Feldman's Faves: October 20, 2025

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

To paraphrase Elton John, GAME 7 are the sweetest words my ears have ever known….What a season this has been for the JAYS – this team just figures out how to win. Let’s hope they can do it again tonight and punch their ticket to the WORLD SERIES.

It is hard to talk about baseball and not mention Shohei’s performance for ages in Game 4 of the NLDS. Many are saying that this performance catapults him directly into the pull position (even over Babe Ruth) as the GOAT. I’m sure this debate will be happening for years to come but that game is probably the best ever played and certainly puts him in contention.

In other news, time sure flies. We are now starting our second articling rotation. Please join me in welcoming Chloe and Laxsega who are eager to hit the ground running – so please get them involved in your files. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Hannah and Tyler for their great work in their first rotation. We appreciate you very much.

Finally, a friendly reminder that this is UNITED WAY WEEK - being kicked off this morning with the Articling Students’ Breakfast of Champions - so please participate as much as you can and please contribute to the best of your ability. GO TEAM!

This week’s theme is hot topics.

SATANTANGO By: László Krasznahorkai's – Last week was the first time I ever heard the name László Krasznahorkai, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian author whose books are pretty hard to find (although I suspect that will now change). His writing is considered post-modern (aka single paragraph long chapters, post-apocalyptic stories and ideas that go on a path to nowhere – sound appealing???). In any case, I always try to learn about each year’s Nobel winner and read some of their books. Based on the experts, Satantango is his most accessible book – so I am starting here. Born in under Soviet rule and living through the decline of the Soviet empire Krasznahorkai creates a setting and atmosphere of utter despair and misery. In Satantango we meet numerous characters living on the “estate”, which appears to be a failed collective farm in rural Hungary with a bunch of miserable people living dreary lives and planning their escape – and waiting for a saviour, Irmias, who like most saviours is just a con-man - using money the appear to have received from the STATE for some unknown reason. There is depravity, backstabbing, horrible smells and a lot of weird characters. Sound appealing yet? I will say, this book is unique on so many levels and I can understand why the Nobel Committee made this choice. This book, however, is not a beach read and requires some patience and perseverance to get through but it is worth it (I think). There is a SEVEN HOUR movie of this book made by Bela Tar as well. If you do some research there you will find that the movie – made in 1994 – is considered by many to be an absolute masterpiece and by others pure torture. Given my limited attention span, I suspect I know which camp would be mine. This book is strange but good so I do think worth a try if you want to read something that is very different. As one reviewer notes, “Satantango, first published in Hungary in 1985 and now regarded as a classic, is a monster of a novel: compact, cleverly constructed, often exhilarating, and possessed of a distinctive, compelling vision – but a monster nevertheless. It is brutal, relentless and so amazingly bleak that it's often quite funny. The action centres on the arrival of a man who may or may not be a prophet, or the devil, or just a violent con-man, in a rotting, rain-drenched Hungarian hamlet. This is the "estate", apparently some sort of failed collective, where all hope has been lost and all the buildings are falling down. It is inhabited by a cast of semi-crazed inadequates: desperate peasants cack-handedly trying to rip each other off while ogling each other's wives; a "perpetually drunk" doctor obsessively watching his neighbours; young women trying to sell themselves in a ruined mill; a disabled girl ineptly attempting to kill her cat. At the end of the first chapter, they learn that Irimias, a man whom they credit with extraordinary powers, and who was supposed to have died, is on the road to the estate, with his sidekick Petrina. The locals excitedly assemble in the spider-infested bar to await him, where they argue, drink and dance grotesquely to the accordion into the small hours. If this summary of the first half of the novel sounds baffling, it's a hell of a lot clearer than the book itself. László Krasznahorkai's scenes are designed to disorient and defamiliarize. The chapters tend to begin with some under-explained event: a strangely vehement argument about whether to turn on an oil heater; or the inhabitants trashing their homes and setting out on the open road clutching a few possessions. In the second chapter, two characters who find themselves in the grip of some weird and malign bureaucracy are not identified for nine pages. Meanwhile, each chapter consists of one long paragraph with not a single line break. Within each endless paragraph the individual sentences are often several lines long. The characteristic, if relatively short, opening sentence reads: "One morning near the end of October not long before the first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil on the western side of the estate (later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach) Futaki woke to hear bells." Krasznahorkai's translator George Szirtes calls his work a "slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type", and says his sentences take you down "loops and dark alleyways – like wandering in and out of cellars". At one point the wind moves through the trees like a "helpless hand searching through a dusty book for some vanished main clause"; the reader feels something comparable.

In short, Krasznahorkai writes in the high modernist style. The premise and the characters of Irimias and Petrina clearly owe something to Beckett. The unattributed epigraph – "In that case, I'll miss the thing by waiting" – comes from Kafka's The Castle. And, as in Kafka, a depiction of life in an oppressive modern state shades into allegory. The setting is clearly Hungary under communism (Krasznahorkai was born in 1954, and Satantango was his first novel) and the plot seems to gesture towards the country's disastrous attempt at forced agricultural collectivization. But Krasznahorkai keeps it vague and fairly abstract. Twentieth-century alienation is expressed in quasi-medieval forms: Satantango is shot through with religious imagery and intimations of revelation, from Futaki's bells and Irimias's "resurrection" onwards. "The imagination never stops working but we're not one jot nearer the truth," remarks Irimias. Modernism mostly features in recent western writing as just another style to rip off, either jazzed up with pop cultural goodies (Paul Auster), or as more or less amusing pastiche – see, respectively, Italo Calvino or Tom McCarthy. In Satantango, it feels like the real thing: a horrified reaction to a world without meaning.

Equally, of course, this is probably not everyone's idea of a good time. Satantango was made into a beautiful but grueling seven-hour black and white film by Bela Tarr, famous for its insanely long shots. Reading the book is a similar experience. It seems unlikely that the novel will find the kind of success in Britain of two more obviously engrossing Hungarian classics recently republished here, Sándor Márai's Embers and Imre Kertész's Fateless. Even in Hungary, Krasznahorkai is regarded as forbidding, not least because Satantango is his most accessible book. In the words of one Hungarian critic, "The grandeur is clearly palpable, but people do not seem to know what to do with it." Nevertheless, this is an obviously brilliant novel. Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer; even the strangest developments in the story convince, and are beautifully integrated within the novel's dance-like structure. It's a testament to Szirtes's translation, 10 years in the writing, that Krasznahorkai's vision leaps off the page. The grandeur is clearly palpable.“ I’m not sure if I will read another book of his any time soon but it’s good to see how brilliant minds work. I might even try to watch the movie over the holidays if I can hack it. Here’s a summary of Satantango and Krasznahorkai's work from the Nobel Committee - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2025/bio-bibliography/

THE NEXT BIG IDEA - The Future Is Going to Be Great – Not surprisingly, MIT is one of the central hubs for innovation and creation in the world of AI. The community within MIT led by Dave Blundin is doing astounding work but in scientific research and in the creation of businesses that are growing at astounding rates. So is this the next big thing or the next bubble? In this PODCAST Blundin takes the extremely bullish case on AI, which is truly inspiring. I just hope he is right…. Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “Dave Blundin has co-founded 23 companies, co-hosts the Moonshots podcast, runs the VC firm Link Ventures, teaches at MIT, and has been building neural networks since the 1980s. His take: “[AI is] under-hyped. It's absolutely going to change the world in the next couple of years more than any change in human history. There's nothing even vaguely comparable to it.” — (7:37) “Stop sleeping. Rush to everything you do.” (15:16) Why he started building neural nets at MIT in the 1980s (16:19) Should you finish college or start a business? (20:38) Why best friends are the best co-founders (25:00) San Francisco is still king, but Boston is AI startup central (28:06) “The chip shortage is going to be incredibly bad.” (34:26) The AI energy shortage (36:32) Are we in an AI bubble? (55:44) The case for human immortality before 2050 (1:02:00) Advice for first-time founders (and second-time, and 23rd-time)”: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-next-big-idea/id1482067226?i=1000730959912

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

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

Jon