Conspicuous Consumption

Readers of the old blog, Only a Blockhead, will know that I've been making my way through the never ending, and I think still growing, series of crime novels by Michael Connelly featuring Detective Harry Bosch. I'm glad that there is no end in sight, because though one would think an author would be getting stale by the fourteenth entry in a series, Nine Dragons seems to me one of the best so far. One is aware of Connelly's efforts to keep things fresh—the hard-bitten LA cop visits Hong Kong in this volume, and a major recurring character dies—but one doesn't object because his efforts are successful, not desperate.  The detective, Harry Bosch, is aging in real time. There are several novels in the series after this one, and apparently Bosch is in his seventies in the later volumes. It'll be nice to see, when I get that far, what a geriatric and presumably retired LA cop gets up to

  All travel books are nostalgic: They record memories of a trip that is past, and more than a few lament the way the place they are writing about has changed since an earlier generation of travelers visited, was continuing to change while they were there, and has changed even further since they started writing. The past is another country—one that is always elusive. Roumeli , Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his wanders in Northern Greece, was published in 1966, so the Greece he writes about from the years before 1966 is long gone for those of us reading Roumeli more than half a century after it appeared. And yet, the book lives. What brings it alive is Leigh obvious affection for the Greeks he writes about and for the landscape through which he moves. Add to that the pleasure of Leigh Fermor's prose. It's hard to think of a writer with a finer style. His beautifully written account will make you want to visit this remembered Northern Greece, to walk the trails he walked...

   Professional reviewers like Mark Lawson at the Guardian , along with the hordes of amateurs at Goodreads and Amazon, in commenting on Hideo Yokoyama's police procedural  Six Four , have all remarked on one thing: how illuminating the book is about Japanese society.    Six Four makes the obvious clear: the police force is a bureaucracy. In focusing on how the pieces of that bureaucracy move (and grind against each other) in solving a crime—the disappearance of a young girl—we see the slow turning of bureaucratic wheels and also the rigid hierarchies that are certainly present in Japanese organizations.  One suspects, however, that bureaucracies the world over, especially in quasi-military organizations like the police, are similar. So yes, the book is illuminating about Japanese society, but are the workings of Japanese bureaucracies so different from the workings of bureaucracies elsewhere? Since I haven't lived elsewhere for a long time, I'll leave tha...

  Katherine Mansfield wrote to Virginia Woolf, “We have got the same job, Virginia, & it is really very curious & thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing. We are you know; there’s no denying it.”  Woolf, as far as I know, didn't deny it. In fact, she wrote: “I was jealous of [Mansfield's] writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.” Woolf, it should be noted, was not known for praising her contemporaries. One can see why she felt this way about Mansfield whose stories are each little gems, made more gem-like by the author's fastidiousness in avoiding crude effects. Unremarkable people are observed, and things and animals almost as much as people. The people do their best. There is never a big bang or clanking epiphany at the end. Rather, there is a hint that things probably won't change, life, for better or worse, will go on. (Pictured above is the edition I read. The cover is a detail fro...

  This is the third book in Conrad's "Lingard Trilogy," coming after his first and second novels,   Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands . Though Conrad began The Rescue  not long after finishing  Outcast , it was not published until twenty years later, twenty years during which Conrad published masterpieces like  Heart of Darkness ,  Lord Jim , and Nostromo . The Conrad who composed the final version of The Rescue was, therefore, a much more mature and confident writer than the neophyte of Almayer's Folly . The novel is gripping from start to finish. Conrad wrote of the novel, "I want to make it a kind of glorified book for boys – you know. No analysis. No damned mouthing. Pictures – pictures – pictures. That's what I want to do," and he succeeds in exactly what he set out to do. The novel pulls one along just as boy's adventures should, and the atmosphere he creates of the tropical archipelago where the novel is set sucks us in. R...

  I began the project of going through my CD library alphabetically by composers' last names with Alkan. Now I moved into the Bs with Alban Berg and his violin concerto. This concerto is often used to demonstrate that 12-tone music doesn't have to be coldly cerebral, and, with one of its dedications being "To the Memory of an Angel," it does so effectively. This is a tremendously moving piece, and I'm happy to have returned to it. The version I listened to featured violinist Leonid Kogan with the USSR State Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky in 1966, the premiere Russian performance. It's on one of those cheap and wonderful Yedang Classics CDs that Tower Records still sells, though I bought mine years ago.

  Every time I think I'm done with contemporary "literary fiction," I break down and read a contemporary novel that turns out, against all expectations, to be good. Colored Television , by Danzy Senna, is one of them. It is an account of a mixed-race—or to use the term that is very much at the center of the novel, "mulatto"—novelist, Jane Gibson, whose magnum opus, "a mulatto War and Peace ," at which she's labored for ten years, is rejected by her agent and her editor. To make matters worse, if she can't publish the novel she will not get tenure at her teaching job. Her husband, an uncompromisingly unsuccessful painter, is no help. Because Jane is living with her family in Los Angeles—house-sitting, actually, in the architecturally important home of a screenwriter friend—opportunities to sell out present themselves, and she comes very close to doing so. The novel is, among other things, a satire of bourgeois bohemian life, and the satire works...