Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is one of the Top 50, maybe even Top 20, books I have ever read (over 3,000 books, I estimate). It is a serious, psychologically deep, compelling, and beautifully written novel, where wisdom about human life emanates from almost every page.

Reverend John Ames, 76 years old and suffering from a heart disease, is a minister in a small Iowa town. Knowing that his time on Earth is short, he writes a sort of memoir in the form of a letter addressed to his six-year-old son, to be read when he grows up. The reverend is making an account of his life, trying to answer the questions: "Was my life a life of a good person?", "Was I a good human being?" and "What does it mean to be a good person?" The author implicitly invites the reader to answer these fundamental questions too.

There is another way of reading the central idea of the novel. It shows the basic human struggle to cope with mortality. Reverend Ames is trying to tell his son that he is a part of a much bigger and more significant entity; that he is a part of the chain that includes his great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and himself. The author also shows that the curse of impermanence is partly offset with the human beauty of existence. I do not think I have ever read a book that would better show the beauty and joy of existence.

One might say that the novel has no plot in the traditional sense; the serious religious, theological, and philosophical considerations form the centerpiece of Gilead. However, the reader will also find many wonderful stories embedded in the novel. The most touching of them, for me, is the story of Reverend Ames's first meeting his second wife—the mother of his son. Also, I believe that even the plot-oriented readers will find intriguing and captivating the narrative thread describing the relationship between the Reverend and his younger namesake, John Ames Boughton, the son of his best friend. I love the open-endedness of the novel. After all, real life lacks clear resolutions and unambiguous answers.

When I read a story or a novel, I care as much about how the story is told as about what the story tells. I was stunned by the beauty of Ms. Robinson's prose in the beginning parts of the novel. Read the breathtaking passage:

"There was the feeling of a weight of light--pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do. It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap."

Or much later in the novel, the following bitter yet accurate statement:

"We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for."

Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012—a deserved recognition for this outstanding novel. I am deeply grateful to my student who recommended the novel to me.

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Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"In 1937 Orwell went to Spain to observe the civil war and write about it. He stayed to take part in it, joining the militia as a private," writes Lionel Trilling in his Introduction to Homage to Catalonia. Orwell fought on the anti-fascist side of the Spanish Republic against the Nationalist coup that attempted to overthrow the election victory of the Popular Front.

Orwell stayed in Spain, mostly on the front, in the trenches, until he was hit by a sniper's bullet. Luckily for all of us, future readers of 1984, he survived and recovered. He vividly describes the experience of being hit in the throat by a bullet: "Roughly speaking it was a sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all around me, and I felt a tremendous shock—no pain, only a violent shock. such as you get from an electric terminal, with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing."

To me, the most important aspect of Orwell's memoir is how clearly he presents the ugly tangle of conflicting political interests of the forces on the anti-fascist side. We learn about the tragic days in May 1937 when different factions on the side of the Republic fought each other for several days in Catalonia, mainly in Barcelona. Orwell writes that among the anti-fascist fighters there were men, "who were killed without ever learning that the newspapers in the rear were calling them Fascists." He sums it up bitterly: "This kind of thing is a little difficult to forgive."

Orwell provides sharp political observations and analyses in two substantial appendices to the text. I believe some readers may find the following observation astonishing: "The only unexpected feature in the Spanish situation—and outside Spain it has caused an immense amount of misunderstanding—is that among the parties on the Government side the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left, but upon the extreme Right."

I highly recommend Homage to Catalonia, particularly to anyone interested in 20th-century history. Well-written, interesting, and highly enlightening work! Certainly deserving more insightful reviews than I am able to provide.

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We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are widely known and universally appreciated dystopian novels, not many people have read We by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. I had also been ignorant of this important work until a student of mine loaned it to me.

We was written in 1920-1921, so I am stunned by how contemporary this 105-year-old novel seems. One of the reasons for that must be the excellent English translation, but the groundbreaking ideas conveyed in the novel give credit to the author alone. The book is set in the 26th century in a totalitarian country called OneState, whose absolute ruler is The Benefactor.

Clarence Brown, the translator, writes in the Introduction that in OneState, "men have finally become, if not actually machines, as machine-like as possible, utterly predictable and completely happy. " Everything is carefully planned and scheduled for all citizens of OneState, including Sex Days. People's names are replaced by numbers, and the narrator, D-503, says, "[...] everybody and I add up to the one We." For citizens who do not follow machine-like routines, operations of imagination removal are available as well as executions, naturally.

One of the central tenets of OneState's ideology is that freedom and happiness are incompatible. The author also presents a parallel dichotomy, which partly explains the incompatibility: "[...] there are two forces in the world, entropy and energy. One of them leads to blissful tranquility, to happy equilibrium. The other leads to the disruption of equilibrium, to the torment of perpetual movement."

The plot describes such a disruption of equilibrium. D-503, is a mathematician and one of the main architects of the space vehicle INTEGRAL, whose construction is about to be finished. D-503 falls in love with I-330, who is a rarity—a rebel citizen. She seduces D-503 to get him to join their cause. I am not going to spoil the further trajectory of the story.

I love the frequent references to mathematics and science, and although in my view the plot is not fully convincing, I wholeheartedly recommend this trailblazing novel. It must have had some influence on Orwell. In fact, he published a review of the novel in 1946, where he effusively praised Zamyatin's work, two or three years before he completed 1984. It might have influenced Huxley as well.

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Confidence by Denise Mina
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have reviewed here 13 novels by Denise Mina. I liked or loved all of them and unhesitatingly recommended all 13, rating eight of them with at least four stars. Thus, I am at a total loss to explain why I do not like Confidence.

The opening of the novel is very promising. The narrator, Anna, a popular vlogger, watches a short movie made by another YouTube creator, Lisa Lee. Lisa is an "urban explorer," and the movie shows her visit to an abandoned chateau in France.

Soon, we learn that Lisa Lee vanished and that her disappearance may be connected with a very old artifact from the chateau—a casket that may have great religious significance. Ms. Mina describes the chase across Europe to locate the casket and explain Lisa's disappearance.

Despite Ms. Mina's usual accomplished writing, the story failed to interest me; finishing reading the novel turned out to be a chore. I am planning to re-read Confidence in summer, hoping to change my mind and write a more positive review.

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The Less Dead by Denise Mina
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Margo, a thirty-something physician, had been adopted as a newborn baby. She is searching for her birth mother. Through the adoption agency she meets her aunt, from whom she learns that her mother had been murdered soon after giving birth. The mother, although a drug user who needed to make money on the streets to feed her habit, managed to give up heroin for pregnancy to give her daughter a better chance in life.

Margo is being watched and has received threatening letters, but the danger only makes her more determined to uncover and explain the events of the past and to identify her mother's murderer. Many characters appear in the novel, and the mystery thread is quite complicated. To me, the most important aspect of the novel is the gloomy social commentary. Police had not invested any time in trying to solve the mother's murder. After all, she was one of the "less dead" - people, who apparently did not deserve any efforts to help from the institutions.

Margo's mother, although long dead and appearing only in memories of others, is one of the main characters in the novel. As usual, I like Mina's writing and the social commentary, and I recommend the novel. Yet, for me, it does not reach the stellar level of the author's better books.

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The Good Liar by Denise Mina
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Professor Claudia O'Sheil is about to make a life-changing decision. She is scheduled to deliver a lecture at the reception of the Royal College of Forensic Scientists in London, a lecture that would cement her leading position among forensic science experts. Claudia's most important achievement is developing the BSPS (Blood Spatter Probability Scale), which has become one of the fundamental tools in forensic science. Yet Claudia has found out that there is an error in BSPS and that many convictions secured based on using the tool may have been wrong. Will she decide to destroy her professional life by telling the truth?

The struggle with the ethic dilemma forms the narrative flow of the novel. Yes, there is a murder mystery involved, very skillfully presented, suspenseful, and full of plot twists. Yet, at least to me, that story constitutes the secondary flow. The two mysteries are masterfully connected and intertwined. The narration alternates between two timelines. One relates the current events just minutes before the lecture. The other describes the fateful events of the preceding year. The combination of these two dualities is an extraordinary successful literary device!

There is so much more in the novel! Biting critique of the class system in the UK, the system that offers unearned privileges to people who have the "right" parents as opposed to all others, who can get just a little closer to the world of privilege by having actual talent and working extremely hard. There is also a family thread in the plot: Claudia's husband has died and she is raising two young sons on her own. I am impressed by how skillfully Ms. Mina portrays the struggles of a single mother with the boys' onset of puberty.

An outstanding mystery and a very good novel. Highly recommended!

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Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In an interview with The Guardian, Elizabeth Strout said, "All ordinary people are extraordinary." I share that sentiment, which is why I like books about the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Not for me are imaginary universes, wizards, and magic spells. I like Strout's Amy and Isabelle a lot.

The novel presents the dynamic and the evolution of a difficult mother-daughter relationship. Traumatic events in the daughter's life force the mother to face the secrets of her own past. Life in a small town is shown with depth and insights. The psychological portraits of the two women are well-drawn and convincing. The events feel realistic so that I believe I have learned something about human nature when I read the book.

So why only three stars? First, because three-and-a-half is not an option. Seriously, though, this is my sixth novel by Ms. Strout; I liked all other five a lot (three of them to the tune of four stars), and I am now familiar with the author's excellence in writing about the ordinary lives of ordinary people. She has raised the bar too high! Anyway, I highly recommend Amy and Isabelle!

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