Feldman's Faves: December 11, 2023

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

And greetings from New York. I am here today where I will be speaking at the Bloomberg Shareholder Activism Conference, which should be really interesting and fun.  New York is in full out Holiday Season mode, which is always so nice to see but insanely crowded and overrun with tourist (I suppose I would be contributing to this situation….).

Talking about holidays, last week’s party was amazing – thank you Max and Alex. It’s always fun to celebrate with Team Goodmans. The day after, however, was not super productive…..

This week’s reviews will be my last ones for 2023 and I will be back in the New Year. So I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their hard and smart work this year.  I hope you all get to spend some time over the holidays with the important people in your lives and come back refreshed in January for another great and successful year.  

No theme this week – just topics of interest.

STUDY FOR OBEDIENCE By: Sarah Bernstein – Sarah Bernstein just won the 2023 Giller Award and was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize for this really interesting and creative novel. Bernstein’s style of writing can be best described as breezy.  She very softly touches the story giving enough detail to give the reader a sense of what’s happening but not enough to know for sure. Some critics find this style frustrating and have complained about the lack of a plot. I relish this ambiguity and the challenge this book allows the reader to confront. The main character of this novel (and its narrator) whose name we never know is incredibly self-deprecating, self-aware and acts in the service of others to the point where you want to yell at her and say, you gotta take care of yourself too. We know she moves to a small ‘northern town’ of her ancestors where she doesn’t speak the language (maybe in Eastern Europe) to take care of her recently divorced bother.  It is a little strange and creepy (she gives her adult brother baths…). She lives an old world and rural life but with sprinkles of modernity (e.g., references to Teams calls) but the time/era is not totally clear.  We know her family is Jewish and we know the townspeople accept her brother but not her and we don’t know why exactly.  We sense there is some antisemitism she experiences but it is not entirely clear.  Not much happens and not much is resolved but it is the kind of story that is so unique and creative you cannot stop reading, In fact I kept going back to re-read passages when it was not clear what was happening.

As one reviewer notes, ““It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. It was a swift and menacing time. One of the local dogs was having a phantom pregnancy. Things were leaving one place and showing up in another.” The opening lines of Study for Obedience sound a little like what AI might produce if you asked it to rewrite those of A Tale of Two Cities, but with a much stronger sense of foreboding. And animals. Which is not meant to disparage Sarah Bernstein’s strange, unsettling and profoundly beguiling book. Bernstein, a poet from Montreal now living in the Scottish Highlands, is hailed on the cover as “an extraordinary new voice in Canadian fiction.” It’s the kind of epithet that publishers toss around all the time, so it’s nice, for once, to be able to wholeheartedly agree. (As apparently did this year’s Booker judges, who long-listed her for that prize.)  Our narrator-protagonist is a young woman who has come to a small town in an unnamed northern country to act as housekeeper for her elder brother, a wealthy, recently divorced businessman. Their family – who selective details suggest are Jewish – have ancestral connections to the town, but were also persecuted and driven out. Indeed, the brother’s home, a sprawling manor on a hill above the town, once belonged to “the distinguished leaders of the historic crusade against our forebears.” Outside of the fact that she did an unsuccessful stint as a journalist and is now an audio typist for a legal firm, the narrator gives scant details about herself. Her description of her childhood, though, stops us in our tracks: “I was the youngest child, the youngest of many – more than I care to remember.  Tending to these mysteriously uncountable siblings, we’re told, in her characteristically formal, gnomic manner of speaking, that her role had been to smooth away any “discomfort” by serving “their meals and snacks, their cigarettes and aperitifs, their nightcaps and bedside glasses of milk.” Cigarettes and milk? (The narrator, too, is a devoted smoker.) Aperitifs and nightcaps? Who are this eccentric brood? And what year is it, anyway?   At her brother’s house, the narrator’s “housekeeping” duties include bathing and dressing him. And though she claims to enjoy doing so, we also learn to take these kind of pronouncements – including that she is “inept” and “blundering”– with a grain of salt, given her tendency toward self-abnegation, and her brother’s toward dominance. When the brother leaves on a business trip, the narrator, suddenly at loose ends, distracts herself with a visit to the village. There, the townspeople visibly recoil from her, parents covering their children’s eyes as she passes them by. She can only guess at the reasons for such behaviour. Despite being a master of several languages, the town’s local dialect – to her shame – eludes her.  Her brother, on the other hand, can speak it fluently, so he arranges with the townspeople – who seemingly have no issue with him – for his sister to help out on a local farm, the condition being that she simply do her work and never try to communicate with anyone The undertaking of her new duties, however, coincides with a series of disturbing, animal-related mishaps in and around the community. A ewe dies while caught in a fence with her half-born lamb sticking out of her. An entire herd of cows goes mad, requiring that they be culled. A wave of avian flu sweeps through the chickens. The locals’ hostility turns to fear. They’re certainly not reassured by the narrator’s unexplained habit of weaving human figures out of reeds and leaving them on their doorsteps.  The absence of dialogue – everything is filtered, monologue-style, through the narrator – adds to a building feeling of claustrophobia and uncertainty. Can she really be the cause of all the chaos and dyings-off? Correlation isn’t causation, of course, but try telling that to the townspeople. Now when the narrator enters the local diner to grab a bite, the place practically clears out. As the sinister events multiply, Bernstein keeps us in limbo between the specific and the undefined. And our initial sense that this is some kind of fairy tale or fable is periodically upended by incursions of modern digital life, references to Twitter and Microsoft Teams landing like frying pans to the head. When the brother finally returns, the narrator outwardly returns to her servile role. She washes him and feeds him and reads Montaigne to him. But something has shifted, subtly at first, in their power dynamic in a way that is best read to discover.  The sly ambiguity of Study for Obedience practically demands rereadings. And while the story of the stranger who arrives in town and appears to upset the order of things is an old one, Bernstein’s novel feels entirely original; something ancient and unnervingly modern all at once.”  This book is controversial for a range of reasons but I think worth reading and deserving of the awards and praise it is getting. Here is a good review from The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/02/study-for-obedience-sarah-bernstein-review-granta-best-young-british-novelists-2023

WorkLife with Adam Grant - The Office's Rainn Wilson on meaning and happiness – Who among us dos not love Dwight Schrute?? Rainn Wilson will forever be connected to this iconic character (he is the “Kramer” of his era).  Wilson himself is so very different than Dwight and has a fascinating life story (struggled as an actor well into his 40’s) and has an appreciation for his life and spiritual connections that I found surprising and enlightening. He is a very thoughtful and wise person, but also very funny, which is reflected in this discussion.   Here is an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “Rainn Wilson was a late bloomer: he landed the role of Dwight Schrute on “The Office” after over a decade of struggling as an actor. But success didn’t solve all of his problems — and it even created some new ones. In this live conversation for the Authors@Wharton series, Adam asks Rainn about his unlikely journey to stardom and how it led him into exploring the insights that philosophy, psychology, and the world’s great spiritual traditions can offer on modern life’s existential questions. They also discuss Rainn’s favorite moments from “The Office” and do some improv when Dunder Mifflin invites a certain organizational psychologist to talk to Dwight.” https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/worklife-with-adam-grant/id1346314086?i=1000634651226

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon