Feldman's Faves: December 19, 2022

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

What an epic weekend for sports. The Vikings comeback on Saturday was simply insane and made poor Matt Ryan one of the saddest trivia questions in all of sports. But of course the World Cup Final was one for the ages and crowed Lionel Messi as the GOAT in soccer.

I want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all of you for everything that you do. Each and every one of you has made an incredible contribution to our section and our firm this year and I really, really appreciate it. 2022 has been another extremely successful year for Goodmans, which is 100% attributable to all of the smart, hard working and decent people that make up our firm. I wish each and every one of you all the very best for the holidays and the new year and I hope you will have the opportunity to spend quality time with the important people in your lives.

JUST A HEADS UP THAT THIS WILL BE MY FINAL REVIEW OF 2022. But in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ll be back!!

No theme this week, just random topics of interest.

THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA By: Sheehan Karunatilka – For those of you who have been reading these blurbs over the last two years, you know that I am a big fan of the Booker Prize and try to read the winner every year. The most recent previous winners, Shuggie Bain (2020) and The Promise (2021) were both exceptional novels describing life in very different parts of the world (being gay in impoverished Scotland during the Thatcher era and race relations in South Africa in and coming out of the Apartheid regime, respectively). While both books were outstanding in capturing an era and in developing fascinating and complex characters and accompanying story lines, they were both incredibly difficult to read due to the depressing and heart wrenching topics they covered. Well, this year’s winner, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, is the Sri Lankan version of this general theme. I had a very superficial understanding of the situation in Sri Lanka (and of course still do), but this book was an eye opener and has led me to do a deep dive into the history of this nation. The story itself is beautiful but difficult given the horrors and indignities that our main character experiences throughout. This book has a magical realism feel (given that the protagonist supposed to be dead) and reminds me a little of the writing of both Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The life of a journalist in a society that is less than free is explored here and has universal application particularly these days. As one reviewer notes, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, returns to 1980s Sri Lanka, and has a debauched protagonist. Maali, the son of a Sinhalese father and a burgher mother, is an itinerant photographer who loves his trusted Nikon camera; a gambler in high-stakes poker; a gay man and an atheist. And at the start of the novel, he wakes up dead. He thinks he has swallowed “silly pills” given to him by a friend and is hallucinating. But no: he really is dead, and seemingly locked in an underworld. It’s no Miltonian pandemonium; for him, “the afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate”. Other souls surround him, with dismembered limbs and blood-stained clothes; and they are incapable of forming an orderly queue to get their forms filled in. Many of the people he meets in this bleakly quotidian landscape are victims of the violence that plagued Sri Lanka in the 80s, including a Tamil university lecturer who was gunned down for criticising militant separatist group the Tamil Tigers. The novel also depicts the victims of Marxist group the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna , or People’s Liberation party, who similarly waged an insurrection against the Sri Lankan government, and killed many left wing and working-class civilians who got in their way. Maali is a witness to the brutality of the insurrections in Sri Lanka. Working for newspapers and magazines, his ambition is to take photographs “that will bring down governments. Photos that could stop wars.” He has shot “the government minister who looked on while the savages of ’83 torched Tamil homes and slaughtered the occupants”, and taken “portraits of disappeared journalists and vanished activists, bound and gagged and dead in custody”. Those photos are stored underneath a bed in his family home. Now, stuck in the underworld, he has only seven moons – one week – to get in contact with his friend Jaki and her cousin, persuade them to retrieve the stash of photos, and share them throughout Colombo, Sri Lanka’s largest city, in order to expose the profoundly violent nature of the conflict. It’s explained to Maali that “every soul is allowed seven moons to wander the In Between. To recall past lives. And then, to forget. They want you to forget. Because, when you forget, nothing changes.” Maali doesn’t want his contribution as a witness to be consigned to oblivion. His own death has viscerally exposed to him the fragility of life, and the photos constitute his legacy for his country and a defence against collective amnesia. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is written in the second person, which gives the narrative a slightly distancing effect, but it’s compensated for by the sardonic humour. In one passage, the narrator muses: “You have one response for those who believe Colombo to be overcrowded: wait till you see it with ghosts.” Another asks: “Do animals get an afterlife? Or is their punishment to be reborn as human?” Another compelling feature is the vivid use of similes: one man’s battered body is described as having ribs caved in “like a broken coconut”.…Beneath the literary flourishes is a true and terrifying reality: the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil wars. Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country’s history.” We rarely get exposure on any meaningful level to this part of the world, whose history and culture are fascinating and deeply disturbing at the same time. As you can see the formula for winning a Booker continues to be to exposing misery in a creative manner, which this novel does very effectively. Here is a good review from the Booker Prize Committee itself - https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/2022

TED BUSINESS - How to write less but say more | Jim VandeHei – In this PODCAST Jim VandeHei argues that “less is more” when it comes to successful business writing. The ability to convey an idea as succinctly and simply as possible is THE super power in our job (just read anything that Jonathan Lampe has ever written). The focus at Goodmans on “point first writing” is a strong reflection of this idea and is fortunately a skill we can all develop. Here is a brief excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “As the saying goes, less is more. The same goes for words. Listen as Politico and Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei shares what he's learned leading two media companies -- and how to radically rethink the way you write to keep people's attention in a distracted digital world. After the talk, our host Modupe Akinola dives into how brevity can get you ahead in your work life.” : https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ted-business/id470622782?i=1000582898961

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon