Side Effects by Woody Allen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Woody Allen’s “Side Effects” is most likely the funniest book I have read in my life. Almost each of the about two hundred pages contains at least one passage that made me laugh out loud, which makes things a bit tricky, especially when you read on the trolley and your fellow passengers look at you suspiciously and move to far-away seats.

Already the second paragraph on the first page is hilarious: “Needleman was constantly obsessing over his funeral plans and once told me, ‘I much prefer cremation to burial in the earth, and both to a weekend with Mrs. Needleman’”. As a mathematician I cannot avoid to laugh out loud at the “Oh, I ran into Isosceles. He has a great idea for a new triangle.” And the totally fabulous passage “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” And yet one more pearl of humor: “Never before has pornography been this rampant. And those films are lit so badly!”

Most of the book is just pure fun and devoid of any deeper content. However, I found four stories to be much more meaningful. “The Kugelman Episode” in which professor Kugelman meets Emma Bovary thanks to magician Persky (funny, I once met a Mr. Persky in Zakopane, and he was sort of a magician). Then “The Shallowest Man”, which is a great story about death and love. In “Fabrizio’s: Criticism and Response” Mr. Allen displays virtuoso literary skills writing about pasta. Finally, “Retribution” is one of the funniest stories about sex I have ever read.

What the heck, I am going to round my four and a half star rating up. The book is, of course, nothing in the class of Coetzee, Pynchon, Joyce, Faulkner, Vonnegut, etc., but the sheer hilarity factor is stunning. Allow me one last quote: “Wittgenstein used the above model to prove the existence of God, and later Bertrand Russell used it to prove that not only does God exist but He found Wittgenstein too short.” The previous five-star book I have read, Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five", is a masterpiece. This one is not, but it has been so much fun to read it.

Four and a half stars.


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Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Eva (originally Ewa) Hoffman's autobiographical book "Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language" is the fourth great book about childhood and growing up that I have read recently. It belongs in such a distinguished company as James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", John Coetzee's "Boyhood", and Amelie Nothomb's "Loving Sabotage". It is perhaps not as deeply intellectual as Joyce's work, not as fiercely social and political as the Coetzee's book, and not as utterly charming as the Nothomb's novel, but it is a great, wise, and deep book. Of course I may be biased - the book is mainly about the contrast between Polishness (which is my ethnicity) and Americanness. I am also both a Pole and an American (meaning USian) and I can relate to most things Ms. Hoffman writes about.

The author was born in a Jewish Polish family. When the political climate became milder in Poland in the late Fifties, the family was allowed to emigrate to Canada. Ms. Hoffman was 13 at that time, which is probably the most difficult age to emigrate. The family boards the ocean liner "Batory" and they finally arrive in Vancouver, after a trans-Canada train ride.

The book is built of three parts: the first, "Paradise", is mostly about the author's childhood in Cracow, Poland. I find that part most moving as I am about the same age and I remember a bit of the late 1950s. The second part, "Exile", is about Ms. Hoffman's youth in Canada and in the US, and in the third part, "The New World", she is a young adult or a grown-up. She studies at Rice University and at Harvard, and becomes a literary critic and a writer.

There are so many wonderful passages in the book that it would take me many, many pages to quote them. Let me just quote two fragments that so aptly characterize the essence of Polishness: "Politics, like religion, is a game, except almost no one - no one we know anyway - seems to believe in it. Poles don't need demystifying philosophies to doubt all sources of power and authority". And "A culture talks most about what most bothers it: the Poles talk compulsively about the Russians and the most minute shifts of political strategy. Americans worry about who they are." How very true this is!

I find the passages about becoming immersed in a new language the most fascinating - what becoming bilingual does to one's brain and to the worldview. It is like appreciating the world and life twice as much.

Wonderful book!

Four and three quarter stars.


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Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So it goes.

So goes one of the most horrifying novels I have read in my life. I have just reread "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, which I first read about 40 years ago, in translation.

Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time and relives various fragments of his life, in the US, in Europe during World War II (when he meets Kurt Vonnegut, the author), in particular during the destruction of Dresden, and as a zoo exhibit on planet Tralfamadore.

It took me over a week to read this short book; I just could not stomach the truth about the wretched human species. I am embarrassed by being a member of a species that burns their members in ovens (bad guys, the Germans, did that by millions in concentration camps) or boils schoolgirls alive (good guys, the Americans, did that by thousands in Dresden). I am embarrassed by how wars are in the very human nature, how mass murders cannot be avoided. How the wars are fought by children, when most adult soldiers are dead. How absurdly random human lives are.

I do not like the Tralfamadoria bit and do not much care for the Kilgore Trout story, yet
this is a great book, a must read, a masterpiece. The blurbs on the cover scream "Poignant and hilarious". Yes, absolutely. Hilarious and very, very, very sad. "Nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcome to the human race." And poor Edgar Derby, who has survived the unimaginable horrors of war, is executed for stealing a teacup. I really think that whoever is proud to be a human might be an idiot. Birds are smarter; they can say "Poo-tee-weet".

Five stars.


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Gun Before Butter by Nicolas Freeling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lucienne Englebert, a protagonist of Nicolas Freeling's "Gun Before Butter" (1963) is as unforgettable a character as the much more recent Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson's famous "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". Both are strong. compelling, complex, and very well written female characters. I read Mr. Freeling's book for the first time in the early 1970s, and ranked it then among masterpieces of the crime genre, along Rex Stout's "Murder by the Book" and Sjowall/Wahloo's "The Laughing Policeman". I have just finished re-reading the novel, and my opinion has not changed; it is indeed a masterpiece of the genre, and my only problem is whether to award it four or five stars.

Inspector Van der Valk, probably my most favorite of all fiction detectives, a nonconformist policeman, critical of Dutch stolidity, provincialism, and isolationism, and a "queer character" overall, often does not do his police work by the book. He meets Lucienne for the first time at the scene of an auto accident where her father dies. Van der Valk is investigating a murder that happened in Amsterdam but which also has connections to Germany and Belgium.

Mr. Freeling's observations of European cities and people are phenomenally sharp. As in all his novels, he masterfully captures the essence of Europeanness (were he alive, he would be very happy about the current state of the EU) and satirizes the stereotypes about European nations. (He also makes jokes about the French, which is always a plus in my book, just kidding...) The passage where Lucienne judges her customers based on the look in their eyes exhibits unusual psychological depth. The conversations between Lucienne and her admirers ring true and they help elevate this mystery book to a first-class literary status.

The ending is astounding, but understandable upon reflection. Unfortunately, in the so-called real life there are very few policemen of Van der Valk's caliber. Probably none.

Wonderful title, believable characters, great writing, engrossing mystery. I decided to round my rating up. Of course, "Gun Before Butter" is not exactly in the same class as Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", Coetzee's "Disgrace", or Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49", but within its genre, it would be very hard to find a better novel.

Four and a half stars.


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Snow White and Russian Red by Dorota Masłowska
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just wanted to write a little in my native language this one time, just to see whether I still am able to. The English version of the review - a different one - is below the Polish version.

Miesiac temu przeczytalem "Snow White and Russian Red" Doroty Maslowskiej - angielskie tlumaczenie powiesci "Wojna polsko-ruska pod flaga bialo-czerwona" i zachwycony jej wspaniala proza ocenilem ksiazke na cztery i trzy czwarte gwiazdki. Teraz, przeczytawszy ksiazke po polsku, musze zmienic zdanie. Jest to absolutnie fantastyczna ksiazka. Wiem, ze to zabrzmi jak swietokradztwo a moze obrazoburstwo, ale powiesc Maslowskiej jest dla mnie porownywalna z "Lalka" Prusa, "Przedwiosniem" Zeromskiego, czy "Ferdydurke" Gombrowicza. Teraz calkiem sie wychyle, ale porownam te powiesc tez do "Pana Tadeusza". Podobna sila przekazu i podobnej skali talent pisarski.

"Wojna polsko-ruska" portretuje rzeczywistosc Polski 2002 roku, nowo-wolnej Polski, sytuacje ludzi kompletnie otumanionych przez telewizje i reklamy, ludzi szamoczacych sie w tej nowo-nabytej wolnosci. Dorota Maslowska ma absolutny sluch pisarski, jej wyczucie jezyka jest fenomenalne. Jezyk powiesci jest prawdziwy, dosadny, bardzo wulgarny, bo przeciez tak, kurwa, wielu Polakow mowi. A do tego jest to histerycznie smieszna ksiazka. Zasmiewalem sie nad prawie kazda stronica. Wezmy chociazby zdanie "A w miedzyczasie osraly ja wazki". Czy tez "Wiesz, mnie od urodzenia bolalo w piersiach, czulem niepokoj. Wreszcie jednego dnia zajrzalem sobie do gardla, a tam podwojne dno". Ze wszystkich ksiazek, ktore czytalem w zyciu - a bylo ich wiele - chyba tylko "Wstep do imagineskopii" Sledzia Otrembusa Podgrobelskiego wywolal u mnie wiecej smiechu.

Zamieszczam ponizej moja angielsko-jezyczna recenzje z angielskiego tlumaczenia, a tutaj jeden z moich ulubionych fragmentow oryginalnej wersji polskiej: "Cale me zycie staje mi przed oczami takie, jakie bylo. Przedszkole, gdzie dwiedzialem sie, ze wszystkim nam chodzi o pokoj na swiecie, o biale golebie z bristolu 3000 zlotych za blok, a potem raptem 3500 zlotych, mus tak zwanego lezakowania, siku w majtki, epidemia prochnicy, klub wiewiorki, brutalna fluoryzacja uzebienia. Potem przypominam sobie podstawowke, zla wychowawczynia, zle nauczycielki w kozakach kurwiszonach, szatnie, obuwie zamienne i izbe pamieci, pokoj, pokoj, golebie pokoju z bristolu frunace na nitce bawelnopodobnej przez hol, pierwsze kontakty homo w szatni wuef." Ja tez przez to wszystko przeszedlem, mimo ze pani Maslowska jest mlodsza od mojej corki.

Poza tym odszczekuje krytyke zakonczenia z "Masloska" z mojej angielskiej recenzji. Jest ono swietne; w pewnym sensie przypomina mi najlepsze utwory Stanislawa Lema. A wiec albo moj angielski nie jest wystaczajacy, albo tlumaczenie nie jest tak znowu wspaniale jak uwazalem.

Dlugopis z napisem "Zdzislaw Sztorm" przypomina mi symbol Trystero z wspanialej noweli Thomasa Pynchona, "The Crying of Lot 49". Co za klasa!

Szesc gwiazdek za genialny warsztat literacki, cztery za tresc Czyli piec gwiazdek.

For years my wife has been telling me about this young (born in 1983) Polish writer, Dorota Maslowska, and about her book "Snow White and Russian Red" (2002) (the original Polish title sounds much better: "Wojna polsko-ruska pod flaga bialo-czerwona", which roughly means "A Polish-Russian war, under the white and red flag"). I have been reluctant to read it; after all what can one expect from a nineteen year old author? While it is obvious that at nineteen one can be a great mathematician, poet, chess player, and the like, it seems impossible to write a great novel at that age. At nineteen one can have the knowledge of structures, but not the structure of knowledge, which takes years and years of living to emerge. For example, I myself at nineteen was a total idiot (like almost all of my friends and acquaintances, boys much more than girls, sorry for the sexist stereotyping); of course I knew about music, games, sports, films, TV, etc., but I knew nothing about the matters that count, I knew nothing about life.

Now that I have read the book (in English translation, because someone has borrowed the Polish original from us and never bothered to return it), I am totally blown away by it. There is much depth in the novel, and the writing is utterly magnificent. The entire ending is a literary tour de force; it is poetic, hypnotic, brilliant. Like, wow, man.

The novel, which some critics rightly compare to "Catcher in the Rye", "Trainspotting", "Naked Lunch", is about gray, depressing, small-town life of young people, the author's contemporaries, in the times of systemic change in Poland, from the so-called Communism to free-market economy. The narrator is a young man, called Nails (Silny, in the Polish original), who has just been dumped by his girlfriend. Nails and everybody else in the novel are constantly on speed. They live from day to day, without any aim, in a country where, as they say, there is no future. They look up to the West and down on the "Russkies".

When I was 19, life was so much easier. We knew who the bad guys were: the government, the press, radio, and TV. They were always lying to us, the good Polish people. In 2002 Poland things are not so easy; it is hard to know who the bad people are. Nails claims to be a leftist-anarchist, but he really does not know what it means and is mainly interested in satisfying the needs of this one special part of his body.

"Snow White and Russian Red" is a biting satire on xenophobia and fake patriotism: "Either you are a Pole or you're not a Pole. Either you are Polish or you're Russki. And to put it more bluntly, either you're a person or you're a prick." Patriotism is measured by respect of the flag.

It is a very funny novel as well. I burst out laughing about every other page. The translation by Benjamin Paloff is totally wonderful. I will soon read the original and amend this review, if need be, but I cannot believe the original Polish version could be any better. The quarter of a star that I am taking off is for the author's failed device (in my opinion) of putting herself, "Dorota Masloska", in the final parts of the book.

Here's a passage that reminds me of some of the great works in world literature; it could have been written by William Faulkner or James Joyce, but it was written by 19-year-old Dorota Maslowska, barely out of high school in Wejherowo, Poland:

"Indeed, we're girls talking about death, swinging a leg, eating nuts, though there's no talk of those who are absent. They're scarcely bruises and scratches that we did to ourselves, riding on a bike, but they look like floodwaters on our legs, like purple seas, and we're talking fiercely about death. And we imagine our funeral, at which we're present, we stand there with flowers, eavesdrop on the conversations, and cry more than everybody, we keep our moms at hand, we throw earth at the empty casket, because that way death doesn't really concern us, we are different, we'll die some other day or won't die at all. We're dead serious, we smoke cigarettes, taking drags in such a way that an echo resounds in the whole house, and we flick the ash into an empty watercolor box."

Four and three quarter stars (five stars for the translation).


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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first read James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916) as an adolescent, almost 50 years ago. The novel made a huge impression on me then. The sublime beauty of Joyce's prose made it clear to me that I better become an engineer or a mathematician because I obviously had no talent for writing, even if I had dearly wanted to be a writer. I have just reread the book, and I still think it is one of the greatest works of world literature. Each of the five chapters of the book contains more wisdom and beauty than the entire Internet. The conversation between Stephen and Lynch in the fifth chapter carries way more meaning than all posts on Facebook combined.

"A Portrait" is a fictionalized autobiography of James Joyce's youth; in the novel he appears as Stephen Dedalus. Thousands of reviews by much better writers than myself are available so I will just offer some loose thoughts. J.M. Coetzee's "Boyhood" ( which I review here) deals with similar issues. It is also similar in its greatness. Coetzee's manufacturing of childhood memories is on the same level as the literary, political, and religious awakenings of Stephen Dedalus. I do not know which book I like better. They are both magnificent. Coetzee's book is politically sharper, but Joyce's is psychologically deeper. And it shows how little people changed in about one hundred years, despite all the technology.

The first chapter, about Stephen's childhood, is to me the most striking. The broken sentence patterns convey the fragmentary nature of childhood memories. In the third chapter we witness Stephen's struggles with emerging sexuality ("The sootcoated packet of pictures which he had hidden in the flue of the fireplace and in the presence of whose shameless or bashful wantonness he lay for hours sinning in thought and deed."). The chapter also contains monumental Jesuit sermons on the horrors of hell and the nature of sin. The fifth chapter showcases Stephen's growing fascination with language. The famous conversation between Stephen and Lynch about arts and beauty is the focus of that chapter. As is the later conversation between Stephen and Cranly.

Here's a passage from the fifth chapter: "A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret quietly and swiftly." Utterly magnificent. J.M. Coetzee writes equally beautifully, but his strength - because of his education - is the mathematical precision of the language rather than Joyce's lyricism.

Five stars.


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Snow White and Russian Red by Dorota Masłowska
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For years my wife has been telling me about this young (born in 1983) Polish writer, Dorota Maslowska, and about her book "Snow White and Russian Red" (2002) (the original Polish title sounds much better: "Wojna polsko-ruska pod flaga bialo-czerwona", which roughly means "A Polish-Russian war, under the white and red flag"). I have been reluctant to read it; after all what can one expect from a nineteen year old author? While it is obvious that at nineteen one can be a great mathematician, poet, chess player, and the like, it seems impossible to write a great novel at that age. At nineteen one can have the knowledge of structures, but not the structure of knowledge, which takes years and years of living to emerge. For example, I myself at nineteen was a total idiot (like almost all of my friends and acquaintances, boys much more than girls, sorry for the sexist stereotyping); of course I knew about music, games, sports, films, TV, etc., but I knew nothing about the matters that count, I knew nothing about life.

Now that I have read the book (in English translation, because someone has borrowed the Polish original from us and never bothered to return it), I am totally blown away by it. There is much depth in the novel, and the writing is utterly magnificent. The entire ending is a literary tour de force; it is poetic, hypnotic, brilliant. Like, wow, man.

The novel, which some critics rightly compare to "Catcher in the Rye", "Trainspotting", "Naked Lunch", is about gray, depressing, small-town life of young people, the author's contemporaries, in the times of systemic change in Poland, from the so-called Communism to free-market economy. The narrator is a young man, called Nails (Silny, in the Polish original), who has just been dumped by his girlfriend. Nails and everybody else in the novel are constantly on speed. They live from day to day, without any aim, in a country where, as they say, there is no future. They look up to the West and down on the "Russkies".

When I was 19, life was so much easier. We knew who the bad guys were: the government, the press, radio, and TV. They were always lying to us, the good Polish people. In 2002 Poland things are not so easy; it is hard to know who the bad people are. Nails claims to be a leftist-anarchist, but he really does not know what it means and is mainly interested in satisfying the needs of this one special part of his body.

"Snow White and Russian Red" is a biting satire on xenophobia and fake patriotism: "Either you are a Pole or you're not a Pole. Either you are Polish or you're Russki. And to put it more bluntly, either you're a person or you're a prick." Patriotism is measured by respect of the flag.

It is a very funny novel as well. I burst out laughing about every other page. The translation by Benjamin Paloff is totally wonderful. I will soon read the original and amend this review, if need be, but I cannot believe the original Polish version could be any better. The quarter of a star that I am taking off is for the author's failed device (in my opinion) of putting herself, "Dorota Masloska", in the final parts of the book.

Here's a passage that reminds me of some of the great works in world literature; it could have been written by William Faulkner or James Joyce, but it was written by 19-year-old Dorota Maslowska, barely out of high school in Wejherowo, Poland:

"Indeed, we're girls talking about death, swinging a leg, eating nuts, though there's no talk of those who are absent. They're scarcely bruises and scratches that we did to ourselves, riding on a bike, but they look like floodwaters on our legs, like purple seas, and we're talking fiercely about death. And we imagine our funeral, at which we're present, we stand there with flowers, eavesdrop on the conversations, and cry more than everybody, we keep our moms at hand, we throw earth at the empty casket, because that way death doesn't really concern us, we are different, we'll die some other day or won't die at all. We're dead serious, we smoke cigarettes, taking drags in such a way that an echo resounds in the whole house, and we flick the ash into an empty watercolor box."

Four and three quarter stars (five stars for the translation).


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The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another great recommendation from "The Complete Review" website. It rates Cynthia Ozick's "The Puttermesser Papers" (1997) with an A+ and while I am not sure about the plus, this book is certainly a first-class piece of literature: quite strange, a little crazy, deeply intelligent, and overall delightful.

The novel is composed of five parts or episodes that portray various periods of Ruth Puttermesser's life and afterlife. In the first story, Puttermesser (her first name is seldom used) is a 34-year-old Jewish lawyer, fired from a Wall Street firm, working for the Department of Receipts and Disbursements in the New York City. The mechanisms of bureaucracy are shown with clinical precision and wit. Puttermesser comes "to understand the recondite, dim, and secret journey of the City's money".

Puttermesser, who is 46 in the second part, has an opportunity to follow the example of the 16th-century Great Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague. Somewhat accidentally she creates a golem, a teenager girl, who wants to be called Xanthippe, and who becomes Puttermesser's daughter and is quite instrumental in furthering her creator's political career. This part is solely responsible for my rating not being the perfect five stars.

The third episode is a magnificent literary construct. Puttermesser, now fifty-plus, meets Rupert, who reproduces (reenacts, he wants to call it) famous paintings. Puttermesser introduces Rupert to 19th-century works of George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans). They read aloud her biographies, particularly interested in her friendship with George Lewes. After Lewes' death George Eliot marries Johnny Cross, and the couple reenacts George Eliot's and George Lewes' trip to Venice. Puttermesser and Rupert reenact that reenactment, with all its natural consequences. Brilliant!

Puttermesser is in her sixties in the fourth part. These are the times of perestroika in the Soviet Union. Puttermesser cousin comes from Moscow, as a refugee, and a funny culture clash occurs when the capitalist Americans are interested in ideas while the socialist-raised Lidia is only interested in money. The Shekhina fundraiser story is hilarious. Alas, in the exquisitely written fifth part, we learn that Paradise, the place where we go after we die, is not really quite what we expect.

Wonderful book about life, death, philosophy, and literature, touching so many important topics. I am particularly interested in the "wrong generation, after your time" issue. Puttermesser does not believe in generations. Culture is obviously generational, yet human nature is not. The anger of an ancient Greek does not differ from the anger expressed on Twitter today.

Four and a half star, rounded up.


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The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I used to be a voracious reader when I was a teenager. Each July and August, while on vacations from high school, I spent most of my time reading. I must have been 13, 14 or 15 when I read L.P. Hartley's "The Go-Between" for the first time (in translation into my native language). It was about 48 years ago. It is an amazing coincidence because "The Go-Between" is about a 60-year old man who remembers events that happened 48 years earlier. In 1966 or so the novel did not make much impression on me. No wonder, how could this particular novel impress a teenager? Today, 48 years later, as I have finished reading the English original, I am stunned by the greatness of Mr. Hartley's work. Not only is it flawlessly structured and beautifully written, but it is also full of wisdom about people, the nature of relationships between them, and it presents a brilliant, vivid portrayal of the time.

It is 1900. Leo Colston is almost 13 years old. The mother of his friend from school invites Leo to spend some time in the imposing Georgian mansion in Norfolk, which belongs to the ninth Viscount Trimingham. Leo arrives there on July 8th (another coincidence - this is my birthday) and serves as a go-between who carries messages, mainly between his friend's adult sister and a young farmer who lives nearby. Leo does not know what the messages are about. The pace of the story is leisurely but steady and the plot that moves to the inevitable dramatic resolution is more captivating than in 99% of mystery novels.

So much has been written over the years about this 1953 book that any attempts of mine to analyze it would be ridiculous. Obviously, the loss of innocence and the coming of age are some of the main themes. Leo makes his transition from a child's world to the grown-up world. Yet it is amazing how much more one can find in "The Go-Between"; the author is a gifted observer of human psychology, his portrayal of the rigid English class system is superb, and the richness of details in description of everyday behaviors of, mostly, the upper class has made me feel that I was actually there, that I participated in the cricket game and in the post-game party. Even the Second Boer War casts its shadow onto the plot.

Being a perfect novel, "The Go-Between" is not devoid of humor: Leo's skill of casting spells to further his goals, his adroit analysis of a love triangle while not really knowing what "love" is, and, of course, the wicked business of "spooning" are so funny. But to me, the most hilarious is one of his guesses about what the letters he carries might contain.

The unforgettable first sentence of the novel is one of the most famous in the entire world literature: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." I find the first clause a stunning metaphor, yet it is the second one that delivers the punch. Note the word "they": we are different people in different times. Because of that, 48 years ago, he (Lukasz Pruski in 1966) read a different book.

Five enthusiastic stars.


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The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ernesto Sabato's "The Tunnel" (1948) is an intense, dark, psychological novella that portrays, with clinical accuracy, one man's obsessive love for a woman (I am not using the term 'obsessive love' just as a characterization but rather as a psychological syndrome). The obsession leads the man to killing the woman, which we learn in the very first sentence.

During an exhibition of his paintings in Buenos Aires, Juan Pablo Castel, a highly respected artist, notices that a woman looking at one of his works focuses on a small fragment of the picture, which he himself, unlike critics and other people, considers most important. Juan Castel's overactive mind instantaneously manufactures a strong bond between himself and the woman. He is shattered when the woman disappears, and for several months he only thinks about her. When he sees her again on the street, he begins stalking her. Then, in an unforgettable scene, he manages to engage the woman, named Maria, in a conversation.

Juan Castel is utterly selfish; he despises other people and he frequently despises Maria, even if he thinks she is the only person in the world who can understand him. He constantly analyzes events, words, moods, and facial expressions, interpreting them in a way that suits him the best at the given moment. He thinks his reasoning is logical, but most of the time the volatile train of his thoughts deludes him into alternating between feeling happiness and despair.

Juan wants to possess Maria completely and totally. Even more than the physical relationship, he desires to control her mind, to make sure that she deeply loves him, and that her manifestations of love are authentic. He will not be happy until she becomes exactly like the vision of Maria that he has created. When he eventually realizes that while he lives inside a dark and lonely tunnel where he has spent his entire life, Maria lives in the freedom of the outside world and will not focus solely on him, he has no choice other than punishing her for his loneliness.

Mr. Sabato's writing is taut, economical, and precise (I have read the book in a good, non-English translation). It reminds me a little of J.M. Coetzee's style, which may be due to their similar backgrounds (Sabato had a Ph.D. in physics and Coetzee has a B.A. in mathematics and also a Ph.D. in linguistics). I am not sure what I love more about "The Tunnel" - the insightful observations of human psychology or the wonderfully tight writing. I find one passage jarring though; the author has included a superfluous six-page conversation about mystery books, which in my view breaks the precise rhythm of the narration.

Four and a half stars.


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The Dead by James Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although James Joyce's "The Dead" is a short story from the "Dubliners" collection, it was published as a separate book in the Penguin 60s series. Its 59 pages contain only 15,672 words, which is about 37 times fewer that Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and about 84 times fewer than Proust's "In Search of Lost Time". Still, because of its stunning psychological depth, this short story can properly be called a novella.

The story takes place at a New Year's party in Dublin over a period of few hours. Two elderly sisters are having their annual sing and dance party. Among various colorful characters attending the event is the protagonist, the sisters' nephew, Gabriel, who is accompanied by his wife, Gretta. He is the one to carve the goose and to make the main speech of the night. One of the songs reminds Gretta of a dramatic event from the past.

This is an impressive work of literary art, on many levels. First of all, it is absolutely amazing that the story is not dated at all. The collection was published in 1914, exactly 100 years ago, even before commercial radio was available. Despite all the mindboggling progress in technology, people have not changed. Some topics of conversations at a party held today may be different, although most would be similar to those that Mr. Joyce describes, and, of course, people today would be constantly checking Facebook or e-mail, yet their psychology, reactions, and moods remain the same as hundred years ago.

This is the first book that I have read that focuses on people's moods and here Joyce is a phenomenally skilled observer. Over the few hours, Gabriel's mood constantly changes, either subtly or in a dramatic way, and the intense feeling that the story is real, that the reader participates in the party, is palpable.

While many authors are able to capture sharp psychological observations, very few are so masterful in their writing. The novella is a tour de force of short prose, and the last two pages take your breath away.

I loved Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". I read many fragments of "Ulisses" and was very impressed. This novella provides a strong argument for my pet thesis that books should, in general, be shorter. Joyce shows that one can construct a lively, complex, wise, and utterly believable depiction of human behavior on 59 pages.

Five stars.


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Age of Iron by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have been torn while reading J.M. Coetzee's "Age of Iron" (it is the ninth book by this author that I have read) - my reactions oscillated from extreme awe to slight irritation. The novel contains so many passages of unparalleled wisdom, depth, and beauty, yet it is marred by a few instances of sermonizing preachiness.

Elizabeth Curren, a professor of classics in Cape Town, South Africa, is in the last stage of terminal cancer. She finds a homeless man, Mr. Vercueil, in the alley next to her garage. With her tacit approval, he kind of takes residence on her property. This is 1986, a dramatic time for South Africa, the time of burning townships and violent clashes between anti-apartheid fighters and the police aided by conservative activists. Mrs. Curren finds her domestic's son shot dead and a friend of his takes refuge in her house. Isolated from the harsh realities throughout her life, she discovers the true horrors of apartheid in her last weeks.

The novel, framed as a long letter to Mrs. Curren's daughter who escaped South Africa in 1976 and settled comfortably in the United States, has four central themes: the psychology of dying, the relationship between Mrs. Curren and the homeless man, the savagery caused by the apartheid system, and the juxtaposition of the wise reason of the old and the mindless fervor of the young.

The first two themes, the personal ones, are dealt with in an absolutely masterful way, typical for Mr. Coetzee. If the novel stopped there, I would need a six-star rating to give it justice. The two latter themes are different. The author vividly portrays the extreme drama of South Africa, yet I have some problems with the "paint-by-numbers" plot. The fourth theme, the young versus the old, emotion versus reason, feeling versus knowing, is largely conveyed through Mrs. Curren's monologues (since her conversation partner does not talk back), which makes the deep truths stated sound a little preachy. Still, Mrs. Curren is a classics professor, and speaking in perfectly complete paragraphs is what classics professors do best.

"Age of Iron" is an extremely dark book, even darker than Mr. Coetzee's other works. The heavy darkness is needed here, though. How else could one deal with impending death and with massive degradation of one's fellow human beings? Yet it is in no way a depressing novel. Mrs. Curren's involvement with anti-apartheid movement moves her thoughts away from the terrifying prospect of soon not existing any more. Helping others adds meaning to her ending life. Also, there is a beautifully captured fleeting moment of hope late in the novel and the last passages, despite death being near, are wonderfully uplifting.

Even with its weaknesses "Age of Iron" is a great book. The average of six stars for the first two themes and three-and-a-half stars for the latter two is

Four-and-three-quarter stars.


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The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Leo Tolstoy's novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1880s) is one of the most horrifying works of world fiction. It is a brutal, clinically precise, explicit book about the process of dying. I read it as a teenager and it shook me hard. Today, after almost 50 years, it has affected me even more, because I am now so much closer to the end. Tolstoy does a better job in describing the progression of Ivan Ilyich's mental states as the illness ravages his body than Ms. Kubler-Ross in her "On Death and Dying" (the "five-stage model of grief"). While we know that all other people die, Tolstoy shows his mastery in making the novella not about someone else's death but about me dying. And you.

The terror of dying has many facets. The first, obviously, is that with death we cease to exist. Today we are, and tomorrow we are not any more. It is perhaps the easiest aspect to bear. After all, we did not exist before our birth and somehow it was OK. All our plans, dreams, knowledge, feelings, and secrets are suddenly gone, but luckily we are not there to miss them.

Then, there is physical pain. Ivan Ilyich's illness causes him horrible pain. He screams for days on end, even on opium and morphine. But then not everybody draws the short straw; we can hope for an instantaneous death, through heart attack or being run over by a car.

Next, there is the deception. Ivan Ilyich, few weeks before his death, "saw clearly that all this was not the real thing but a dreadful deception that shut out both life and death". The doctors deceive him. His wife and children deceive him, pretending they believe he will be cured. His work colleagues pretend he is just sick and not dying.

But the most horrifying aspect of dying is how inconsequential our existence or non-existence is to other people, how irrelevant every one of us is in the big picture, and how replaceable we are. Ivan Ilyich has died, so we need to find someone else for our weekly bridge game that will proceed as if nothing has happened. While Ivan's wife talks to his friend, Pyotr Ivanovich, about her husband's agony and screams of pain, he thinks about the nasty spring in the sofa on which he sits.

Tolstoy is an extremely sharp observer of human psychology and behavior. Just one example: Ivan sees that "the awesome, terrifying act of his dying had been degraded by those about him to the level of a chance unpleasantness, a bit of unseemly behavior (they reacted to him as they would to a man who emitted a foul odor on entering a drawing room)".

This 19th century masterpiece is totally up-to-date in the 21st century. We are still in the business of dying.

Five stars.


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A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although J.L. Carr's "A Month in the Country" was published in 1978, it reads like a classic. It is an enthralling novella of What Might Have Been. People who are on the descending path in their lives, like myself, will understand it better than the young ones. We do not have any future; we only have the past. Most of what we have are the memories of the good times long time gone and we often think of what might have been if we did things differently.

It is the hot August of 1920. Tom Birkin, a World War I veteran is hired to restore a whitewashed, several-hundred-years old mural in a Yorkshire parish of Oxgodby. He meets another veteran, Charles Moon, who has been hired to find remains of a 14th-century character in the same parish. Tom also befriends the stationmaster's young daughter and the vicar's wife,

It is just about a month in the country, but viewed from the perspective of fifty or so years later, the month is a tremendous turning point. What might have been if we did things differently. How totally different our life would be if we just said one word or moved our arm in a different way.

An exquisite fragment of prose can be found here (but it is a kind of a spoiler).

A beautifully written book. A masterpiece of English prose. One of the best books I have read in my life.

Five stars.


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Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace" is the first so-called "serious" book I have read in quite a long time (although some of the mysteries are serious literature in their own right). It is a stunningly well-written book, beautiful yet very painful to read - not because of scenes of violence or abuse, but because it is unrelenting in showing truth about people and their wretched lives.

David Lurie, a writer and a communications professor at the Cape Technical University, has an affair with a young woman, one of his students, and is forced to leave his job in disgrace. He moves to his daughter's smallholding in Eastern Cape and tries to adapt to rural life, helping with farming chores and with euthanizing animals in a rescue center. Soon, David and his daughter are subject to a violent act, rooted in racial conflict in the post-apartheid South Africa. This brief and simple synopsis of the beginning of the plot is quite misleading; so many issues are touched in this short book that a literary critic could write an essay based on every single page of the novel. An attempt of mine to review the depth and complexity of this book would be ridiculous - it would be akin to a grade-school student discussing a unified field theory.

The novel is rich in unforgettable scenes. The university inquiry into David's affair is superbly portrayed, and the animal euthanasia scenes are gut-wrenching. One could fill quite a collection of quotes with acute observations like "nothing so distasteful to a child as the workings of a parent's body" or "the proper business of the old: preparing to die". Mr. Coetzee is a virtuoso writer, and I wish I did not have the mystery-novel-related habit of fast reading, so that I could savor the writing and the language.

This extraordinary novel offers no message. There is no closure, no redemption. There is life and its continuity of hope and suffering, of death and birth.

Five stars.


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The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" (published in 1966) is an absolutely unique book. This is my first complete Pynchon's novel; I have read large fragments of "V" and "Gravity Rainbow", but even if I have totally loved the writing I have never finished those as I detest books longer than 200 or so pages. "The Crying" is only 138 paperback pages long yet it took me about 12 hours to read the novella. I can read 1000 pages of lesser authors in 12 hours. Almost on every page of "The Crying" there are sentences and passages so fascinating that I have to keep rereading and rereading.

The plot of this novella takes place in 1964 or so. Oedipa Maas is named the co-executor of the will of her recently deceased ex-lover, Pierce Inverarity. While trying to discharge her executor's duties she becomes aware of a historical mystery - she learns about an ancient postal delivery service, the Trystero, that used a characteristic muted post horn symbol. The service was vanquished in early 1800's by Thurn-und-Taxis Post, but went underground and has continued its existence since then. The premise is so ridiculously absurd that it presses all my "love of surrealism" buttons. Tradition of postal fraud dating back to 1206!

So Oedipa is looking for Trystero muted post horn signs and we are offered an incisive and funny portrait of California and Californians in the mid-Sixties, during the "British Invasion", and just before the great cultural revolution of 1968-1969. Pynchon's writing is extremely rich in social and cultural references. There are references to references to references, and the prose is labyrinthine and dense. Just as an example, in the space of half a page we learn about a nose-picking contest, electronic music, and about Czar Nicholas II of Russia dispatching his Far East fleet to San Francisco Bay.

Great authors create alternative worlds through their writing. The world created by Mr. Pynchon is exhilarating and fascinating. How can one not like KCUF, the name of radio station where Oedipa's husband, Mucho, works? How can a mathematician not love a passage on "DT", delirium tremens, that slowly morphs into "dt", an infinitesimally small increment of time in the foundations of calculus? The whole Courier's Tragedy shtick is superb. The bits about European history suggesting that maybe the French Revolution was caused by Trystero are hysterically funny. The passages that happen in the Bay Area read as extended hallucinations. Maybe Oedipa does indeed take LSD prescribed by Dr. Hilarius, despite her claims to the contrary?

Two favorite sentences from the novella - one for its sheer surrealism, the other for subtle beauty: "In Golden Gate Park she came on a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering". And "As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine."

I have read that Mr. Pynchon himself does not consider "The Crying" an important book. Yet it is a gigantic, hilarious joke by a great writer. For me, with this novella, Mr. Pynchon is in literature what Rene Magritte is in visual arts. Post modern? What does "post-modernism" really mean? Will Professor Derrida's Gallic mumbo-jumbo illuminate me? I doubt it.

Four and three quarters stars.


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Loving Sabotage by Amélie Nothomb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amelie Nothomb's "Loving Sabotage" is an absolutely charming little book. It is an evocation of the author's childhood in Beijing (then called Peking) in the early Seventies and, at the same time, it is a damning critique of China of these times and a sharp study of human nature.

Ms. Nothomb's parents, both diplomats, are stationed in Peking along with diplomats from many countries, living in a restricted area (the 'ghetto'). All children roam the streets together and play an elaborate war game: the Allies versus the East Block embodied by the East Germans. The author writes in the first person - she is a seven year-old pathfinfder for the Allies. The war is quite cruel, yet wonderfully infantile (the yogurt enrichment episode and the unspeakable "monstrous act" made me laugh out hysterically). In addition to playing war games, the author also falls in love with a beautiful girl, and learns to play love games.

Ms. Nothomb presents a superb portrayal of childhood. Many people go through a stage of constructing alternative realities in their pre-teens. I know I did. The characterization of adults as "children fallen from grace" is stunning. There is plenty of tenderness and love in the book, and the narrator's comments written from the point of view of an adult complement the overall maturity and wisdom of the novel.

A fantastic read, sweet and light, yet deep. The translation by Andrew Wilson is great - it is hard to imagine the book could be any better in its original French.

The Afterword the author added in 2000 (the book was originally published in 1993) is unneeded. I think it slightly reduces the magnificent charm of the novel. Thus, instead of five solid stars, it is only

Four and three quarter stars.


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Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If there were a contest for the most outrageous one-sentence summary of J.M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians", my entry would be "Two main themes of the book are torture and an elderly man's sex life with young women". Although there is some truth in this flippant summary, I will rather be serious: it is really an allegorical novel about how power and fear degenerate people, and about some of the humanity's ugliest, shameful traits. I found this book almost as painful to read as the outstanding "Disgrace", yet the message, despite the allegory, is much more direct in "Waiting for the Barbarians".

The plot takes place in unspecified time in the past, in a town that is a far outpost of the (also unspecified) Empire. The magistrate, who narrates the story, holds judicial and executive powers. One of his main tasks is to keep in check the hordes of barbarian nomads who apparently roam nearby. They do not really do much harm to the Empire at this particular spot, yet the Third Bureau of the Civil Guard from the capital sends officers to the frontier town to take more drastic steps against the barbarians.

The visiting functionaries use the citizens' fear of barbarians to gain more power and use the power to instill more fear among the citizens. They catch barbarians and torture them, some to death. The magistrate, an old man, is a decent human being, yet he befriends a young woman, a victim of torture, and uses his power over her to have her as his servant and a warm, fresh body to worship and sleep with. This is just the beginning of the plot, which moves in unexpected directions, while always staying near the central issues of torture, power, and our (and our bodies') frailty in the face of oppression and physical pain.

I recall some literary critics explaining the novel as a commentary on the racial issues in contemporary South Africa (where Mr. Coetzee was born). I think they are wrong. The book is a commentary on the reasons why the human race will always struggle with racial issues, why we will exploit, torture, and execute THE OTHER people, whom we fear or, more accurately, whom we are taught to fear by people who have power over us.

Despite the ugliness of the subject matter, the book is beautifully written. I do not think that in my 50+ years of heavy reading I have encountered an author who writes better - more economically and with more clarity - than Mr. Coetzee. I am not sure which to praise more: the exquisitely masterful writing or the depth of the messages and the richness of threads. The novel has a poignant thread about a civilization that vanished and left hieroglyphic writings that are impossible to decipher. The quite prominent "erotic thread" makes this a very mature book; I do not think many people younger than middle age will be able to relate to this theme.

I will close this inept but heartfelt review with my favorite quote, which comes from the magistrate: "I should never have allowed the gates of the town to be opened to people who assert that there are higher considerations than those of decency".

Five stars.


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Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I find it amazing that there can be so much content in a 166-page book, and that the result is so spellbinding and perfect. J.M. Coetzee's "Boyhood: scenes from provincial life" is a portrait of the author as a 10-year-old boy growing up in South Africa. I have never read a more insightful analysis of a child's thinking and emerging personality; well, it is hard to find this level of psychological profundity in any writing. At the same time, the novel gives an amazingly rich and deep depiction of the South African society, with its class and racial divides.

Mr. Coetzee, in this "fictionalized autobiography" writes about a 10-year-old boy in the third person. The "he" is little John Coetzee, a precocious child, who loves and hates his mother and is ashamed of his father. The author reaches to the deepest and most private layers of a child's psyche, layers that one is usually too embarrassed to get to. One of the magnificent passages describes how the boy creates his first memories (yes, creates and edits them). The essential question are raised: Who am I? Where do I belong? As the author writes: "What he does not yet know is why he is in the world." The boy tries to figure out how the world works - who the good people are. He experiences something almost like the first love, and is fascinated by the beauty and mystery of other children's bodies.

The year is about 1950, just after the United Party's downfall and the ascent of the National Party rule. The boy lives in a society that is racially much more complex than that of the U.S. and probably of most countries in the world. The racial divides are between four distinct groups: the English, the Afrikaners, the "Coloureds", and the "Natives". Mr. Coetzee shows the racial fissures in the South African society sharply yet subtly. So many books in which the well-meaning authors try to present the problems of race on hundreds of crudely written and superficial pages read like predictable sermons. Here, the author writes four sentences about the meaning of the word "mustn't", and these four sentences perceptively convey the nature of racial inequality.

I can pleasantly waste about two hours of my life reading 166 pages of Connelly, Kellerman, or Grafton. I have spent about 12 hours over four days to read 166 pages of "Boyhood". These were some of the best spent 12 hours in my life.

Five stars.


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Mischief by Chris Wilson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Chris Wilson's "Mischief" is one of the funniest books I have ever read. It attests to Mr. Wilson's literary skills that the book is hilarious while being nothing less than a philosophical treatise on the weaknesses and evils of human nature. To provide a sample of Mr. Wilson's writing and humor here is a fragment where he compares ideas and people: "Principles are precious, pure and brilliant; whilst people are dull and sordid [...] Which do you prefer - Truth, Art or your neighbour?"

Charlie, the narrator of the story, is found as a baby in Brazilian rain-forest by a British zoologist, Dr. Duckworth, who adopts him and takes him to England. Charlie learns that he is the last of the Xique Xique tribe. As he is almost hairless and orange-colored and as he seems to be developing at a slower rate than other people, he believes he is not a human being but rather a hominid creature, a different species than homo sapiens. Even so, he completes his university education, finds a job, and manages to succeed in quite a few sexual conquests. There is much more to the plot but it does not need to be divulged.

Charlie's special circumstances give him an opportunity to illuminate and condemn some of the worst vices of human race: hypocrisy, vanity, stupidity, affinity to violence, etc. "People - the hyenas of creation." is the most astute characterization of the human nature I have ever encountered. The "learned class", the academia, is the subject of especially biting satire, and rightly so. The novel is full of wisdom and despite its philosophical themes it is never boring. Clever word-plays and often outrageously funny humor make the book a pleasure to read.

It is a deeply unusual book, a one-of-a-kind gem. My thanks to the Complete Reviews website ( http://www.complete-review.com/main/m... ) for the hint.

Four and three quarter stars.


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The Assault by Harry Mulisch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Harry Mulisch's "The Assault" is a short yet profound novel, powerful, sad and full of wisdom. In a sense, it may be categorized as a mystery because we learn the whole truth only at the very end. Mr. Mulish writes "Anton felt sick. The whole story was worse than the partial one he had known." And even then, when he thought he finally learned the whole truth, there was even more to learn.

The novel is built of five episodes in Anton's life. The first begins in Haarlem near Amsterdam in January 1945. Anton is 12 and Holland is still under German occupation. The chief of local police, a German collaborator, is killed by resistance fighters close to the house occupied by Anton's family. There is an additional nasty element of the plot that I do not want to disclose. Germans take instantaneous reprisals, burn the house and kill several people. Anton is not mistreated and is allowed to live with his uncle in Amsterdam The next episodes happen in 1952, 1956, 1966, and 1981.

Despite the first episode being focused on horrors of war, the novel is really about fundamental aspects of human life: randomness of fate, moral dilemmas that we may have to face and that have no right solution, how we are not able to escape from the past, and how dramatically one's perspective changes with age. The beginning of the last episode contains a stunning passage that takes a different interpretation of the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. "Nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute," writes Mr. Mulisch. The novel is also about human inability to live in isolation from politics. Anton is not involved or interested in politics, yet politics influences his life. The dirt inherent in politics defiles all of us.

"The Assault" is beautifully written (and translated from Dutch). Anton's conversation with a female prisoner in the first episode is deeply moving. To me, the novel would be an absolute masterpiece if not for the final piece of the cruel puzzle.

Four and three quarter stars.


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Garnethill by Denise Mina
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the best books I have read in recent years. Great writing. Great plot. Great depth of observation of mental illness. I will review in some depth when I reread the book.

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Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

William Boyd's "Brazzaville Beach" has been exhaustively discussed and reviewed during the 23 years since it was published. It has served as book club fare probably thousands of times. Everybody who has read it has an opinion on what the novel is about. Some say it is about scientists being only human. Others say it is about the similarities between chimpanzee and human behavior. One arrogant bozo, trying to ride the fashionable bandwagon, even posits the book is about "emancipation of women". Bollocks! Being a mathematician, I will suggest, with equal arrogance, that "Brazzaville Beach" is about the difference between continuous and discontinuous types of change and between predictable and chaotic phenomena. Calculus needs continuity, as Mr. Boyd mentions himself. Despite all its pretentiousness, it is an extraordinary novel. The author tells a great story and does it so well that I can forgive him the excitement about how clever he is. The brazen attempts at using results of mathematics as metaphors for certain aspects of human life are excused too.

The story is mostly narrated by Dr. Hope Clearwater, a Ph.D. in ethology. We first meet her when she collects a chimpanzee's feces. The novel interleaves plots occurring in two different periods of Hope Clearwater's life. The earlier one is the story of her marriage to John, a mathematician on the verge of brilliance, and her work surveying an ancient and historic estate in South Dorset, England. The later thread is located in Africa, where Hope - employed by a world-famous primate research center - studies the behavior of large groups of chimpanzees.

"Brazzaville Beach" is a complex novel and Mr. Boyd handles the complexity well. We have a totally fascinating and beautifully presented layer of observations of chimpanzee behavior. Then there is a layer dealing with nastiness in science, where people go to extremes trying to defend their theories. There is a still higher-level layer, that of Hope reflecting on the direction or lack of it in her life. The war between various factions in an African country provides a background layer. Threads on the Dorset estate survey and on a man's slow descent into mental illness complete the exquisite structure. Mr. Boyd connects all layers with references to mathematics.

The passage about Hope's visit to her father's 70th birthday party is beautifully written and the "digging episodes" and horsefly-powered airplanes have left a deep imprint in my memory. Wonderful stuff. On the other hand, Mr. Boyd uses the phrase "susurrus of prurience". Yikes. Also, the grandiose "three questions" reek of pretense.

Four and a half stars (today I am rounding up, because of "my" mathematics, but maybe I will change my mind one day).


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The Dead Hour by Denise Mina
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An excellent book! I am not into reading books for their plot but rather for learning about people and the world as well as for the pleasure of reading well-written prose. This book delivers all, even the plot. Very different than "Garnethill", yet outstanding.

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Black Seconds by Karin Fossum
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

(This is a review I had originally posted elsewhere, in July 2010, before I read several other books by Ms. Fossum.)

I have been reading mystery novels for over forty years, at a pace of about a hundred books a year. Karin Fossum's "Black Seconds" is her third book I read, and to me it is the best. I began with "When the Devil Holds the Candle" and I liked it. I loved "Don't Look Back", especially the masterful way the author teases the reader at the beginning, by way of a "false start". I found "Black Seconds" among the very best books I have ever read. Yes, it is a mystery, and it sort of keeps you guessing to the end, but that is not important at all. The psychological portraits of the characters are drawn so well that I felt I had known these people for years. The gentle "interrogations" towards the end of the book are reminiscent of Dostoyevski's "Crime and Punishment". There is not much action, but there is so much truth about people instead. Ms. Fossum writes extremely well, and the translator did a splendid job in managing not to spoil the dry, to-the-point style.

A piece of real literature.

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The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning by Hallgrímur Helgason
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hallgrimur Helgason’s “The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning” is an outstanding book. It is beautifully written and funny; it has an outlandish yet engrossing plot, and an unexpected depth.

Tomislav Boksic, aka Toxic, a Croatian American, is a hitman, a highly successful contract killer. He has flawlessly executed 66 people so far, yet #67 brings trouble, which causes Tomislav to find himself in Iceland. Various adventures in Iceland, including involvement with a fundamentalist Christian sect, constitute the gist of the book.

There are four layers to the novel. On the top there is the writing layer. Mr. HH, an Icelandic writer, famous for his “Reykjavik 101”, wrote this book in English himself, as I understand. He did a better job with the language than 90% of writers who are native speakers of English. He has fun with the language; the book is full of wonderful puns, plays on words, and language jokes. The writing is so hilarious that I was LOL’ing many, many times.

The second layer is the plot. Of course it is absurd, but then it manages to seem more realistic than the tired, formulaic plots of huge majority of thrillers. There is something almost approaching “magical realism” in the novel. Everything makes sense in this plot, given the absurd universe it resides in. There are no cheap “twists and turns” in the plot.

Sociological and cultural observations constitute the next layer. I love the portrayal of Iceland and Icelanders. It is not particularly sympathetic, but I feel I have learned more about the country than from any other Icelandic book I have read (and several movies I have seen). People of some other nations are caricatured too and quite well (I can vouch for this as I represent one of these nations). The whole plot of the Christian sect is fascinating. Yes, it is exaggerated, but to exactly the right extent.

Finally, when one peels away the writing, the humor, the plot, and the observations, there is a deeply human core to the novel. It is about how ethnic hatred, which is one of the most characteristic features of our deeply flawed species, destroys nations and people. It about how this hatred transforms sensible, gentle, and loving people into ruthless killing machines.

(An aside: when I finished reading the book I looked at some reviews on Goodreads. They were, as usual, mostly clever and insightful. However, one of the reviews rendered me speechless. The reviewer was indignant that Tomislav kills a dog. No further comment.)

Four and three quarters stars.


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Hour of the Wolf by Håkan Nesser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am reluctant to assign five stars to a mystery novel that is in no way a literary masterpiece. Hakan Nesser's "Hour of the Wolf" does not have the sociological depths of Denise Mina's "Gartnethill". It does not have the simple beauty of some of Karin Fossum's best work. Yet it is such a darn good book. On the surface it is a police procedural, one in Mr. Nesser's Chief Inspector Van Veeteren series, which is located in a fictitious country in Northern Europe that seems like a cross between the Netherlands and Sweden, with some neighboring countries mixed in. When one looks deeper though, the novel is a treatise on guilt and human weakness, a contemplation of this side and the other side of our existence and non-existence.

I think that older people will appreciate this novel more than the young ones. One has to acknowledge the unavoidable proximity of the other side to understand some of the undercurrents present in the book. I was stricken by a beautiful sentence: "The dead are older than the living." I first thought it a quote from some famous philosopher. Not so. It seems to be Mr. Nesser's own. Beautiful. And wise.

To me "Hour of the Wolf" is the best of the six Nesser's novels I have read. It has an engrossing plot, economical and simple writing, and everything that happens in the plot leads to the final solution. As an icing on the cake it has an extremely funny ending, happening in New York, with Mr. Nesser having a field day writing about the U.S. culture. Some readers will complain that the denouement is predictable. Yes, it is. I do not care, with the book being so excellent in so many other ways.

A disclaimer: In some sense Mr. Nesser's work reminds me of novels by the great Nicholas Freeling, whose plots were located mainly in the Netherlands or France, but the locations felt just like "in Europe". Maybe I am biased, being a European.

Still, I have not had so much fun with a book for quite a long time.

Five stars.


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