The Rattle-Rat by Janwillem van de Wetering
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"United Europe [...] That's the dream. Why shouldn't it come about some day? All together and still apart? [...] United above all troubles?"

Many years ago a dear friend of mine highly recommended Janwillem van de Wetering’s novels. I had tried to read The Corpse on the Dike and was able to get through just a few pages: I could not follow the bizarrely structured text. About 30 years later I decided to try again and chose a different book - The Rattle-Rat (1985). This time I managed to finish the book only because of my superhuman patience and dedication. I admit the plot is interesting and many characterizations and situations are presented with nice insights and a nice sense of humor but I will not attempt any other book by the author. The problem is that while I understand all the words and almost all sentences in the novel, I do not understand many paragraphs. Mr. van de Wetering’s prose constantly leaves me wondering whose point of view he is presenting at any given time. It seems that frames of reference change frequently within the same paragraph. The fault is not with the translation as I understand the author wrote himself two versions of the book: the Dutch one and the English one.

An Amsterdam Police constable notices a floating fire, something burning in the waters of Amsterdam Inner Harbor. The next morning Adjutant Grijpstra and Sergeant De Gier of the Murder Brigade have to deal with a corpse burned beyond recognition, found in a blackened aluminum rowboat. The autopsy indicates that it might be a laborer's body but the expensive dental work does not quite match. Soon the suspicions as to the identity of the victim focus on a Frisian man and the criminal plot gains an accompanying motif of juxtaposing the northernmost province of Frisia (Friesland) with the rest of the Netherlands, and Amsterdam in particular.

Many interesting subplots contribute to the story: sheep trade, Chinese immigrants, heroin dealing, prostitution, Hong Kong vs. Singapore triads, and the rare disease of trigeminal neuralgia. Two threads make the strongest impression: Hylkje Hilarius, a Frisian police female corporal, offers a convincing characterization of a modern liberated woman. And of course we have the pet rat mentioned in the title. The rodent plays quite a prominent role in the plot.

There is a lot of humor in the novel, most of it based on contrasting the good Frisians and bad Amsterdammers who wallow in filth. We are told about 167 times that the unnamed commissaris, Grijpstra’s and de Gier’s boss, was born in a city of Joure (city of 13,000 people) in Frisia. There are some funny sexual references like:

"Why does your wife copulate in a cupboard?" Hylkje asked. "So that she may debauch herself in secret."

We have quite a “socially progressive” ending, fitting the image of the Dutch as some of the most progressive people on Earth. And we have this wonderful passage, quoted in the epigraph, about the dream of united Europe: the dream that came true for a while and now is in grave danger of being trampled by nationalistic fervor.

I like most things that are Dutch, I love my memories of Amsterdam, and the Dutch author Cees Nooteboom is my most favorite writer. If only I could understand the paragraphs written by Mr. van de Wetering!

Two and a quarter stars.

View all my reviews

Bill Bruford - The Autobiography: Yes, King Crimson, Earthworks and More by Bill Bruford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Popularity is a crime from the moment it is sought; it is only a virtue where men have it whether they will or no." (Marquis of Halifax, Moral Thoughts and Reflections (1750), as quoted by Bill Bruford)

Bill Bruford: The Autobiography (2012) is an outstanding work by the famous drummer, a legend in the rock and jazz music community, and the "godfather of progressive drumming." The autobiography presents the 40-year career of Mr. Bruford, from his work in the famed progressive rock bands Yes and King Crimson, through electronic jazz, to acoustic jazz drumming. As far as I can ascertain this is not a ghost-written work: there is little of that characteristic polished, glossy style of entertainment writers and a lot of somewhat endearingly awkward prose of an "amateur" author.

By far the best aspect of the autobiography deserves capitalization: THERE IS NO SHOW BUSINESS GOSSIP in the book! The reader will not learn who slept with whom, who took which drugs, or who fired whom from the band. These kind of issues belong in tabloid magazines and luckily there is virtually nothing of that kind here, with the exception of some gentle fun made of Robert Fripp, the famed leader of King Crimson. This is a really serious book, one that deals with serious issues in a mature way.

Another good feature of the autobiography is that it is not chronological but instead arranged around selected topics from theory, business, and sociology of music, which of course helps the author focus on the serious aspects of his career. He repeatedly "circles in time" and returns to his periods of playing with Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, Bruford, and Earthworks.

Some of the topics studied by the author are: the relationship between talent and success in the music world, the differences between being an artist and a craftsman, the theory of music as a social phenomenon, differences between composed and improvised music, and similarities and differences between mathematics and music. The closest that the author comes to the dreaded gossip in his autobiography are passages that portray the interpersonal dynamics on a rock/jazz tour and detailed descriptions of recording sessions. Still, luckily we have no sensationalism here.

Let me just focus on two of my hot-button issues. The first one is about "music as art" versus music as a commodity. Mr. Bruford nicely says that artists create music "to soothe their soul," and he chides the alternative - the focus-group-based, business view of music whose goal is to study "what the market wants and provide it." Alas, the latter approach is prevalent these days.

The other issue dear to my heart is the dramatic shortening of the attention span for modern listeners. Mr. Bruford writes:

"For a whole new generation, listening to a piece of music from beginning to end seems unusual. Through TV advertising we hear slices of Beatles songs, Bach cantatas, jazz and blues pastiche, and - here is the point - all of it incomplete".

The "incomplete listening" goes hand in hand with the more and more common "multitasking," which means that instead of doing one thing well, we do two or more things poorly.

There is a number of cool and catchy phrases in the autobiography, such as "Music begins where language leaves off" and several funny quotes, such as

"The [progress in] technology has benefits (anyone can make a record) which immediately leads to drawbacks (everyone does make a record)."

For a moment I was even toying with the idea of a five-star rating for this interesting, analytical, and insightful book. But no, let's leave five stars for absolute masterpieces.

Four and a quarter stars.


View all my reviews

The Shanghai Moon by S.J. Rozan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Through the years that day has come back at times, unbidden, as terrible moments will. I've always thought every detail engraved on my memory so deeply that I'd never forget a single sight, a single sound. But when I look closely, to try to explain it to you, events appear jumbled and confused. Sounds evade my hearing, sights are inexplicable."

Coincidentally, I have read S. J. Rozan's Shanghai Moon (2009) immediately after Patrick Modiano's After the Circus . The beautifully written passage quoted in the epigraph that comes from Ms. Rozan's mystery/crime novel could equally well belong in the "serious" work of the 2014 literary Nobel Prize winner. Ms. Rozan's book is written extremely well and transcends the usual literary limitations of the crime fiction genre. For a long time into the novel I was sure the five-star rating is inevitable. But then what I attribute to some kind of Ms. Rozan's mental hang-up took over and for the ninth time in her nine books that I have read there is a shootout scene near the end of the story. I used to be angry about the atrocious endings but now I am furious at the author for defacing her own work. Guns should have no place in this wonderful novel: they cheapen it, make it look like a run-of-the-mill crime drama, instead of something very special, a gem that it could have very well been.

This is a Lydia Chin novel (Chin and Bill Smith alternate as protagonists). After their last case together (the great Winter and Night ) Bill has been estranged from Lydia. But now he is back thus allowing the incomparable "chemistry" between the two characters to return. The story is told in two separate time frames: the current (early 2000s) and the past, 1938 - 1946, in Shanghai, China. In the current time frame Lydia is hired by a PI friend of hers who is working for a Swiss attorney specializing in recovery of assets for families of Holocaust victims. The grandchildren of a Jewish woman, Rosalie, who in 1938 escaped the intensifying German persecution in Austria and fled to Shanghai are trying to recover a valuable piece of jewelry. Rosalie is believed to have carried the famed brooch called Shanghai Moon while fleeing Austria. Other jewelry items that once belonged to Rosalie have been found in Shanghai and it is suspected that the brooch might have been brought back to the States. Lydia is hired to conduct discreet investigations in the Chinese community in New York.

Events in the 1930s - 1940s time frame are portrayed mainly via Rosalie's letters to her mother that Lydia has found on the Jewish Museum website. We accompany 18-year-old Rosalie and her younger brother as they travel on an ocean liner to Shanghai and then the story follows their first months as refugees on Chinese soil while their host country has just been invaded by Japan. Later, the civil war in China erupts and the story gets even more dramatic.

Let's make things clear: the Lydia-Bill chemistry, and the current-time criminal intrigue are completely unimportant when compared to the truly masterful portrayal of war times in Shanghai. This is first-class literature and the wonderful prose conveys the sense of the time and place. To use Lydia's words from the novel: "I felt like I'd been in Shanghai, walking beside Rosalie, for weeks." I really did.

While I can fully understand why the book won two major literary awards I am still seething about the author using a gratuitous, stupid shootout scene. She spoils her own ambitious and otherwise very successful work. Yet regardless of how much I hate the author for her moronic act, this badly damaged work still deserves very high rating.

Four stars.

View all my reviews

After the Circus by Patrick Modiano
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Outside everything seemed light, weightless, and indifferent – like the cold blue January sky.”

Reading After the Circus (1992) has been my first contact with the French author, Patrick Modiano, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2014. There are many good things about this slim volume, and it has made an impression on me, albeit not one on the order of a masterpiece. First of all, it is a wonderfully short book, not much over 100 pages – one could technically classify it as a novella but it feels like a fully-fledged novel. More importantly, it deals with some of my favorite topics: the transience of memories and non-existence of the past. Yet the most impressive feature is the minimalistic prose. The author's economy of words is fascinating: no word is wasted and there are no spare words that could be removed without harm to the novel.

The book might conceivably be viewed as a thriller, but not of the usual action-cliché-upon-action-cliché variety. There is little action to speak of and the reader’s focus is kept through growing atmosphere of foreboding and menace. Three time frames exist in the novel: in the current time (early 1990s) Jean, the narrator, reminisces events that happened 30 years earlier, and there also is an unexpected detour to the 1970s.

Early 1960s, Paris. Jean is not quite 18 yet, and we meet him as he is interrogated at a police station. He is unable to understand why he is questioned; the reader is even more in the dark as the author points out that Jean is not always telling the truth. Jean notices a young woman - much later we learn that her name might be Gisèle - who is called to the interrogation room after him. He waits for her, they talk, and since she has to move out of the apartment she has been renting and has nowhere to stay, Jean offers her his place. His parents went (fled?) to Switzerland and left Jean the apartment. Gisèle happens to have some strange friends who ask Jean to run an errand: meet a man in a cafe and tell him that another man is waiting outside. The tension is skillfully ratcheted and culminates in a dramatic finale.

To me the following passage (my translation of the Polish translation of the French original) is the key to one understanding of the novel:

"Today I see this scene as if in a fog. In dim light, through the window pane I can make out a fiftyish blonde man in a tartan bathrobe, a girl wearing a fur, and a young man... The light bulb in the lamp is too small and weak. If I could go back in time and return to that room, I would change the bulb. But then, in bright light, everything might well dissipate."

The seemingly all important "now", with all its interconnections, circumstances, relationships is continually dissolving into the past, but the actual past does not really exist, only the dim shadows of our memories.

One can read After the Circus also as a love story - sweet yet very low-key, implied rather than told, and suggested with the faintest touch of the literary brush. There is a strong feeling of autobiographical element in the way the story is told, for instance, Jean is said to be an aspiring writer. Vague references to politics and war are intriguing, particularly the passage where Jean's father asks for the files to be destroyed. What files, the reader may ask. But the files and their meaning existed in the parents' past.

A slight, subtle, and sad story. It reminds me a little of one of the best books I have read in my life, Cees Nooteboom's The Following Story , in that it deals with human impermanence and phantoms of the past, but Mr. Nooteboom does past much, much better. Nobel Prize in literature for him is way overdue.

Three and a half stars.

View all my reviews

High Country by Nevada Barr
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Torture was good. It gave her time."

What a difficult book to review! Nevada Barr's High Country (2004), my fifth book in her National Parks series featuring ranger Anna Pigeon, seems to be composed of two completely different parts: 240 pages of amateurish crime solving and inept, awkward prose, and - in the middle of this dud - a 60-page jewel of a thriller: an outstanding, well-written story of extremely brutal fight-to-death and survival in the unforgiving winter mountain scenery. If I were a suspicious reader, I would immediately jump to a conclusion that Ms. Barr wrote the 60 pages herself (she can write well as evidenced by, for example, Blood Lure ) and then had the remaining clunker ghost-written by someone else. (I prefer not to entertain the idea that it was the other way around.)

Ms. Pigeon works undercover as a waitress in the historic Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite Valley. She is on the assignment because four young people (mainly National Park personnel) disappeared during a period between two heavy snow storms and some kind of foul play is suspected. There had been serial murders in a nearby town so some people suspect a copycat in action. In addition to the investigating the disappearances Ms. Pigeon is facing a constantly growing array of mysterious happenings: a near-death experience of her roommate, presence of some strange men in one of the tent cabins that used to belong to climbers, several attempts on her life, and other events that are hard to explain.

Based on scraps of conversations that she has overheard she sets up to hike in the higher portion of Yosemite Park. Finally, by page 150 or so, the author delivers what I have been waiting for: descriptions of gorgeous mountain scenery. Ms. Pigeon takes the reader onto the Illilouette Trail and to Lower Merced Pass Lake. Here, the truly excellent part of the novel begins. First the author hints at the possible solution of the disappearances and several other mysteries. Then we have the unforgettable thriller sequence where Ms. Pigeon has to fight for her life against extremely brutal opponents. Her survival depends on her using equally brutal means. The fight culminates in one of the most gut-wrenching duels I have seen on pages of thrillers. Gripping, well-written, and not in any way more implausible than the plots of most famous bestselling thrillers.

Alas, good things do not last forever and for the closing part of the novel we are back to pedestrian plot and completely uninspired writing. I feel the need to repeat myself: it is hard to believe that the same author who wrote the thrilling and captivating 60 pages is responsible for painfully clumsy prose full of circumlocutions (for example, "blissfully unaware of the currents of unease"), for editorializing characters thoughts, and other inanities.

By the way, I love the title: a cool double entendre! The rating is the average of five stars for the thriller and one star for the hopeless main part of the book.

Three stars

View all my reviews

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

" It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time."

Let me begin with a disclaimer: my enthusiasm about Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is limited not because I do not appreciate the central message of the novel. In fact, I would prefer that of the two human genders the males were limited to reproductive functions (and of course the all important tasks of watching sports, drinking beer, and playing with guns) while women were in charge. I just do not like the novel much as a literary work of art. Similarly, while I have been deeply touched by the message of Orwell's 1984 I do not think it is written well. By the way, Atwood's book was published in 1985, just one year after Orwell's target year. Coincidence? (Just kidding...)

Ms. Atwood's dystopian novel is a classic so I do not need to provide synopsis of the plot, which can be found in zillion places on the Web. In the so-called Republic of Gilead (the term "republic" is used in the sense as in "People's Republic of North Korea" rather than that of Plato's republic) a caste of women called "handmaids" are kept "for breeding purposes" so that for them having "viable ovaries" is the basic social criterion. They are indeed crucial to the survival of the society as the birth rates have plummeted because of pollution and other factors. The policy is set and enforced by Commanders, a caste of males who actually own the handmaids, whose names are like Offred (the narrator's owner is Fred), Ofglen, or Ofwarren.

Among the many powerful and unforgettable scenes depicted in the novel the reader may find the Ceremony most shocking. This the ritual of fertilization attempt of a handmaid performed by her owner in presence of his wife (a higher caste of females). In perhaps the most sarcastic sentence in the novel Ms. Atwood writes that the term "copulating" would be "inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved." She uses a more fitting, seven-letter gerund. Other rituals that stay in memory are Salvagings (remember, this is Newspeak), Testifying, hangings of "criminals" on the Wall, and the most horrific of them all, Particicution, i.e., a participatory execution, a delight for those of us who feel empowered by administering punishment to convicts.

Some of the author's acerbic scorn is aimed at commercialization of religion, for example:

God Is a National Resource

We are introduced to a Women's Prayvaganza and to praying machines: a woman can use a sort of ATM-system to buy a certain number of machine repetitions of a prayer, and her account will be debited appropriately. Superb satire!

I certainly have serious problems with the purely literary aspect of the novel. It is overwrought, over-emotional, and - which is the worst - over-explained. The author seems to underestimate the intelligence of the reader. The images evoked by the prose are powerful enough: why not let the readers form their own opinion and "get the message" without being explicitly told what it is? Still, even if quite imperfect, it is a very important book, and I would be happy to have it among recommended readings for students.

Four stars.

View all my reviews

Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"He lay down and closed his eyes in a rage, but nothing was as it should be, neither the shadows nor the light, nor the sounds, nor even the twittering sparrows, and his whole being tossed impatiently in the drab limbo."

The Belgian author Georges Simenon is mainly known for his famed series of psychological crime stories featuring Commissaire Maigret (I have reviewed three of his novels on Goodreads, the best of them being Cécile is Dead ). Monsieur Monde Vanishes (1952) is a standalone novel and, in fact, even if it begins at a police station, it is not a detective story at all. I would categorize it as a psychological novella (just about 130 pages) about a man taking a dramatic turn in his life: depending on the point of view, some will call the turn "a midlife crisis" while others "a moment of spiritual rebirth."

Norbert Monde is a successful businessman - he has inherited a brokers' and exporters' company that has carried the family name for over 100 years. Madame Monde notifies the police about her husband's disappearance: he has been missing for three days. The wife truthfully answers the Superintendent's question about her husband, yet the author astutely remarks that "sometimes nothing is less true than the truth."

From then on we look at things from Mr. Monde's point of view. He just can't take the kind of life he lives any more. He cannot sustain the focus needed to run the business while his personal life is in shambles: his first wife left him, he has nothing in common - and never really had - with his second wife. He can't stand her little black, cold, calculating eyes:

"[t]hat fixed stare. That unconscious, immense, haughty contempt, that apparent obliviousness to anything outside herself, [...]"

He considers his grown-up son a failure, nobody remembers his forty-eighth birthday, and he is unable to name even one person to whom he is close. Mr. Monde decides to chuck it all, escape from his dreary life, and perhaps find some sense of his existence. He takes the train to Marseilles and finds a room in a cheap hotel.

The powerful scene of Mr. Monde crying over his meaningless life in the hotel room is to me the highpoint of the novella.

"What was streaming from his whole being, through his two eyes, was all the fatigue accumulated during forty-eight years, and if they were gentle tears, it was because now the ordeal was over."

I find the first half of the novella, a deep psychological study, much better than the rest of the story where much happens, alas at the expense of the sharpness of psychological observations. The reader may find the ending surprising - as I did at the first moment, before I had the chance to think about it a little - but it is quite a fitting ending, from the literary point of view. Thus I am rounding up my marginal recommendation.

Two and three quarter stars.


View all my reviews