Feldman's Faves: April 28, 2025

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

It’s ELECTION DAY IN CANADA (once again). My only comment for this group is to remind you to get out and vote if you haven’t done so already.

Speaking of excitement, our modern day Magellan is back from his world travels and with a very short haircut. Matt, its great to have you back!!

And speaking of excitement yet again, the LEAFS/SENS series, with three overtimes so far, has been pretty fun to watch. While I would have preferred the Sweep, I would be ok with the Gentleman’s Sweep if that happens tomorrow. If it doesn’t, well then this might be too much excitement for me to handle….

Finally, please join me in wishing our good friend Noa a very happy birthday!!

No theme this week -  just topics of interest.

ATONEMENT By: Ian McEwan – I have tried to read this book multiple times and gave up multiple times. It is long, long-winded and written in a way that requires extreme concentration (something I clearly lack). But most literary critics agree that Ian McEwan’s award winning Atonement is one of the most creative and unique novels written in the 20th century. The story is epic but the form is extremely creative and interesting. It is described as “meta” (in the old sense of the word) and while on one hand can be viewed as a classic WWII epic it is so much more than that. As one reviewer notes, “The first time we hear the hero speak, in this impressive, engrossing, deep and surprising novel, he says: 'I was away in my thoughts.' The curious phrase is echoed later by the mother of the novel's other main character, a 13-year-old girl: 'Her daughter was always off and away in her mind.' What it means to be 'away in your mind' is one of the key subjects here. Fantasy, day-dream, evasions, self-dramatisation, all the powerful and dangerous work of the imagination, do battle with the facts, things as they are. Can the imagined and the real ever be 'at one'? The two main characters, Robbie Turner and Briony Tallis, are placed, in the first part of the novel, in an English setting of deceptive placidity. It is 1935, the summer of an intense heatwave and rumours of war. The Tallis family, inheritors of a 'baronial-Gothic' late-nineteenth-century mansion in Surrey with vestiges of a more elegant Adam-style house (a fountain, a temple) in the extensive grounds, aren't quite as solid as their house makes them look. The father is away in London, involved in mysterious defence plans at the Ministry and a long-standing affair. The mother, Emily, is withdrawn into illness, and dogged by a life-long resentment of her self-pleasing sister, a promisingly reckless off-stage character called Hermione. The son is an affable joker; the older daughter, Cecilia, has been to Cambridge but is now at a loss; and her sister, Briony, is a ferociously orderly child 'possessed by a desire to have the world just so' - a desire that takes the form of writing. Handsome Robbie Turner is the family protégé: his mother is the charlady, and the Tallises have helped him get to Cambridge; he wants to be a doctor. Into this household, one fatal day (as Briony might put it) come Hermione's neglected children: sexy, manipulative teenage Lola, and two pathetic twin brothers, whom Briony immediately ropes in to be in her play, a wonderful and absurd farrago called The Trials of Arabella. The play is meant to welcome home her brother, who arrives with a rich, stupid young businessman. By the end of the day, Robbie and Cecilia have discovered they are passionately in love, the twins have run away, Lola has been raped, Briony has accused Robbie of the assault and he has been arrested, and The Trials of Arabella has never been produced.

Part Two cuts to May 1940. Robbie has been let out of prison to join the infantry, and Cecilia is waiting for him to 'come back'. Both she and Briony (who are estranged) have gone into nursing. Two long sections describe, with unsparing, closely researched, gripping relentlessness, the retreat to Dunkirk, as experienced by Robbie and his two (splendidly done) comrades-at-arms and by Nurse Briony Tallis in St Thomas's Hospital. The bloody, chaotic shambles of the retreat sabotages one common national fantasy, of Dunkirk as a heroic rescue - a view of history consistent with all McEwan's previous work. Briony, matured by her hospital experience, goes to ask forgiveness of her sister. In the last part of the novel, it's nearly 50 years on. Briony is a famous novelist in her seventies. She is suffering from the onset of dementia, which will produce complete memory loss (a terrible infliction, especially in a novel so much concerned with the power of memory). In a dazzlingly dexterous coda, she goes back to the family home, now a grand country-house hotel, for a reunion, where one last surprise awaits her - and us. As in all McEwan's midlife work, a private drama of loss of innocence or betrayal is played out against a larger history of bad faith. Here, the personal story - especially Briony's childhood 'failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you', and her later struggle with remorse - is painfully strong. And there are all kinds of tender and exact human details: the lovers' determination to survive, the working-class mother's faith in her son, the confused funny hopelessness of the little boys, Emily's dedication to her migraines. But there is more going on here than a personal story. Atonement, we at last discover, is the novel Briony Tallis has been writing between 1940 and 1999. This quite familiar fictional trick allows McEwan to ask some interesting questions about writing, in what is a highly literary book. The epigraph is a quotation from Northanger Abbey, where Catherine Morland is reproached by Henry Tilney for imagining Gothic horrors in a well-protected English setting. (In a nice echo, the Tallis-home-turned-hotel is called Tilney's.) All through, historical layers of English fiction are invoked - and rewritten. Jane Austen's decorums turn to black farce. Forster's novels of social misunderstanding - the attack on poor Leonard Bast, Adela Quested's false charge of rape - are ironically echoed. When Briony starts writing Atonement as a novella, in 1940, she thinks it should be modern and impressionistic, like Virginia Woolf. But she gets a rejection letter from Cyril Connolly at Horizon telling her that fiction should have more plot. The advice comes from a friend of Connolly's, one Elizabeth Bowen. So her rewritten novella - the Part One of Atonement - recalls The Last September, with its restive teenage girl in the big house. Then Briony writes the war, and all the slow, deliberate literariness of Part One falls away.

Atonement asks what the English novel of the twenty-first century has inherited, and what it can do now. One of the things it can do, very subtly in McEwan's case, is to be androgynous. This is a novel written by a man acting the part of a woman writing a 'male' subject, and there's nothing to distinguish between them. If fiction is a controlling play, a way of ordering the universe in which the writer is away in her - or his - thoughts, then is it a form of escapism, lacking all moral force? Is it just another form of false witness, and so always 'unforgivable'? And are some forms of fiction - modernist, middle-class, limited to personal relations - more unforgivable than others? A political critique edges in. But I wasn't sure how much the life of establishment England (with its diplomats planning mass bombings, its rapacious businessmen, its repression of women, its maintaining of feudal class systems) was being held responsible for the carnage visited on the poor bloody infantry at Dunkirk. Robbie suggests it: 'A dead civilisation. First his own life ruined, then everybody else's.' In Part One, there is a significant tussle between Cecilia and Robbie by the fountain, for a precious Meissen vase, given to an uncle in the First World War by the French villagers whom he had saved. The vase is broken, but mended so that the cracks hardly show (another literary bow, this time to The Golden Bowl). Just so, in Briony's accusation, 'the glazed surface of conviction was not without its blemishes and hairline cracks'. In war-time, one of the servants breaks it irrecoverably. The 'making one' of the vase was a fix, and couldn't hold. Yet a great deal does survive at the end of the novel: family, children, memory, writing, perhaps even love and forgiveness. Or perhaps not; it depends which of the controlling novelist's endings we decide to believe in, as we hold this fragile shape of the unified fictional work in our mind's eye, and are made aware how easily it can all fall apart.”  There is a very good reason why Atonement is considered one of the best and certainly most interesting novels of the 20th century. And if you don’t have the patience to read it, just watch the movie…..Here’s a good review from The New Yorker – https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/04/flesh-on-flesh

Solvable - The Harms of Eating Alone: An International Day of Happiness Special from The Happiness Lab – The Covid Era was tough for so many people on so many levels.  The terror of an unknown illness, the isolation that many people felt and the impact of remote work and learning has implications that will be felt for a generation. For some people, this forced isolation had a bit of a silver lining, which was that some families were able to spend a lot more time together during this period, which allowed them to have meals together in ways that never happened before and hasn’t happened since. So while there was no doubt a lot of misery and suffering this period, there was also an opportunity for family units to connect in a very unique way. The reason this matters, is that study after study on longevity, avoidance of disease (especially dementia) and mental well-being constantly reach the same conclusion, namely that social connections are essential for well-being and the lack of these connections can lead to dire health outcomes. The trends don’t look great.  Social isolation is a real issue in Western society and likely a reason why the Happiness Lab (featured in this PODCAST) is noting a lower ranking of happiness throughout Western Europe and North America. While there is no silver bullet to solving this problem and no easy way to do this, this key takeaway here is for all of us to do whatever we can do to be more like Finland and eat with others as much as possible, which is what this episode of Solvable explores.  Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, ”For the International Day of Happiness, we're sharing a special episode from The Happiness Lab. It's a chance to talk about happiness and what we can all do to be happier. March 20th also sees the release of the World Happiness Report. A big finding of 2025's report is that more of us are dining alone—and that's bad news. The report's editor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve shares the stark figures showing that shared meals are in decline, while Dr. Anne Fischel of The Family Dinner Project gives tips on how to dine better with friends, families and colleagues.” https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/solvable/id1463448386?i=1000700059299

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

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

Jon