:

"One day he lined up his class and went down the line saying with gloomy satisfaction 'You'll be a muck-shoveller, you'll be a muck-shoveller...' and so on and on [...]"

Still more: the magnificent account of the first school dance, a momentous event in a schoolchild's life. For me, also the mention of Paul Anka's song Diana! The event must have taken place about 1962. Well, I had my first school dance around that time too, and I also remember the horrors of worrying who, if anyone, I would dance with; and I also counted one, two, three, under my breath while "dancing." And, yes, Paul Anka's Diana was there too! A sort of disclaimer is needed: maybe I like the memoir so much because the author belongs to my generation?

The author's grandparents on her mother's side are the main focus of the memoir. Their hatred towards each other is the dominating motif:

"So married were Grandpa and Grandma that they offended each other by existing and he must have hated the prospect of gratifying her by going first. On the other hand she truly feared death, thus he could score points by hailing it as a deliverance and embracing his fate."

The entire thread of the grandfather's diary is stunningly well constructed and presented. The diary itself and the author's commentary seamlessly move from one to the other.

I could keep enumerating the literary values of the memoir, but the review is already too long. Let me only mention that we get an evocative account of life in deeply provincial Great Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Oh, and my three favorite sentences:

"[...] it's a good idea to settle for a few loose ends [in a story], because even if everything in your life is connected to everything else, that way madness lies."

And what about

"He too was only fifteen, but he smoked and drank, and was fed up with being so young."

And let's end with the best quote about the ending:

"It's the sense of an ending that's timeless.

Four-and-a-half stars, and I am rounding up. Yay! First maximum rating since February.

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