Feldman's Faves: November 11, 2024

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

Are you ready for it?  If you don’t get this reference you are actually living under a rock.

A HUGE congratulations to everyone that was involved in this year’s student recruit. You guys did a spectacular job and did what we do best – bringing in yet another great group of people to our firm.

Just a friendly reminder to join us this morning for breakfast.  The carbo loading starts at 9:15 am.

Finally, a  very happy birthday to Christina this week. I think we can all agree that it would be in everyone’s best interest to have a huge cake made by Christina to celebrate!

No real theme this week but by virtue of the titles below, let’s call it food.

THE VEGETARIAN By: Han Kang – This year’s Nobel Prize winner in Literature went to South Korean native, Han Kang.  Being honest, I had never heard of her before (but that’s on me). Following the announcement I asked Google about her most famous book and I got The Vegetarian, so here we are.  This short book (broken down into three parts with three separate narrators), which won the Booker in 2007,  is so incredibly dense and rich with content and meaning that it is clear to me why it has received so many accolades.  Kang addresses themes that are central to Korean society but that have universal appeal, including conformity, women living in a patriarchal society, violence, mental illness and the meaning of self. The Vegetarian contains elements of  Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in the  sense that once the protagonist decides to become a vegetarian she changes completely as do many of those in her life. As one reviewer notes, “Yeong-hye is, in her husband’s opening words, “completely unremarkable in every way”. She is a reasonably diligent homemaker, a reasonably attentive spouse, not deeply unhappy and driven by no great passions. Her husband, Mr Cheong, is a mediocre employee, not greatly ambitious, mildly unenthused by his life but not dramatically so. Time ticks by, and the two of them get on with living their ordinary lives; but their ordinariness, it turns out, is more fragile than they realise.  Things begin to fracture the day Yeong-hye throws away all the meat from the freezer and announces that henceforth she is going to be a vegetarian. The only explanation she gives her husband is not hugely satisfactory: “I had a dream.” We know, though her husband doesn’t, something of the nature of the dream: it is dark, bloody and aggressive. Violence soon breaks out in Yeong-hye’s waking world, too, when her father tries to force a piece of sweet-and-sour pork into her mouth, and in revolt she stabs herself. And it goes downhill from there. Other people are dragged in, other relationships fray and Yeong-hye’s vow to remain vegetarian is the one constant in a family disintegrating before our eyes. Her husband is frustrated at this complication in his meticulously uncomplicated life, and can’t help thinking it’s all about him. (What happens when they have to go to dinner with his boss? And his wife not even wearing a bra any more! What will people think?) Her sister, In-hye, struggles with her sense of familial responsibility, while learning that, even when a family member is in trouble, there is only so much others can do. The Vegetarian is a story in three acts: the first shows us Yeong-hye’s decision and her family’s reaction; the second focuses on her brother-in-law, an unsuccessful artist who becomes obsessed with her body; the third on In-hye, the manager of a cosmetics store, trying to find her own way of dealing with the fallout from the family collapse. Across the three parts, we are pressed up against a society’s most inflexible structures – expectations of behaviour, the workings of institutions – and we watch them fail one by one. The novel repeatedly shows the frictions between huge passion and chilling detachment, between desires that are fed and those that are denied. With such violence in these characters’ internal worlds, and such a maddening external impassiveness, those inner passions are bound to break out somehow, and it won’t be pretty. This is Han Kang’s first novel to appear in English, and it’s a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader’s diet. It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions. As Yeong-hye changes, the book’s language shifts, too, with Deborah Smith’s translation moving between the baffled irritation of Mr Cheong’s first-person narration in part one, the measured prose of In-hye’s world, the dense and bloody narrative of Yeong-hye’s dreams, and seductive descriptions of living bodies painted with flowers, in states of transformation or wasting away. Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience. Last year’s London Book Fair had Korea as guest of honour, in the hope of tempting English-language publishers to seek out more contemporary Korean novelists, but The Vegetarian will be hard to beat.” Han Kang is a special writer and absolutely deserving of all of her success. Here’s a good review from the NYT-  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/books/review/the-vegetarian-by-han-kang.html

ZOE Science & Nutrition  - Why nuts make you healthier | Professor Sarah Berry – Nuts get a bad rap for having too much fat and too many calories. However, my view is that they are a real superfood that I try to eat every single day. And they are delicious. Professor Sarah Berry agrees but says how we eat them (whole versus grounded) can impact the calories you take in and the nutritional balance. Bottom line – eat them as part of your meals, as a snack and you will benefit big time. That’s my pseudo-scientific advice of the day. That said, probably, better to hear it from the expert directly -Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/recap-why-nuts-make-you-healthier-professor-sarah-berry/id1611216298?i=1000665993925

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

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

Jon