Sidetracked by Henning Mankell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Inspector Kurt Wallander and his colleagues from the Ystad, Sweden, police face what might be their most difficult case. The former minister of justice is hacked to death with an axe and partially scalped. In addition, Wallander witnesses the self-immolation of a girl, and this dramatic event never leaves Wallander's mind while he and his team attempt to find the axe killer, who continues the rampage.

From the very beginning, the reader is offered insights into the mind of the killer. However, the police, not knowing the motives, face a very difficult task, and the investigation rapidly grows. Naturally, it is Wallander who solves the case, despite struggling with personal problems.

Sidetracked is an excellent procedural, with an interesting plot and credible characterizations. Yet there is nothing in the novel that would transcend the procedural genre, and the book, at 421 pages, is—in my nitpicky opinion—too long. But I highly recommend it to all readers who don't mind the hefty volume.

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Mortal Engines by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stanislaw Lem, arguably the greatest science fiction writer of all time and certainly the most widely read sci-fi author, was the favorite writer of my youth. I believe I have read everything that he published, most of it in Polish. I have also reread many of his books in English translation and have reviewed five of them on Goodreads, among them two unquestionable five-star books ( A Perfect Vacuum and His Master's Voice). Also, let's not forget that Lem was much, much more than just a sci-fi writer. He was a philosopher, futurologist, humanist, literary critic, and popularizer of science. His 1960s and 1970s visions of the future predicted the ascent and ubiquity of AI.

Mortal Engines is a compilation of short stories; 11 of them have been taken from Lem's famous Fables of Robots, the other three, including the magnificent The Mask, from other sources. The Fables stories are just like the "regular" fairy tales, but they are set in a world populated exclusively by android robots. Each of them is equipped with advanced AI so that their behavior is basically the same as human. The AI is more advanced than ChatGPT, but it is amazing how accurate Lem was in 1964, when the stories were published, in predicting the capabilities of AI.

The fables are very funny, and I exploded in laughter many times reading the stories. How about "Tikcuff!!" the battle cry of the Triodius race? The universe of the Fables is strictly physics-based (let's take an example from the second story: "...he knew ways of threading photons on a string, producing thereby necklaces of light..."), yet the prose is creative and charming. Also, one has to give the highest praise to Michael Kandel, the translator. I have been able to read a few paragraphs in the original Polish and then in his translation, and nothing of the original style, mood, and beauty has been lost.

The story The Sanatorium of Dr. Vliperdius features Ijon Tichy, the incomparable space explorer and traveler, first introduced in Lem's The Star Diaries. The intrepid star pilot Pirx (known from the popular Tales of Pirx the Pilot) is the protagonist of the engrossing action story The Hunt.

Finally, the outstanding The Mask, one of the best short stories I have ever read. The protagonist is an artificial yet sentient being, and the plot involves a metamorphosis (I am unable to explain more as it would spoil the plot, but let me at least point out that the word 'metamorphosis' itself is a hint). The story is pretty deep and invites multiple interpretations, but the main philosophical question it raises is the issue of free will in artificial sentient beings. A superb work of literature, beautifully written in a sort of Gothic romance style. Again, the translation is truly perfect.

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In The Eden Express, Mark Vonnegut, son of the great Kurt Vonnegut, describes his struggles with schizophrenia and the eventual recovery from the illness.

We follow, in a somewhat non-linear fashion, the events in Mark Vonnegut's life from his June 1969 graduation from Swarthmore College, through a short period of employment, to the 1970 journey with his girlfriend to British Columbia. These were turbulent, post-Sixties times, with the nation involved in and divided by the Vietnam War. Several other Swarthmore graduates join Vonnegut and his girlfriend, find a barely accessible yet beautiful piece of undeveloped land in British Columbia, and set up a hippie commune. Initially, things seem to be going very well.

Fluctuations in Vonnegut's mood between utter euphoria and total despair signal the slow onset of schizophrenia. The process of descent into illness is meticulously described. The author recounts, in detail, three intense episodes, two stays in a mental hospital, and the recovery.

I am poorly qualified to have an opinion on the issue, but it seems to me that Mark Vonnegut wants to suggest the biochemical basis of his illness rather than seeing it as a social construct, as an individual's reaction to the insanity of a society at war.

While I read the book with interest, and while I very much appreciate the author's intentions of providing a first-person account of "descent into madness," I am wondering to what degree the detailed descriptions of thought processes during the episodes were altered ("edited") by his memory during the period between the actual episode and the writing of this book, which took place quite some time after the illness struck.

Hannibal by Thomas Harris
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Until about the middle of the book, Hannibal is just a silly fairy tale for adults about the fight between evil but omnipotent Dr. Lecter and Clarice Starling, the brave and intrepid warrior for the side of good. This struggle takes place on the backdrop of dirty politics in Washington, D.C. But then the author switches gears and tries to dazzle the reader with an orgy of torture and death. For instance, we can learn how to feed a living human being to hungry feral pigs in order to maximize the spectators' enjoyment.

In a spectacularly silly passage, the author attempts to impress the reader with the indomitable Dr. Lecter's knowledge of math and physics; we learn that he is using string theory trying to defeat the second law of thermodynamics and have entropy decrease with time!

One of the early parts of the novel is set in Florence, Italy. The prose in that part is quite good and vivid, and the author even includes some of Dante's poetry in Italian. Yet the overall silliness of the story, the fascination with torture, and the stunning, truly stunning asininity of the ending place the novel firmly among the worst books I have ever read.

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Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is yet another book by Elizabeth Strout that I greatly enjoyed. Anything Is Possible is hard to categorize: while it is a collection of nine short stories, they are all linked not only by location—a small, rural town in Illinois—but also by the character of Lucy Barton, who even appears in one of the stories. Thus, it wouldn't be incorrect to classify the book as a novel.

More importantly, the stories are unified by their main themes: loneliness, pain of the present, pain of memories, dark shadows of the past, and sadness caused by various human failures. Yet, the stories also show some optimism: compassion, joy, and hope.

Mississippi Mary is probably my favorite story in the collection: it is mainly about difficult mother-daughter love, but it also shows how a relationship between two people has a way of changing over a long period of time from love to hate or indifference. But I also love Dottie's Bed & Breakfast, which reminds us of our ugly need to feel superior to others but also has a flash of humor. Sister, with its dramatic ending, shows us that it is not really possible to come back home having left it many years ago.

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101 Reykjavik by Hallgrímur Helgason
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Twelve years ago, I read and enthusiastically reviewed The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning . I loved the book so much that I immediately reached for the acclaimed 101 Reykjavik by the same Icelandic author, Hallgrímur Helgason. Alas, I could not get through the first 50 pages, so I had to put the book away to wait for when I mature a little. Well, I have now managed to read the entire novel, and I have appreciated the experience. Yet, while I am recommending the book, I am unable to assign it a high rating.

The reason for my difficulties with the novel is the prose. It is mainly a sort of "stream of consciousness" style of first-person narration, grounded in language. Mimicking the narrator's thought process, the author indulges in creating avalanches of words and phrases, word associations, and puns. For me, the resulting flood of verbiage, the lava streams of words, are hard to read, and I am too lazy to consistently keep intense attention on the pages, particularly in the case of overlong inner monologues when the narrator is drunk, on drugs, or both.

Laziness is also the main problem of the narrator, Hlynur, who is 33 when the novel begins, who lives with his mother, and whose only activities are heavy drinking in bars, getting high, and--most importantly--having casual sex. He does nothing else, does not work, and lives off his mother and a disability pension. Consequences of sex and issues related to sexual orientation form the narrative axis of the novel. Obviously, Hlynur is not a nice character; his relationships with women are atrocious, yet the author shows glimmers of sympathy for Hlynur's weaknesses and failings.

There are several hilarious and wonderfully written passages, for instance, the Christmas party with the in-laws or the scene with Hofy's family. I particularly like one of the later fragments of the book, where Hlynur and a gay couple of his pals go on a trip to Amsterdam and Paris. If the entire book were written in that manner, I would've assigned it a higher rating.

In the novel, published almost 30 years ago, Mr. Helgason aptly captured some ills of the modern society, which have only grown worse since then, for instance, people's short attention spans. Here's a funny short bit, which shows Hlynur's thoughts when riding in a car and watching the landscape: "Those mountains are so irritatingly still. No way of zapping over to something else."

Pop culture of the 1990s is portrayed richly and vividly, particularly pop music. The translator, Brian FitzGibbon, has done an excellent job, considering the language-oriented inner monologues. I believe 101 Reykjavik is a very good novel, which I underappreciate because of my inability to focus. Let's finally note that quite a popular movie based on the novel was made in 2000. The film received several international awards.

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Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third novel by Elizabeth Strout that I read and, chronologically, the second book by the author, published in 2006. I loved both Olive Kitteridge (2008) and My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) and rated them with a solid four stars. Abide with Me is a very good novel too, but, for me, not quite on the same level.

The plot is set in 1959, in a small New England town. Several years earlier, young Reverend Tyler Caskey was appointed as a minister of the town parish. After a few happy years, he has recently been dealing with huge personal loss while trying to help his parishioners not only with strengthening their Christian faith but also with their personal problems.

The novel shows why it is difficult to be a human. It is about the central aspects of our humanness: about loss, about our personal weaknesses, about our failures, and about differences between our ambitions and expectations and the actual reality that ensues as a consequence of our actions. The book is yet another example of how literary fiction, created by a skillful author, conveys truth about people much better than a nonfiction account ever could. The writing is beautiful, as usual for Ms. Strout: the prose is clear, simple, and economical.

It is worth noting that—while the main focus of the plot is on characters' tribulations—the signs of a tense political situation keep popping up in the background: mentions of Mr. Khrushchev, nuclear weapons, building anti-atomic shelters, etc.

It was a hard decision, but, for me, Abide with Me does not rise to the four-star level. First of all, in my view, the ending does not match the tone and the mood of the rest of the book. Otherwise, and this is totally subjective, I did not experience the feeling of awe about the novel, one that I clearly felt about the other two books by Ms. Strout.

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