Month: February 2024

Russia and Martin Cruz Smith

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Once American intelligence agencies verified that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, it behooved all thinking Americans to inform themselves about our long-term enemy, an enemy many of us thought was no longer a potent threat. The invasion of Ukraine and the recent suspicious Siberian death of Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s foremost opponent, makes educating ourselves even more pressing.

You couldn’t start anywhere better than with the crime novels of Martin Cruz Smith. They present a wide-ranging, richly-textured portrait of the ailing, corrupt Soviet Union collapsing and slowly turning into an even more corrupt, money-mad Russian kleptocracy. A country that undermines American democracy in profound and devilish ways, like supporting the current Speaker of the House with campaign donations.

The touchstone for all this upheaval is the cynical, battered hero Arkady Renko. Renko should have risen much higher than he has as a police inspector, because his father was a famous general in The Great Patriotic War (WWII).  But he disobeys orders, won’t cut corners, and won’t accept cover-ups. In other words: he’s honest. It hasn’t done him any good in the old order and it’s even less helpful in the new one where everything is for sale. In fact, it almost gets him killed more than once.

His latest dangerous case sends him to Siberia in search of his testy journalist girlfriend Tatiana who’s risking her life researching a story about oligarchs and oil–and much more than she’s let him know about. Siberia is “where strange things happened and stranger things were just around the corner…It was a zone on the edge where planes of existence overlapped.  Nothing was inexplicable.”

But everything is potentially lethal.  When Arkady lands in the grim Siberian city of Chita, the chatty cab driver laughingly warns him, “Don’t go by first impressions.  It gets worse. A few days ago an oil tanker on a train headed to Moscow exploded two kilometers from the station.  It went up in flames for no good reason. They say you could have seen the blast from the moon.”

Renko asks if that happens often there and the driver says, “It’s Chita. Anything can happen.” And anything does, as Arkady is the subject of more violence in this book than ever before, or perhaps more accurately, violence unlike anything he could have imagined.

I’ve read all of the previous novels twice and look forward to reading them again. They’re beautifully written, but not in such a way as to interfere with the narrative. Every word serves the story, like these quietly ominous lines from  Three Stations: “Yegor’s name was like a drop of ink in water. Everything took a darker shade.”

Line by line he’s also one of the funniest novelists we have, and Renko’s sly insolence when dealing with his nasty boss Zurin is one of the highlights of the series. Their barbed relationship doesn’t prepare you, though, for a shocking request Zurin makes near the end of the book that could not only change Renko’s life but change the course of Russian history. And while the characters may be fictional, their prototypes are not.

“Brilliant” may be an over-used word for  reviewers, and so is “stunning”–but both of them fit.  There’s more to say than that, however. Martin Cruz Smith has been writing an epic history of contemporary Russia that should have earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature by now. ★★★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other publications, online journals, and radio stations.  He is the author of 27 books in many genres.

Our Forgotten War

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Anna Reid is the author of Borderland, a brilliant book about the history of Ukraine, and she tackles an even more complicated story in A Nasty Little War.

The Allies in WWI were under the delusional belief that they could intervene in Russia’s civil war, invade the country after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Russia’s peace treaty with Germany, and force it back into the war and/or crush the Bolsheviks. Armies from more than a dozen countries landed in Russia’s Far East, in the Caucasus, and the frozen north near Finland. They fought a dizzying array of armies, supported over a dozen different governments, ignored the massacres of Jews as well as mass executions, and believed that they were making Russia great again. Or at least harmless.

Arrogance, lack of information and insight, shambolic planning, bigotry, and theft of supplies undermined the campaigns at almost every step. One of the most ludicrous examples of stupidity among many falls to President Wilson. He initially sent troops from Michigan and Wisconsin to Russia’s subarctic Murmansk and Archangel because it was believed they would be used to the cold. 

If there wasn’t so much cruelty, confusion, death and and combat, you might think the months of political and military wheel spinning had been organized by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Even when nearly 200,000 troops were on the ground across the vast country, they made very little impact.  The only real success was establishing Red Cross hospitals which had never been a war aim and some treaty agreements for the newly-independent Latvia and Estonia.

The vivid and engrossing book is enlivened by quotations from letters and diaries and many of them from the Allied side are stunning in their crudity.  Churchill as Minister of Munitions thought that Russia was “a very disagreeable country, inhabited by immense numbers of ignorant people.”  As for the Bolsheviks, he likened them at various times to ferocious baboons, vampires, rats, crocodiles, and hyenas.  He was hardly alone in his invective and myopia. My favorite English twit is the aristocrat who wondered airily in Vladivostok why anyone would want to live in Siberia.

Amid the fog of war, Jews suffered way out of proportion to their numbers: as many as 200,000 were victims of mass rape and murder.  The culprits were Russians of all stripes, Poles, Ukrainians, Cossacks. Almost as disturbing as events that presage the Holocaust was the way that British politicians, diplomats and military officers downplayed, ignored, or denied that these horrific massacres were taking place.  Readers might likely connect all of this to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

The book teems with generals, warlords, politicians, Cossacks, coup leaders, assassins–and nationalities and ethnic groups–who most people have never heard of.  Given the cast of thousands, A Nasty Little War could have used a Dramatis Personae section at the beginning to help readers keep track.  It also lacks a detailed map of the Caucasus, but it’s otherwise stunning history of events that should be much better known. Because even an American president and a British prime minister didn’t know their countries had ever fought in Russia.  ★★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report, The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram and several public radio stations in Michigan.

Hitchens Hits Hard: A New Collection

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I confess that Christopher Hitchens’ erudition and wit can sometimes be intimidating: His writing is just so damned smart, caustic, and rhetorically relentless. Imagine an Oxford-educated Robin Williams at warp speed with, I guess, a First in Classics, perhaps, or whatever degree is most impressive to the hoi polloi (and yes, I know, the British just say hoi polloi). 

So I recommend this book of previously uncollected essays and reviews, some of them quite scathing, to be sampled slowly, like an 16-year-old Lagavulin. Because this stuff is definitely peaty.

Consider the essay titled “Spanking” in which Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher made Hitchens lose “all independent volition” when they met at a book party. He actually obeyed when she ordered him to bow lower and lower until she could “thwack” him on the butt.  Yes, it was with rolled-up papers, but still. . . .

The opening of that piece is a treasure house of finely-tuned mockery:

Sometimes in the late autumn of 1977, I went to a book party that was held in the Rosebery Room of the House of Lords. Why I went I can’t think–the volume was some piece of unreadable bufferdom* extruded by Lord Butler, who as “Rab” had never in his life done anything to live down the sobriquet “flabby-faced old coward.” He himself was vaguely present, moving about the carpet like a terrible tortoise.

I thought instantly of the grotesque bejeweled tortoise that Rex Mottrom gave Julia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited.

There’s much to feast on here, like the gimlet-eyed portrait of Princess Margaret having the full weight of the British government suppress her quite ordinary need for love and deny her marriage to the divorced man she loved.  It’s hard to read those sad, boozy pages without seeing Lesley Manville’s riveting performance–the glamor and clamor–in The Crown. Hitchens has no love for royalty and its discontents and while the essay is brutal, it’s also surprisingly compassionate.

The book is heavily political from politics in the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon years to the sexual hypocrisy of J. Edgar Hoover.  Hitchens hated all four men, and gives readers good reasons why.

And people who feel Barbie was “snubbed” might find the surprising “At the Oscars” illuminating. Or infuriating.  Either way, it’s masterful reportage and analysis.

One fascinating feature of the book is published letters responding to complaints about various articles of his. In Hitchens’ ripostes, he often seems to be dueling an unarmed–or at least unskilled–opponent.

Hitchens’ essays frequently quote Oscar Wilde  and I found myself deeply grateful for his reference in one essay to a master of humor almost equal to Wilde: H.H. Munro who wrote under then pen name of “Saki.” Saki’s Edwardian tales are priceless in their dissection of the period’s arrogance and self-love. Read them when the world is too much with you, late or soon.

The author was known by many people as “Hitch” and the publishers went with a punning title and cover, but honestly, a stiletto or rapier would have been a more fitting implement.  ★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other newspapers as well as for NPR stations in Michigan.  Guests on his interview show on Lansing Public Radio included Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes.

*the state of being foolish, old-fashioned, and incompetent

Why Is China’s Genocide Ignored? Especially by U.S. Faculty & Students?

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Over more than a decade, the Chinese government has been grossly persecuting Muslims in the western region of Xianjiang. An officially-recognized ethnic minority of between 11-13 million people, the Uyghurs speak a Turkic language. As second-class citizens, they have seen their lives grow more tenuous, constricted, desolate and desperate as the Chinese have spun ugly new twists on the Nazi persecution of Jews and Soviet-style surveillance.

Supposedly protecting China from terrorists, Chinese persecution has involved demeaning the Uyghurs as less than human; endless interrogations over things as minor as speaking to someone abroad on the phone–and even arresting those people; denying them passports; arresting and “disappearing” people who have passports; seizing anything related to Islam like Korans, Islamic books, and prayer rugs; forcing people to change their Muslim names and expensively register the change in newspapers; arbitrarily arresting and detaining a million people in slave labor camps. Uyghurs have even been forced to renounce Islam and praise Communism in word and song. And they have to pay for the installation of state surveillance cameras on their apartment buildings.

People just disappear, and family and friends don’t know where they are or if they’re even alive. Torture has been employed against Uyghurs in prisons and camps, and so is forced sterilization of some women. The aim is to terrorize this population and destroy their culture. The oppression extends beyond their region: Uyghurs who have come to Beijing for any number of reasons cannot stay in ordinary Chinese hotels but are ghettoized in Uyghur hotels.

Much of this is detailed soberly but powerfully by renowned Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil in his memoir Waiting to Be Arrested at Night.  In his devastating short book he details his three-year imprisonment after trying to travel outside of China, along with endless interviews and bureaucracy that go beyond Kafkaesque. Chinese surveillance of its people who all have ID cards is highly sophisticated, strict, far-reaching, and inexorable. And the Uyghurs aren’t just spied on, they’re fingerprinted, forced to give blood samples, and photographed extensively via computers for facial advanced recognition.

The author tells the stories of friends who almost died trying to get to freedom in the West and his own attempts to escape China with his family are heartbreaking, the stuff of a thriller. Luckily, he made it out.

In one of the most haunting passages, he and his wife are interrogated in a basement office where they pass by prison cells, bloodstained floors, and a chair with straps meant to immobilize people being tortured. Waiting anxiously to be summoned downstairs, they had heard a man crying out in pain–until a steel door to the stairs was shut by police.

Many colleges and universities around the U.S. seem to think that they should be making foreign policy declarations even though their central mission is education. Given that drive and the uproar about the war in Gaza, it’s shocking that when it comes to China, Muslims there do not seem to count despite their horrendous suffering–and the fact that the U.S. has declared what is happened in China to be genocide.

Michigan State University is a sad example with its furious meetings about the war in Gaza. Whatever lies behind student and faculty silence about the Uyghurs, the institutional silence could be due to the fact that MSU has long-standing and apparently remunerative ties with China. You have to wonder if other universities have similar reasons for shamefully ignoring the truth. ★★★★★

Lev Raphael is a former book reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has also reviewed for The Washington Post and several public radio stations in Michigan.

Downton Shabby

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Brandy Schillace’s debut mystery The Framed Women of Ardmore House is a classic fish-out-of-water crime novel.  Jo Jones may have a drab name but she’s a fascinating woman: autistic, divorced, broke, an editor who loves mysteries and classic literature, and the surprised inheritor of an English country mansion.

It’s not remotely a show place. The once-magnificent gardens are dilapidated and the house is a wreck: there’s a major roof leak, filth, mold, and water damage throughout, and it’s all overseen by a creepy caretaker who has boundary issues. 

Not surprisingly, he’s soon dead with Jo as the prime suspect because they’ve argued and she had him fired. As you might expect from an author who’s been a professor of Gothic Literature, the lights often go out in this book and there’s a mysterious portrait that Jo finds hanging in the wrong place before it disappears completely. The hunt is on!  Who was the woman, who stole the portrait and why? That’s Jo’s mission while the police zero in on her  as the murderer because of her barbed interactions with the caretaker.

Schillace has skillfully made Jo’s autism turn her into a suspect because her behavior is awkward to say the least. She seems to those around her either strangely detached and unemotional when you’d expect the opposite–but she can also flare up and panic. She can ramble and is frequently inappropriate in her questions and answers. As a stranger who is truly strange in the eyes of almost everyone in town, Jo is a magnet for suspicion. 

But Jo has a keen memory that makes her a terrific amateur sleuth even if she sometimes has trouble reading people. Conversely, she can see connections that other people can’t and can make those connections faster. 

Book lovers of all kinds will relate to her because she lives in books, noting “Always, I love words. The way they look and feel and smell. It’s hard to explain. Words have just always been my people. And I don’t forget them after I read them.”

This is a charming mystery with bite and filled with wonderful observations. Like these about the stodgy detective investigating the murder: 

He did not want to be in the incident room on a Saturday. He wanted to go for a walk with the dog he didn’t have (but kept meaning to get) and have a pint somewhere with real food and the general hum of humans.  Murders were damned inconvenient.

That parenthesis is delicious and so is that last line worthy of P.G. Wodehouse, though I suppose he would have used “dashed.”

With plenty of suspects, the book is a fine blend of darkness and light and will make an entertaining weekend read wherever you are.  ★★★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, Jerusalem Report and several NPR stations in Michigan. His suspense novel Assault With a Deadly Lie was a Midwest Book Award finalist.