IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 41m, rated 5.4 by 115 cinematizens.
Genre: Satire; Species: dramedy.
DNA: Czech.
Verdict: [Gasp!]
Tagline: The story must go on…and on.
Czech Radio correspondent from a civil war in the Middle East makes a surprise return to his home in Prague, fearing his wife’s infidelity during his long absence. She, too, is a journalist at Czech Radio.
His fevered imagination misinterprets everything and he goes ballistic, confirming his worst fears, but he has to keep up the pretence of reporting on the spot from a state of emergency in Arabia. Ingenuity and laughs follow, as does his wife’s incredulity, exasperation, (im)patience, and then enthusiasm for the project. The deception is a circle as the television news plagiarises the radio news which plagiarises the news services and the television which plagiarises both. And repeat.
Some of the humour is adult, and there is some gratuitous violence at the end, but the result is upbeat. If you have seen His Girl Friday (1940) you get the idea, and if you haven’t: why not?
There is side story with a school teacher about disinformation that seemed tacked on and not integrated, and the final shootout started as farce and ends up with cadavers.
Most of this dramedy takes places in the apartment so there was no Prague travelogue to remind us of our visit there.
***
Speaking of patience, mine was stretched. This was the finale of the Czech & Slovak film festival at the local Dendy, it began an hour late while we sheep sat and waited. Grumble, grumble.
Good Reads meta-data is 339 pages, rated 4.25 by four litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Georgia, USA.
Verdict: Acute.
Tagline: Petunia did it, and how!
A hapless graduate student in a genetics PhD program observes the ignorant, solipsistic, corrupt, narcissistic, venal, alcoholic members of the department who ingest illegal substances, give rabbits lesson in libido, cheat and lie in research, and hate each other, enslave grad students, while the student befriends a gun-toting house maid, a voodoo practicing untenured English professor, a jive-talking janitor with occult powers and a cartographic knowledge of drain pipes, and then there is the soon-to-be, and sooner-not-to-be, Doctor Frankenstein.
The touch is light but the macabre ending is not. Be forewarned.
Here are some of les bons mots, many of them quotations from literature. The author is clearly a reader of far more than genetics research.
_____________
‘To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering,’ quoth Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey.
He was a monk of science, who devoted himself to his calling, ignoring minor matters of light, air, sleep, or food.
Only fiction has to seem possible, reality does not.
Words advanced to convince her were doomed soldiers sent on a suicide mission.
To quote Confucius: ‘The wise man is informed in what is right. The inferior man is informed in what will pay.’ No prizes for guessing which sort dominates the academy in these pages.
Most men believe to be true whatever they want to be true. So said Caesar. he could say it today as long as he includes women.
Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt. William Thackeray, Vanity Fair might have been describing the successful professoriate.
Each day I received four or five emails from the university designed to relieve it of all responsibility for anything I might do or not do or think about doing or have done in the past. Daily, it disowned me and my works.
How void of reason are men, said Seneca. (Had he been watching Fox News?)
They may plan to burn you at the stake, but they begin with innocuous questions.
Selfishness has to be forgiven because there is no cure, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park.
How few know their own good, and fewer still who purse it, John Dryden in his introduction to Juvenal’s Satire X.
No amount of money is compensation for the grind of graduate school. (Amen. Hardest thing I ever did.)
To hate all the hate-worthy people leaves one no energy for anything else, Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism.
_____________
Gupta and I also did some vocabulary building: valetudinarian, maleficent, undulant, diurnal, stellate, arithmomania, flensed, eldritch, professosis, hebetade, ethology, soi-disant, and more. (Yes, some are coinages.)
Eugene M McCarthy
I see from the author’s Research Gate entry that he has retired from the lists of competition for research grants. Therein he describes this book as ‘a satire of academic life, based largely on my own experience (with names changed to protect the guilty).’ He is not going to be applying for more research grants after this delightful hatchet job.
I certainly recognised some of the personalities from my part of the jungle.
I read it during our stay at the zoo. Seemed fitting, right, Petunia?
Plod goes to an annual crime writers seminar (of 30 participants) to comment on the technical aspects of murder in the five krimis nominated for this year’s prize awarded by the sponsor of this seminar. In each case he faults the descriptions of the murders. The writers, each of whom is present, react to his critique in different ways. One welcomes it as a free professional consultation. Others pretend indifference, and another is passive aggressive hostile. A fifth stomps out of the room at the first quibble. (Yes, I felt like I had attended that seminar.)
The prize awarded; murder ensues. There is an Ellery Queen story with this setting that is lighter and brighter.
The authors and their companions are described, including the companion dog of one of them, along with some of the thirty attendees.
There are loose ends aplenty. Unconvincing characters who are also uninteresting and hard to tell apart rendered in forced prose. Yikes. I chose it for the ostensible academic setting, but that offered poor consolation.
B M Gill
Gill wrote many other krimis, using other pseudonyms. Her birth name was Barbara M Gill but she also used Margaret Blake and Barbara Gilmour.
Good Reads meta-data is 242 pages, rated 5.0 by two litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Bristol, UK
Verdict: Uphill.
Tagline: Deviants all.
Delightful chapter headings accompanied by epigrams from poetry, song, training manuals and other sources of high and low literature. These are worth the effort to read the book.
Yes, I did find it an effort. Much of it is presented in police interview transcripts – boring. The same person may be interviewed four or five times, and each time states her legal name and address, place of employment….
One of the police officers has hormonal surges that seem, well, adolescent in a trained-up cop.
It has an excellent plot all the same, and I enjoyed the descriptions of the academics, though I did not notice a seminar. The pompous, opinionated, solipsistic, alcoholic, and lecherous are all on parade. I certainly recognised some of them.
I did get muddled up about the presence of high school students. No doubt I blinked when that was explained. But there were a lot of explanations and I skipped many on the assumption they were padding and not blocks in the plot wall.
I hope the author has more to offer.
Read while disporting at the Retreat in Taronga Park Zoo.
Good Reads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.74 by 943 citizens
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: Unusual.
Tagline: Tell me a story.
Dutiful granddaughter visits her aging grandfather regularly. He has an unusual form of dementia (which is described in some detail for clinicians) and to hedge against that she plays a game with him that he used to play with her when she was a child. The poser provides two or three details, and the respondent has to make up a story based on that. I might say there is a blue house with a red bicycle parked in front of it on a rainy day. Now weave a short story based on that information.
One day on her way to visit her grandfather, she sees an assault and an innocent bystander who went to the aid of the victim is arrested by the police who mistakenly suppose he is the perpetrator. This all happens far across a river and before she can get to the other side everyone is gone. Later the police show no interest in her claims because they have the culprit and she was so far away, but she is sure.
She puts this information to her grandfather and asked him to weave it into a story. He does. She checks it out…. Hmm. She finds further clues and asks him to elaborate the story with them. He does. She checks and adds more. He elaborates further. Voilà! She does the legwork to feed him intel and he moves the pieces of information around until everything clicks into. Think of Archie and Nero and there it is. She does Archie’s legwork and he does Nero’s cogitation.
There are four more such crime problems, the last being close to home.
Masateru Konishi
It is a charming set up and a delightful premise. That the old man has visions at times when he telling the stories adds to the fun as she has to sort those out to follow the thread.
While we had a long birthday weekend at the Retreat in the Taronga Park Zoo with a harbour view room, we took the 100 bus down Military Road to Mosman and had coffee and a stroll. We went to Hartog’s Books where I acquired this title. (Some historians think Dutchman Derk Hartog was the first European to see Australia, the northwest coast, or even Rottnest Island off Perth.)
GoodReads meta-data is 270 pages, rated 4.0 by 2,330 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: SoCal.
Verdict: Chapeaux!
Tagline: Families divided!
Archer is hired to recover a stolen painting but that quickly develops into something far more deadly. Thirty years ago in an Arizona desert the painter’s illegitimate half brother was beaten to death, nearly beyond identification. Ten years ago, at the height of his creativity and sales, the painter himself disappeared. Presumed now to be dead. There will be more deaths to follow in the here and now, unless Archer can put the jigsaw puzzle together working from the edges inward.
When reading an Archer novel, if a drunken blowhard boasts of his long ago high school football triumphs, pay attention because somewhere later that fact will fit into the plot. When a clerk at a liquor store hesitates in replying to a question about the shop next door, the silence says it all. When comments about how aging changes a person are made that is thread to follow.
There are some of the signature features of Ross Macdonald’s Archer stories. An archeological murder in the dim past. A few mixed up youngsters in their twenties. Half-truths, lies, and secrets. But a new twist is that Archer is falling in love with a newspaper woman, and that makes him vulnerable, and confused.
The title comes late in the piece and is worth waiting for because it heralded the end for Archer himself in the 18th and last of the Archers.
I read it first in the year of publication and it stayed with me.
I read the One (1) star reviews to remind myself why the aliens will never make contact with humanity.
I re-read while we spend a long weekend at the Taronga Park Zoo retreat with a harbour view room.
Heavily armed and armoured police assault children and murder mothers for the crime of reading! Is it Florida or Texas? Can’t decide which. It depicts bleak future dominated by illiterate bullies. Or maybe that is today. You be the judge.
Good Reads meta-data is 187 pages, rated by 2.67 by a measly 3 litizens.
Genre: krimi; Species: Academic.
DNA: Oxbridge.
Verdict: Dry.
Tagline: Pass the port to the left and the sherry to the right.
It opens with a discussion of Thomas Hobbes! Regrettably Hobbes makes only one more appearance near the end. Still that opening soupçon was bait enough to hook me.
But wait! There’s more. No sooner is Brother Hobbes consulted than the foregathered Dons unite in rejecting Sociology and all sociologists! I began to wonder if the author had the University of Sydney in mind.
In 1974 when my shadow darkened the door of the University of Sydney the Vice Chancellor of the day repeatedly declared his determination to keep out the barbarian sociologists clamouring at the sandstone gates of the quadrangle. It was also a time when we endured weekly faculty meetings wherein colleagues lectured we of the hapless hosts on the errors, mortal and venal of those who did not drink but the waters of neo-classical economics. These sinners all were ‘sociologists’ by many other names! This subtext was loud, clear, and repeated weekly.
Max Weber, Emil Durkheim, Harriet Martineau, Mary Douglas, and company be damned! Derive those demand curves!
(Aside, an acolyte of that faith said to me once that original research in economics was impossible because all was known. No, I am afraid he wasn’t kidding. So pure are they of the faith that when we had a Nobel Prize winner in Economics visit, few of the local economists bothered to attend his lecture or seminar, because he was not one of them. He was…shudder…a psychologist who studied the economic behaviour of people! People! Such was completely irrelevant to those who preferred faith to facts.)
Now back to the action: The foibles, ego centrisms, obsessions of the denizens of a fictitious but very realistic Oxford college are paraded and parodied. Well, most scholars are self-parodying in their own microcosms. This college is old fashioned even by Oxford standards. In my aforementioned days colleagues assured me Sydney was second only to Oxford, and now I begin to see why. We operated according to two rules. Rule One – everyone/thing here is excellent. Rule Two – don’t question the first rule.
Leachers, idlers, incompetents, narcissists, blackmailers, egotists, drones, preachers, and deluded wielded their vices. Pareto’s keep the boat afloat, barely.
In addition to its protected species of academics with arcane ranks and specialities there are students, who typically do not figure in the story, porters, administrators, and the visitors. Some of that later cross the stage.
This well-ordered world is jarred by the need to raise money for its long-neglected physical plant, starting with the roof of the chapel no one attends in this secular age. A professional fund raiser arrives to take stock of the needs and prospects. He expects members of the college to assist in this project in their own common interest and is puzzled by their unwillingness to lift a finger for the greater good. Clearly he has not spent much time among this congregation or he would not have been surprised by this solipsism.
Then comes a second and greater shock when one of the oldest and most senile Fellows of the college is murdered in the library where he goes to sleep away the day between meals.
Enter plod who ever so deftly and politely asks questions. Being questioned, [shudder…] by an outsider is not something these cosseted men can abide, but needs must. Yes, they are all men.
Among their number is one person whom they all despise – the only thing they agree on – and soon every finger of blame is pointed at him. The plot thickens when it becomes apparent that he could not possibly have done it.
Yikes.
Plod plods on.
By the way, Plod is Inspector Barnaby. Yep. Same as…. (If you don’t know, then you don’t know. Got it?)
It was highly recommended in Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (1989), so I went looking for it. Glad I did.
IMDb meta-data 1h and 43m, rated 6.0 by 566 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy Comedy.
DNA: France.
Verdict: Diverting.
Tagline: ‘It was better tomorrow!’
In a stolid petit bourgeois neighbourhood time travel occurs, by accident. A couple from 1958 are inexplicably hurled forward in time to 2025 where they are fish out of water socially and technically. While the emphasis is on all the tech toys there is an undertone that the future is not all golden. There are homeless people on the streets and women are still victimised.
There are plenty of laughs as the couple comes to terms with the brave new world of cell phones, Siri, self-driving cars, streaming media, tell-all television, an untamed Roomba, and more, and socially with racial integration, social media, sexual liberation, and the price of cigarettes!
He is so firmly set in his 1958 ways that adjustment is nearly impossible, but she, long used to going along to get along, adapts better than he does to contemporary expectations, wardrobe, norms, and so on. Her talents for organisation, solicitude, and encouragement pay off at work. She is willing to try. And she succeeds little by little. Her maternal care at the office, so unusual in contemporary business, leads to commercial success, an inexplicable result to her manager who manages by McKinsey’s veiled management threats: ‘We have a KPI for you!’
While his skill to say ‘No’ leads to nothing, per Lear. So he stays at home. Role reversal follows. He has one shock after another, and becomes a changed man, though we wonder how long that will last once he is back in 1958.
We saw it on Wednesday at the Palace in Leichhardt as part of the Alliance Française film festival; one of the three we chose to see. I didn’t know what to make of the third with its immaculate conception, Nun in the City (2025) Doux Jésus and haven’t written it up. It is another fish out of water tale with some high points but, well….
Johannes Simmel, It Can’t Aways be Caviar (1960) (The Monte Cristo Cover-up)
Good Reads meta-data is 558 pages rated 4.26 by 1,299 litizens.
DNA: Austria.
Genre: SpyFi.
Verdict: Amusingly sophomoric.
Tagline: Stir slowly.
Banker Lieven, thanks to the misdeeds of his business partner, gets pressed into espionage service…. by the French, then the Germans, then the English…in this travelogue 1939-1941 – London, Brussels, Zurich, Berlin, Paris, Toulouse, Lisbon, and more.
On each occasion he finds it best to go along to get along. Unlike James Bond of the same era and ilk, Lieven is a pacifist.
He is also a gourmet and wherever he goes he cooks, even in a war ravaged countryside. His recipes dot the book. Wherever he goes, like Bond, the women surround him, and he does his duty by them. He takes license to thrill but not to kill.
It was highly recommended in Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (1989), so I went looking for it. Not readily available to this reader but I came across it in the Internet Archive, and read it on the iPad screen from that source. I didn’t finish it, partly because the antics became repetitive and partly because of the awkwardness in screen reading on the iPad. I made it page 100 and noticing that many more awaited I withdrew. It is in print for German readers.
