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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