Murder Through the Looking Glass by Andrew Garve
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"A substantial part of Warsaw's population, including regiments of children, seemed to have been marshaled on to the bleak, windswept platform. They stood in orderly files behind a screen of security police [...] holding aloft red banners inscribed with such slogans as 'The Peoples' Democracies Strive for Peace' and 'Ban the Atom Bomb'"

Andrew Garve's (pseudonym of the British journalist and author Paul Winterton) Murder through the Looking Glass (1951) begins with the Warsaw scene quoted above. A British "peace delegation" gets on board of a train to Moscow to demonstrate support for the peace-loving, people-friendly Soviet rule in the U.S.S.R. The narrator, a British journalist, George Verney, is already on the train which he boarded in Berlin. Having spent several years in the Soviet Union during the war, fluent in Russian, Mr. Verney is on a new journalistic assignment, and he welcomes his fellow travelers with quite an unease as he has seen enough of the Communist regime in his past. By the way, the author revels in his brilliant literary pun of having a group of "fellow travelers" become fellow travelers of Mr. Verney.

The non-criminal aspect of the story is really interesting and the author manages to convincingly present a bunch of characters deluded by Soviet propaganda: some of them may even be well-meaning. But this is a crime mystery, so we have a murder: an important member of the delegation is found dead, his head bashed with a bottle. Our narrator who happens to be the first on the scene discovers some clues. We witness his private investigation that parallels the one conducted by the infamous MVD (successor to NKVD). And, obviously, it is he who eventually discovers the truth.

The entire criminal thread and the private investigation in particular are rather ridiculous, and a reader may infer that the functionaries of MVD are almost like regular police in other countries, only slightly corrupt and inhuman. The mechanisms of widespread, systematic torture and killings of millions of people in the Soviet Union are not mentioned, except for one gentle allusion, even though Stalin is still wielding his monstrous power.

Other than the crime plot, I liked the story as I could easily recognize several aspects of the Soviet life. I too departed for Moscow - more than once - from the same train station in Warsaw. I also have always made fun of Soviet phraseology and in particular of the "stormy applause" expression ("Бурные аплодисменты"), and I also learned how to open a bottle of vodka by smacking its bottom hard. I too had to stay in several Soviet hotels and experienced the "protection" of floor manageresses, the search for recording bugs in the furniture, and the ubiquitous radio loudspeakers tuned to the official propaganda station. My visits to the U.S.S.R. were in the 1970s however, so it is funny how little things changed between 1951 and the end of the 1970s.

Bottom line, a readable book, if we do not pay too much attention to the crime plot.

Two and a half stars.

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Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"What is wanted is history, the man in the raincoat, wearing the loops of his ideas, the buttons of his period. Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is she, rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope."

I am wondering why Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights (1979) is classified as a novel. Probably for business reasons: the publishers are likely to believe that non-novels do not sell. Well, here's a spoiler: Ms. Hardwick's work is certainly not a novel. While some might call it autobiography, it is not that either. Somewhere I have seen a reasonably fitting term - "scrapbook of memories," but then are those really "memories"? How do we know which passages are "real" and which are "fictional", if we put aside the question what the terms "real" and "fictional" mean in literature? Maybe it is a collection of stories connected with the author's past? Nah, none of the passages are proper stories: they do not begin and they do not end. They just suddenly arise from a tangle of words and they dissolve in another tangle. I would like to call Sleepless Nights a set of poetic impressions about life. About people, about places, and about passing.

People come alive from the pages: The brilliant passages about Billie Holiday dazzle with the power of observation and literary virtuosity as do the impressions about Josette and her sister, and about an unnamed man from the narrator's youth and the "warning word disgrace [she] carried with [her] for years and years." The "red-cheeked homosexual young man from Kentucky", the narrator's long-time friend, is the subject of another scintillating portrait.

Places: Kentucky (the author was born in Lexington, in 1916), New York and the West 67th Street, the jazz clubs and the streets. Then Maine. But also Holland. To me, Part Eight, about the narrator's (and presumably the author's) time in the Netherlands is one of the highpoints of the book. Ms. Hardwick captures the literary aspect of Europeanness:

"Amsterdam, a city of readers. All night long you seemed to hear the turning of pages, pages of French, Italian, English, and the despised German. Those fair heads remembered Ovid, Yeats, Baudelaire and remembered suffering, hiding, freezing. The weight of books and wars."

The short chapter about Holland made me remember Nicolas Freeling and his many books about that country. How similar the prose is, how Ms. Hardwick's and Mr. Freeling's cadences evoke the same images and feelings.

Passage of time: The brief visit that each of us pays to the realm of the living. Ms. Hardwick writes, beautifully:

"Where is my life? he seemed to be saying. My plates of pickled mussels, the slices of cheese, the tumblers of lemon gin?

Sleepless Nights is also about women. How they are the subjects of human history, rather than just being filed away as memory objects (cf. the epigraph). The characterization of the narrator's physical relationship with a certain Alex is masterful and so different from the way men usually describe the relationship.

An excellent, mature read, a book to remember. In addition to all the previously mentioned good stuff, the ending is strong and we can find a most wonderful fragment of Hölderlin's poem - in a beautiful translation - that I quote after the rating.

Four and a quarter stars.

"Alas for me, where shall I get the flowers when it is winter and where the sunshine and shadow of earth? The walls stand speechless and cold, the weather vanes rattle in the wind."
(Friedrich Hölderlin, "Hälfte des Lebens", translated, presumably, by Elizabeth Hardwick)

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Hard Truth by Nevada Barr
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"She held [the flashlight] backward and the light blasted her retinas. Startled, she dropped it. Found it. Pointed it in the right direction. "Holy shit," she whispered.
Then the screaming began."

Hard Truth (2005), another National Parks series mystery by Nevada Barr, is the weakest of the five installments I have read so far. In fact, I actively dislike the ending of the novel, badly written and simply in bad taste. Until about page 235 (out of 320) it seems an interesting and worthwhile addition to the series. The story is located in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, where Anna Pigeon is now employed as a district ranger. But then, towards the end of the story, the writing dissolves into pornography of violence.

Three young girls have gone missing in Rocky Mountains National Park six weeks ago, and the intense search has not yielded any results. But now a paraplegic climber, "handicamping" in the park with her aunt comes across two girls, disheveled and covered in mud, feces, and blood. The girls are incommunicative and in a state of shock. When the parents - members of a conservative Christian sect - are notified, instead of being extremely happy, they all lawyer up and prohibit their daughters from being tested for rape and questioned by psychologists or police. Ms. Pigeon is having difficulties in fulfilling her law enforcement duties - finding the third girl - because the parents suspect the involvement of Satan. The whole affair acquires a different flavor when Ms Pigeon finds evidence that someone has been torturing animals. The possibility of a brutal series killer cannot be excluded either.

The absurdly prolonged ending with its barrage of gratuitous violence and brutality overwhelms the reader. It is not just that the scenes of mental and physical torture are excessive but they are also badly written. In High Country Ms. Barr wrote great, captivating scenes of a prolonged ferocious duel between a good person and a bad one. Here the passages depicting brutality are simultaneously disgusting and ridiculous. For instance, a character repeatedly stabbed with a knife and just about to die is glad about the cordovan-colored socks they are wearing as they do not show how much blood is being lost because of their color. Cringeworthy and embarrassing for this usually competent author.

I also wish Ms. Barr wrote more about the Rocky Mountain National Park, which my wife and I visited just a year ago (our thirty-second National Park). The author does know how to write about nature, which she proved in other books in the series. Instead of just mentioning the names such as Sprague Lake, Loomis Lake or Deer Mountain I would love to read more about these wonderful places, with similar skill as the author has exhibited before.

I will probably look for more National Park series mysteries by Ms. Barr, but I am unable to recommend this one.

Two stars.

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Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Already breast to breast and toe to toe, [the birds] made their sinuous necks as erect as flagpoles. They tilted their heads back as far as they would go. They pressed their long throats and the undersides of their jaws together. They formed a tower, the two of them - a single structure, pointed on top and resting on four blue feet."

I am slowly working through Kurt Vonnegut's opus and the ninth book of his that I am reviewing here does not get my recommendation. Galápagos (1985) is to me among the bottom tier of Vonnegut's works and the author's failure makes me wish I have rated higher some other novels, such as the great Bluebeard or the very good Breakfast of Champions ( Slaughterhouse-Five being in an altogether different category of masterpieces of world literature). Galápagos is a cautionary fantasy tale about the ills of mankind. The fantasy overhead of the novel obscures the message and diminishes its worth.

The story is located in Ecuador in 1986 but is told from a vantage point one million years later, after humans have evolved away from their twentieth-century form, away from having huge brains. In 1986 the entire world is in the throes of financial crisis that causes severe hunger on all continents. The fertility rates are dwindling to zero. Six tourists are preparing to board "the Nature Cruise of the Century", from Guayaquil to the Galápagos Islands. While the cruise does not proceed exactly as planned and while not all participants get to the islands, those who do - as well as some stowaways - will have a tremendous impact on the future as they will be the ancestors of the modern (i.e., year 1,000,1986) humans.

The fable implies that the homo sapiens' big brains are responsible for the immense vastness of human stupidity, greed, and love for violence. Not only the individual people are vile, like one of the main characters, James Wait, a marital swindler and accidental murderer, but also the entire repulsive, failed human race demonstrates that it has evolved in a completely wrong direction and deserves annihilation. This is the same motif as in Slaughterhouse-Five but there it was masterfully told, without fantasy gimmicks, and the one-million-year perspective does not provide any payoff here.

One of the few things in the novel that I like is a wonderful passage where Mr. Vonnegut compares a missile that acquires a target to the culmination of sexual intercourse. This image will stay in my memory. Is there a well-written novel focused on the boys' and men's fascination with weapons and killing as being derived from the penile-based sexual drive? If there is not, there should be.

In addition to the overall clumsiness of the story and the overabundance of fantasy components I do not like the story's take on evolution. While the mention of Darwin's work on Galápagos provides a nice addition, the whole evolutionary motif is trivialized and just plain silly. As to the storytelling itself I do not think that the innovative trick of providing an asterisk in front of the names of characters that are just about to die works at all.

Two loose comments: in Mr. Vonnegut's commentary - as usual, he editorializes a bit too much - he seems to be emphasizing that randomness plays much more important role in evolution of species than the natural selection mechanisms. As a proponent of randomness as the guiding force of everything and anything, I would strongly agree.

On another note, the author refers numerous times to two devices: Gokubi, a hand-held translator, and its advanced model, Mandarax, that is a sort of repository of knowledge. One might say that Mr. Vonnegut, as a purported sci-fi writer, predicted the advent of cell phones, Google, Wikipedia, and the like.

And, of course, my usual personal peeve about Vonnegut's novels: the recurring character of Kilgore Trout. In his better novels he sort of disappears overwhelmed by other, good stuff. Here he does not...

Two stars.

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Play Dead by Peter Dickinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The hardest thing for us to accept about the universe is its sheer bloody randomness. Our minds are programmed to look for reasons, for patterns, for purposes, for justice. They are simply not there."

I have reviewed here on Goodreads one novel by Peter Dickinson: One Foot in the Grave , which I found a bit of disappointment. About 40 years ago I read the outstanding A Pride of Heroes (U.S. title: The Old English Peep-Show), which I would rate with at least four stars. While Play Dead is for me a better book that One Foot it is quite far from an almost-masterpiece of mystery novel genre such as Peep-Show.

We meet Poppy Tasker, a youngish grandmother, as she looks after her two-year-old grandson Toby in a children's play centre. The memorable opening scene of children play proves beyond doubt that Mr. Dickinson knows children and their behavior. Toby fancies playing with Deborah Capstone, also about two years old, which poses a problem. Poppy's daughter-in-law is running for a seat in British Parliament as a Labour Party candidate, against Ms. Capstone, Deborah's mother, a Conservative Party candidate.

The criminal thread begins when a young man intently watching Toby is spotted just outside the play centre. The same man later follows Poppy as she walks home and she has to retort to clever tricks to lose him. Few weeks later a mutilated body of a man is found in the play centre and - when interrogated by the police - Poppy suggests this is the same man who watched the children and followed her.

Later in the novel we meet Ms. Capstone and Poppy gets involved with her husband, a Romanian man of Polish ethnicity. This is the fall of 1989: the Soviet rule over Eastern Europe is crumbling. The revolution in Poland has already been victorious, other Eastern Bloc countries have followed and now Ceausescu's regime in Romania is about to collapse. Politics plays quite a significant role in the plot, and not just the fight against Soviet domination. The account of a Labour Party election meeting is vivid and hilarious:

"[...] he said much the same as Janet [...] but making it all so grey and parochial that he might, Poppy thought, have been a woodlouse addressing a convention of woodlice and affiliated beetles and millipedes about the dilapidated state of bark they lived under."

But the best passage in the novel is the astute analysis of the nature of corruption and how it so naturally embeds in a society: why massive corruption works so well and becomes a convenient way of life for most people. Alas, despite Mr. Dickinson's accomplished prose, the novel is marred by too much preachiness, particularly towards its end. Instead of the author explaining the Big Picture behind the events and motivations of the characters, the readers should get that on their own.

On a positive note, the affairs of the heart of late middle-age people are very well portrayed and the author makes it clear that they are so much more interesting than those of the under-30 crowd. Interesting, well written, readable book, perhaps not as much as a mystery novel.

Three stars.


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Ross Macdonald by Tom Nolan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[...] recurring patterns in Macdonald's plots which [...] more resembled Dickens' and Faulkner's than Hammetts's or Chandler's. [...] All men are guilty and all human actions are connected. The past is never past. The child is father to the man. True reality resides in dreams. And most of all, everyone gets what he deserves, but no one deserves what he gets."
(George Grella, University of Rochester, on main motifs in works of Ross Macdonald)

Tom Nolan's Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999) is an outstanding book. The biography portrays the life and works of one of my most favorite writers, the author of "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American." As much as I dislike critical hype and hyperbole, I completely agree with these words of a literary critic about Macdonald's series of novels featuring Lew Archer, a California P.I. I have reviewed all 18 Archer novels, written between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s, here on Goodreads. Two of these novels, The Underground Man and The Chill , are in my view near-masterpieces, and deserve inclusion in the so-called serious literature category.

Sue Grafton, an accomplished and popular mystery author, provides a touching introduction to the biography and emphasizes the profound influence Macdonald had on her own writing. Mr. Nolan provides a detailed account of Ross Macdonald's early years. While most of us know that Macdonald is a pseudonym of Kenneth Millar, fewer readers are aware of the author's fractured childhood and checkered youth, when he spent most of his days apart from his parents and was raised mainly by aunts and uncles, continually changing addresses, cities, and even countries - he spent many years of his youth in Canada. After serving in the US Navy as a communication officer, he studied literature at the University of Michigan and obtained the PhD degree based on the thesis about Samuel Coleridge. His first books, non-Archer ones, were firmly grounded in the hard-boiled crime genre. The Archer series illustrates the author's evolution that freed his writing from the constraints of hard-boiled genre and led to the depth of late works that masterfully depict the human condition.

The biography is fantastically rich in details, analyses and interpretations, so for sake of brevity I will just mention the few threads that I find the most important. The dramatic youth, possible mental illness, and tragic early death of Macdonald's daughter, Linda, cast a long shadow upon the author's life and writing. A Newsweek journalist offers perhaps an oversimplified yet astute diagnosis when he writes about Linda and Macdonald's novels: "she's really the one that all those novels are about."

Another major thread in Macdonald's life is his marriage to Margaret Sturm, later Margaret Millar, an accomplished and popular mystery writer who in 1956 won the prestigious Edgar Award for her Beast in View . The couple had married in 1938 and stayed together until Macdonald's death 45 years later. The thread of spousal "competition" is totally fascinating: in the beginning years it was Margaret who was supporting the family financially through her mystery writing when her husband focused on his academic and military careers; but towards the end, it was Mr. Millar whose earnings dwarfed those of his wife's, when he became a worldwide acclaimed author.

The third thread in the biography is focused on sort of a "rivalry" between Macdonald and Raymond Chandler. It may be true that in the early stages of his literary career Kenneth Millar used Chandler's hard-boiled style as inspiration and pattern to imitate. However, he certainly grew beyond the hard-boiled canon. Mr. Chandler used to denigrate Macdonald's literary skills and disagreed with grouping Macdonald along himself and Dashiell Hammett as the three masters of the genre. In fact, some of Chandler's statements might be construed as attempts to sabotage Macdonald's career. I apologize to Chandler's fans but I think his novels are generally inferior to these of Macdonald's and that listing Chandler as Mr. Millar's equal is not justified. To me, only one novel by Chandler, The Long Goodbye is comparable in class to the best of Macdonald's works.

Fascinating biography and I need to toss a coin to decide whether to round my 4.5 rating up or down.

Four and a half stars.


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A Red Death by Walter Mosley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Police and government officials always have contempt for innocence; they are, in some way, offended by an innocent man."

Walter Mosley who comes strongly recommended by a dear friend of mine is another new author for me. I am thankful for the suggestion: I like the novel and will definitely read more books by Mr. Mosley, although it is hard for me to be enthusiastic about A Red Death (1991). Yes, a good book, with solid grounding in social and political issues, but not particularly remarkable. Maybe the "sophomore curse" can be blamed: this is the second novel in the Easy Rawlins series, one that follows the immensely popular Devil in a Blue Dress.

The story takes place about 1953 in Los Angeles. We meet Easy (Ezekiel) Rawlins, an African American war veteran who moved to LA from Houston, as he cleans an apartment building in the Watts neighborhood. However we soon learn that he actually owns the buildings where he works as a handyman. He explains:

"That's why I kept my wealth a secret. Everybody knows that a poor man's got nothing to lose; a poor man will kill you over a dime."

We also learn that Easy was successful as a sort of amateur detective a few years ago and that there are secrets in his past, which is probably a reference to the previous book.

Easy is in serious trouble. IRS is on his back threatening him with a prison term for tax evasion. The woman he had an affair with in the past has just come to him with her little son. Her estranged husband who had been Easy's best friend may be looking for her: he is a killer and "has gone crazy," according to the woman. In addition, one of the tenants - unable to pay the rent - commits suicide in a building that he owns. When Easy is resolved to kill the IRS agent who pursues him he is miraculously saved by FBI: they promise him help in the tax case if he helps them infiltrate the African American community. He is supposed to set a Jewish man, a suspected Communist organizer, for a fall. The captivating criminal plot gets even more complex, there are more deaths, and it is Mr. Rawlins who provides crucial contributions to resolving the case.

These are the times of "Red Scare", suspected Communist hunts, blacklists, arrests, trials, and other kinds of repressions in the U.S. These are also the times when soldiers come back home dead or wounded from the Korean War. The story takes place in some of the poorest African American neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Racism is overt and ubiquitous and the author - who is himself of mixed black and Jewish ethnicity - draws parallels between persecution of Jews in Europe and economic and social oppression of black people in the U.S.

There are several compelling scenes and threads in the novel. The portrayal of a mass in the First African Baptist Church makes a strong impression. Both the suicide scene and the "dental" fragment (I can't say more without spoilers) are graphic and powerful, and I find the thread of the African Migration group very interesting. Sadly, the author's great efforts are damaged by his tendency to provide unnecessary commentary on the characters' motives and his attempts to tell the readers what they are supposed to think as if they were unable to think on their own. Still, A Red Death is a worthwhile read.

Three stars.

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