Zappa: A Biography by Barry Miles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Frank Zappa is the musical idol of my youth. I listened to Zappa's album "Freak Out!" almost 50 years ago, in 1966 or 1967, fascinated by what I considered the avant-garde freshness of the music, political references, and great sense of humor. Obviously, being a teenager, I dearly loved the scatological and obscene references. Later, when I tried to grow up, came my fascination with Mr. Zappa's strong stance for freedom of speech and against consumerism. As far as music is concerned I was very much into Mr. Zappa's guitar playing, and "Hot Rats" and "Shut Up n' Play Yer Guitar" were some of my most revered albums. Zappa's death in 1993 came as a big loss in my life. Zappa had been my hero, someone to look up to politically and musically.

I read (or tried to read) several books about my hero. Zappa's autobiography - "The Real Frank Zappa Book" - made me adore my idol even more. I did not particularly like the unfocused "The Frank Zappa Companion", and could not very much get into "Frank Zappa: the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, full of technical details about the music, and sounding too much like a research paper on the conceptual continuity of Zappa's work for my taste. I have just now finished "Zappa" by Barry Miles. It is a great biography, a serious, extremely well researched book that - in my view - does a fantastic job of showing the real Frank Zappa - a musical giant, yet a real person, full of insecurities and obsessions. A genius yet also somewhat of a jerk.

The major strength of Mr. Miles' biography is that it transcends the biographical details, the enumeration of albums, songs, and performances, and the trite gossip. The author proposes several theses about forces that drove Frank Zappa in his art and in life and provides convincing arguments for these theses. Perhaps the most important of them is that the experience that shaped the artist the most was the ten days he had to spend in San Bernardino County Jail for making an ostensibly pornographic tape, whereas in reality he was entrapped by a zealous policeman. "By the time he got out, he no longer believed anything the authorities had ever told him. Everything he had been taught at school about the American Way of Life was a lie." Ever from then on he would try to make America "see itself as it really was: phoney, mendacious, shallow and ugly."

Zappa often claimed he did not want to become what he is known to most people as - a rock musician. He famously confessed "I never had any intention of writing rock music. I always wanted to compose more serious music and have it performed in concert halls." His becoming one of the most famous rock artists was a vehicle that allowed him achieve his ultimate goal - having various symphony orchestras play his "serious" compositions. The guise also allowed Zappa to achieve the other major goal of his life - becoming a pre-eminent social critic. Songs like Brown Shoes Don't Make It express "consummate indictment of government corruption and the vacuous sterility of American consumer society." In I'm the Slime Zappa "describes television content as vile and pernicious, brain-washing the American public until they are a country of zombies who do as they are told: eat the processed junk food that is advertized, and think what the government wants them to think, all dished up as mind-numbing sit-coms, soap operas and game shows." Well, it is hard not to totally agree with this assessment.

Mr. Miles' diagnosis is most acute when he emphasizes Zappa's "ambivalent relationship to the counter-culture". While living in the absolute center of this counter-culture, he despised most of what it stood for. Zappa usually had very little respect for his fans and often he even vilified his audiences. He treated many people whose money he took for performing for them like complete idiots (and rightly so). The famous "Gee, my hair's getting good in the back!" quote satirizes the audiences' preoccupation with looking like the band members they idolized. The adolescent boys screamed in delight when they listened to Zappa's famous Titties and Beer, which was, basically, a song about how stupid they were.

I am for complete freedom of speech in arts and do not mind if an artist wants to write songs with lyrics about defecation, urination, flatulence, feet odor, nasal excretions, and other such things. People who are disgusted by the subject matter should just refrain from listening to these songs. And yes, I am disgusted with some Zappa's lyrics - I think 'Jazz Discharge Party Hats' might be the grossest song ever - yet I still support his right to write such a song, while at the same time doubting whether he ever managed to grow up.

What Mr. Miles' book made quite clear to me is how tyrannical and callous Frank Zappa was with respect to the musicians who played for him. Despite the fact that they had to work extremely hard - no other bands in the history of rock had to practice that hard during insanely prolonged rehearsals - and that Mr. Zappa paid them little, he continuously berated them and fired at will. His patronizing remarks about the members of the London Symphony Orchestra, who played his compositions and applauded his skills as a composer, are a particularly acute example.

Mr. Miles puts forward several other interesting theses in his book, for instance, about the influence of Zappa's Sicilian patriarchal roots, the consequences of his father's constant job changes and consequent relocations of Zappa's family, his lack of friends, even his apparent inability to love, yet this review is already way overlong. To sum up (finally!): Frank Zappa is a great musician and a keen social observer. He is the author of perhaps my favorite epigram "Scientists claim that hydrogen is the basic building block of the universe because it is so plentiful. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe." Yet, there is also another side to the genius and while I still admire Frank Zappa, I would somehow feel embarrassed, having read this great biography, to call him my hero.

Four and three quarter stars.


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A Long Silence by Nicolas Freeling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"His wife's smile, and the smell of mimosa vividly pictured and for one instant recaptured, would be the last thing in his life. That, and the moisture on his loden coat, and the dead leaves, and a wet leather glove: the smells of Holland."

Nicolas Freeling's "A Long Silence" (also published as "Auprės de ma Blonde") is the most extraordinary crime novel I have ever read. I do not really mean the best one - some weaker spots can be found - but I challenge anybody to find a more unusual mystery. Let's see:

This is the ninth novel in the series featuring Piet Van der Valk, first an inspector, finally a Principal Commissary of the Dutch police. Well, there is no tenth book in the series as he is killed while conducting a private investigation. In the remainder of the novel, it is Arlette, Van der Valk's widow, who is the principal character, and who completes the investigation. Sherlock Holmes also dies in one of Conan Doyle's stories, but he gets resurrected later. Nicolas Freeling is cooler than that; he knows that death is irreversible. I love Van der Valk, but I totally admire Mr. Freeling's courage for doing away with the protagonist of his series, and I just wish authors of other series would do the same.

When Van der Valk dies, Mr. Freeling, the author of the novel himself, appears in the novel. The author's emergence is seamlessly woven into the story. There is not a single false note in this meta-fiction experiment.

Finally, and most importantly (at least to me), the first 80+ pages of the novel are exceptionally well written. I do not mean "well written for a crime novel". J.M. Coetzee, James Joyce, or any other great author could not write better than that. It is high-class literature, simply breathtaking. Nothing is said to the end, things are just hinted at, exactly as in real life, where we just think we understand what is going on. Also, Larry Saint is one of the most vividly drawn characters in world literature.

The remainder of the novel is perceptibly weaker - the whole concept of a group of amateurs planning revenge is rather ridiculous. There are too many dialogues, whereas Mr. Freeling is an absolute master of narrative prose. I also find the ending disappointing. Still, the weaknesses of the latter part only accentuate the absolute greatness of the first third of the novel.

Four and a half stars.


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

I had begun reading mysteries in about 1970, but it was only in 1998, when I began rating them for my own amusement (being a computational mathematician I love numbers). I did not rate all of the mysteries that I read, but I did most of them. A few days ago I looked my ratings up, and found out that among about 1300 mysteries I have rated there are just two that have received the highest rating of 9.5 out of 10, in my scale. One of them is Karin Fossum's novel "Black Seconds" (published in 2002 in Norway), and the other is "The Chill" (1964) by Ross Macdonald. I read "Black Seconds" for the first time in 2009, when it was published in the U.S. and then copied my enthusiastic review from Amazon.com to Goodreads. Being a skeptic, I believe that people are constantly wrong and that I am wrong more often than others, so I decided yesterday to read the novel again to check the extraordinarily high rating.

I stubbornly stand by my opinion; this is probably the best mystery book I have read in my life. Most of you who have read it will certainly disagree with me. Yes, it is pretty good, well written, with realistic characters, but best mystery ever? Come on, don't be silly. Well, I will try to justify my outrageous claim.

I have read nine books by Ms. Fossum. She is the absolute master of psychological observation. The mother's terror when her daughter does not come home at expected time is described with clinical accuracy. The overpowering fear, the senseless seeking for reasons for hope, the deal making with God, with fate. Ida, the girl who disappears, has always dreamed about a pet. Her birthday is coming, and the mother said "no". Now, she promises to buy all sorts of pets, when Ida comes back. Can you imagine the pain of an almost a 50-year-old, lonely woman, losing a beautiful, well-behaved 10-year old daughter who was the only thing for which her life was worth living? Now she is gone, forever. I believe most parents went through the hell of fear of losing a child when he or she is half an hour late. But in almost all cases the kids come back late.

The most beautiful, absolutely outstanding feature of Ms. Fossum's book is her compassion toward people. Weakness is the essence of the human nature; we are stupid, vain, self-centered, greedy for stuff and for power, insensitive to others' pain. Yet in "Black Seconds" the only person who is presented in negative light is not guilty of Ida's disappearance.

All characters in the novel are real people, they are not just the templates of the "murderers" and the "victims" or agents of the bad and the good as happens in most crime books. The only exception is, of course, Inspector Sejer. Police inspectors are human like all of us, meaning they exhibit all the negative traits of human nature. Mr. Sejer has too few of those, so maybe that is why I cannot assign the novel the rating of 10/10.

Furthermore, Ms. Fossum's novel, despite in fact being a police procedural, wonderfully slow, muted, and quiet one, is indeed a mystery. I mean we kind of know "who did it" from rather early in the text, and we are right. But not just quite right. I am unable to write any more on that topic, in order not to spoil the mystery. This "just not quite" is an extremely strong asset of "Black Seconds", if one reads mysteries for the "mystery". I do not care much about the "mystery factor", but here it is strongly present. And the method used by Inspector Sejer to finally understand what happened is refreshingly clever. Finally, don't miss the last paragraph of the novel!

Five stars.


---- The following is my review after 2009 reading ----

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 Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Who will ever forget this first sentence: "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."? In fact, I prefer the original German "Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt." It makes less of a fuss of the transformation, and to my ear, it makes the event sound more natural.

Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" was first published exactly 100 years ago, in 1915, and I read it for the first time exactly 50 years ago, in 1965; I remember it because I was in the freshmen grade of high school in Poland. Of course, at that time, I was fascinated by the fantasy aspect, and if I remember correctly, I found the whole premise humorous. Well, although my wife does not believe it, I have matured a bit during these 50 years, and do not find any trace of humor in the novella - exactly the opposite.

I am reading possibly the worst edition of the novella, in the so-called Enriched Classic series by Simon and Shuster, where as many as 55 pages (while the whole novella takes 80 pages) are dedicated to Kafka's biography, interpretations of his work, explanations of such esoteric terms as "servant girl" or "slight indisposition", and - horror of horrors - "Questions for Discussion". The edition is clearly designed for use in schools or book clubs.

I am of a rather extreme opinion that a true work of art should not be interpreted; it should stand on its own. Do we ask why in some Picasso's works the left eye is almost perpendicular to right one? Do we ask why "Guernica" is not realistically painted? Why are Beethoven's late string quartets so "abstract"? In the same way, it does not bother me that Mr. Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up as an insect. I can only shrug at the early attempts to interpret the novella as masochistic, as showing "a man becoming a beast", as an allegory for alienation. I can add my own, equally idiotic interpretation. One day, when I was 37, I woke up and with utter clarity realized that I am not young any more; I realized I am now middle-aged, and the days of youth are irretrievably gone. This was my metamorphosis.

Gregor Samsa changes into a monstrous verminous bug, but it is really his family, and primarily his loving sister Grete, who are subject to real metamorphosis. They used to love Gregor, the family breadwinner. Now, when he loses his usefulness and his looks, even Grete wants "it" to disappear. Gregor (the "it") understands it well: "He remembered his family with deep feelings of love. [...] His own thought that he had to disappear was, if possible, even more decisive than his sister's." How inconsequential we are!

The last sentence of the novella is even more terrifying than the first one: "And it was something of a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions when at the end of their journey their daughter got up first and stretched her young body."

Great work of literature.

Five stars.


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Mordet på Harriet Krohn by Karin Fossum
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I believe there exist authors and readers that are made for each other, almost like love at the first sight. Norway's author Karin Fossum's works always resonate with me. This is my ninth book by this author and, although I rated two of them with only three stars, and am hesitant - because of the subject - to read other two, I rate the remaining seven of Fossum's books with at least four but mostly five stars. I love how she writes about little things in life that lead to bigger and worse things. I love her powers of observation and the depth of knowledge of human psychology.

It would be really inappropriate to call "The Murder of Harriet Krohn" a mystery. We know from the very beginning who the killer is, and we know his motives. We even know why, how, and by whom he will be caught. This is precisely what I love in the novel. Instead of insipid twists and turns of a run-of-the-mill mystery, the plot logically and inexorably moves from the gruesome beginning to the natural end. Toutes proportions gardées the novel reminds me of Dostoyevski's "Crime and Punishment". This may sound like sacrilege, but I prefer Fossum's book as it is not as dated.

Charlo, a widower, and a father of a sixteen-year old girl whom he adores, is a gambler. He owes a lot of money to a local gangster, and decides to steal money, jewelry, and silver from an elderly woman, Harriet Krohn. Alas, he kills her in the process, as she resists the robbery. The first fifty-something pages of the novel are an absolute psychological masterpiece. There are deeply moving scenes further down as well, as Charlo tries to explain away his actions, as he tries to weigh good deeds in his life with a few bad ones (like the murder). But wasn't it accidental? Why did Mrs. Krohn resist? It was really her fault.

There is a heartbreaking thread in the novel about Charlo's daughter, Julie, who eventually loses everybody and everything she loves. There is also a fascinating thread about Charlo's health, and how his stumbling is way more important to him than being a murderer.

"The Murder of Harriet Krohn" is a great novel: one of the wisest, most mature, and sad books I have ever read. It is way more than a mystery or a police procedural. It exposes human frailty, utter stupidity, and the people's inclination to cheat themselves. Read the book not for the mystery, but for truth about our wretched species.

Five stars.


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Boundary Value Problems by David L. Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have been teaching undergraduate Partial Differential Equations for 31 years. I have tried various textbooks, including classics such as, for example, Brown and Churchill, and other well-known texts, for instance, by Colton, Jeffrey, Pinsky, Duchateu and Zachman, and others. After each such experiment I come back to David L. Powers. It is a perfect undergraduate text on boundary value problems, Fourier methods, and partial differential equations. The level is just right - not too difficult yet not too trivial. The selection of problems is great, with varying level of difficulty. The author's writing is clear and understandable even by medium-level undergraduates.

I have just reread the textbook in preparation for my spring course, so I am listing the date of finishing as December 20, 2014, although the first time I read this book was in 1989.

Of course, the text would be too low level for a graduate course, but it provides a wonderfully clear introduction to Fourier methods. Highly recommended!

Five stars in its particular niche.

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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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