As the title suggests, this book is an examination of a tragic character who’s only capable of relating to others by obeying them unquestioningly. She grew up in an oppressive family, and doesn’t seem to know how to exist as her own person.
The pastoral setting and reflective style reminded me of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. Like that book, it’s a challenging read; my experience of it could be described as spending long stretches not really understanding what was going on, but then being knocked over every few pages by a deeply profound sentence or passage. Unlike Dillard’s work, though, Bernstein has the benefit of fiction, so that she can introduce surreal and dark elements, like the image of the protagonist as a baby, taking care of her older siblings before she could even speak; or the Ari Aster-esque cult-like imagery in the finale.
All in all, a bizarre and melancholy read. You really pity the protagonist’s constant negative self-talk. I think there’s more to it than that, though; this book would reward a closer reading than I was able to give it.
I did like the show, but I will mostly be critical here because it’s already received its fair share of praise. I enjoyed it mostly for the comedy. “You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Greggs” is an all-time great line.
Where it’s lacking for me is specificity about the actual business. What is it like to run a TV station? How do they manage the logistics of a cruise ship? What kinds of numbers need to be crunched during a merger? We get glimpses of these things, but I guess my expectation for a workspace drama is: I want to see the work. I’m thinking of a show like Mad Men, where you can really tell the difference between a successful ad and a failed one. More recently, The Bear spends a lot of time on showing the characters through their abilities in the kitchen.
In Succession, it all feels kind of vague and hand-wavey, with the details obscured by (admittedly clever) one-liners. To be fair, the focus is on how the characters angle for power, but the show would have been more enjoyable for me had the actual ins and outs of the business been more clear.
I saw this film as part of the TIFF Secret Movie Club program. The screenings have that film festival feeling, because we’re seeing movies before wide release. Also, they’re often capped by a Q&A session with part of the filmmaking team. For the screening of The Animal Kingdom (a.k.a. Le Règne Animal), we were told before the show that there’d be a recorded interview with the sound supervisor at the end. Because of this fact, I tried to tune into the auditory experience, and indeed, it’s one of the notable technical achievements of the film.
In the story, people have started to randomly mutate into Dr. Moreau-esque animal hybrids. We follow a family whose matriarch has begun this transformation, and has disappeared into the wild, while the father and son try to get her back—both in the sense of physically locating her, and in the sense of “curing” her and making her human again. The tension mounts further when the townspeople get their pitchforks ready, and further still when the boy shows signs of mutation too.
The designs of the hybrids are cool, and brought to the screen mostly by performance and prosthetics. The aforementioned sound design comes into play in the way the creatures blend their human speaking voices with animal sounds.
Sci-fi-grounded-in-reality is probably one of my favourite things, and I enjoyed the film on its technical achievements and plotting. However, the allegorical elements felt too broad to be effective. It only points at subjects like racism, queerness, environmentalism, without really diving into any. Honestly, it covers a lot of the same thematic ground as X-Men, but without the luxury of time that a long-running series affords.
I can’t express much about my opinion without describing the overall structure of this book. This may be a spoiler for some, so proceed with caution.
Trust is divided into four parts:
A novel about a wealthy New York couple who made their fortune on stocks, and weathered the 1929 crash so well that it’s suspected that the man manipulated the markets.
A memoir written by the man on whom the novel in part one is based. He defends his wealth on the grounds that his personal gain benefits society as a whole. Growing the pie and all that.
Another memoir written by the ghostwriter of part two. Through her eyes, we see just how much part two was an exercise in self-aggrandizing myth-making.
The unearthed private diaries of the wealthy man’s wife, who was more involved in the business than she was given credit for.
My enjoyment of this book was driven mostly by the structure and the way each section reveals a new layer of truth. It does a less extreme version of what Cloud Atlas does.
But on the other hand, I didn’t really like the writing style. The first two parts are especially dry, observing the characters from a cold distance. And ultimately, the truths that the book reveal feel obvious. The wealthy can get away with anything, and women are neglected by history? Tell me something I don’t know.
I admired the visuals and animation of this film by Mamoru Hosoda. The design of “U”—a metaverse-like world with billions of users—is suitably grandiose and chaotic. I personally would never want to spend time in a virtual environment like that… I’m sure I would vomit from motion sickness within minutes. But that’s just me.
Unfortunately, the story fell flat for me. For most of the runtime, the plot happening inside U—featuring the mysterious Beast character—felt disconnected from the plot happening in the real world, which mostly involved the teenage romance angst that I see a lot of in anime. And the climax really stretches believability, requiring two characters to find each other at the exact same time at the exact same place in the middle of Tokyo.
Even though I probably wouldn’t recommend watching it to anyone I know, I absolutely respect the quality and originality of the writing in this show. The actors are also amazing all around, especially Justin Theroux and Carrie Coon, and they deliver many emotional gut punches.
I’ve been listening to the musicalscore (by Max Richter) since finishing the three seasons, and I have to say I’ve been moved more by the music alone than by the show itself. I think the purity of the score evokes the sadness that permeates the show, but distills it from the frustrations that I felt with the story.
The premise of the show is as follows: one day, in a single instant, two percent of the world’s population disappears with no trace and no explanation. The story picks up three years later, and deals with the people who are left behind. As expected, everyone is in pain. Where the show loses me is the extent to which every character is broken. I was reading the book Humankind at the same time as I was watching The Leftovers, and I found it hard to swallow that the collective trauma in the show has made everyone hateful and hostile towards each other. I want to believe that people would find a way to cooperate and support each other through the darkness.
I would describe this film as an “artsy rom-com,” and I mean that as a compliment. I really connected to the introverted main character Fran, who struggles to insert herself into the superficialities of office social life. Fran is me: I’m certain that I, like her, have grabbed a slice of cake from the office party and left to enjoy it at my desk alone. And when a new coworker joins the team, and you have to go around the table and say a little something about yourself, I have also waited my turn in dread, and just blurted out my introduction to get it over with.
But what really makes me feel like Fran is me and I am Fran is what happens between her and this new coworker. It made me reflect that the most valuable relationships in my life have been with people who bring me out of my shell. Sometimes I find the phrase come out of one’s shell to be misleading, as if once you’re out, you’re out and there’s no going back. More accurate is the continuous tense: I will always be coming out of my shell, and I must appreciate the people who make it just a little bit easier.
(Aside: when I was drafting this post, I omitted the last word of the title, so that anyone looking over my shoulder at my screen wouldn’t get the wrong idea, i.e. Look at that guy… is he writing a suicide note? It’s a provocative title to be sure, and I was weary going in that it would be dark, but to my relief, the tone of the movie is more quirky than dreary. I wouldn’t necessarily say that Fran is suicidal, more that she wonders whether she would be missed if she were dead.)
This is a short story collection centred around a single character. Therefore, I wouldn’t hesitate to accept this as a novel if it had been published as such.
Soma is a character who’s been scarred in many ways by the hardships in her life: an abusive and eventually absent mother, the loss of a close friend to suicide, a break-up with someone who seemed not to respect her Jewish heritage. I appreciated the layers of character detail in this book, like Soma’s proficiency at cooking. It’s a skill she’s proud of, but at the same time, it’s a constant reminder that she had to learn how to feed herself because her mother was gone, and she had to take on the responsibility at a younger age than the average person.
The centrepiece of the book for me is the story titled “Who You Start With Is Who You Finish With,” which threads together Soma’s life and her grandmother Charna’s youth in wartime. The grandmother suffered the horror of watching the Holocaust unfold over the Atlantic, as well as the pain of being shunned by the Jewish community for marrying outside of her religion. Her cultural identity was under attack in two ways, and so when we see Soma’s efforts to celebrate her grandmother with traditional prayer, it feels like a happy ending for Charna, in a way.
There are a couple of stories in the collection which are more experimental and surreal, almost like poetry. It’s not really my thing, but your mileage may vary.
Humankind by Rutger Bregman is a book that attempts to overturn the prevailing view that people are inherently selfish and malevolent. From the oft-referenced stories of the Stanford Prison Experiment and Kitty Genovese, to the everyday news, we hear a lot about the sins of humankind. Bregman dismantles these stories, arguing that they only preserve existing power and economic structures. Instead, he aims to show that we’re motivated by kindness towards others.
The book is a breezy read, filled with snappy anecdotes and factoids. It worked on me: at the beginning, I read with skepticism, trying to poke holes in his arguments; but by the end, I found everything he was saying to be obvious. Run a school without classes and lesson plans, because the students will naturally find their own path to learning? Of course! Run a prison without cells, and where the guards play games and sing songs with the inmates? Sounds like a great idea!
It was as if the book had created a new intuition in me: take everything that is considered conventional in modern society, and do the opposite.
