Hi. How is your week? Lately we’ve had many clear days with windy conditions. It was so windy a few days ago it sheared off some large branches from our poplar trees. We spent some of the weekend picking up the debris. We live near the prairies and the foothills here and it’s definitely the windiest place I’ve ever lived. In the summer there’s always a steady wind blowing.
You might have caught the news that author Sarah Bernstein won Canada’s Giller Prize last night for her novel Study for Obedience. Wow! This surprised me since I sort of thought Eleanor Catton would win for her novel Birnam Wood, but No! Perhaps it’s a bit of an upset. Bernstein, who grew up in Montreal and now lives and teaches in the Scottish highlands, takes home $100K for the win. Congrats to her. The timing couldn’t have been better since I just finished reading Study for Obedience over the weekend (see review below). How apropos. The author’s novel is also on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. Will she win again? That would be quite a coup, but some are guessing Paul Murray’s novel The Bee Sting will win. Though we will have to wait and see on Nov. 26 when the prize will be announced.
In other news, we’ve been watching and liking the TV series All the Light We Cannot See on Netflix and should finish it in a couple days. The two leads who play the blind French girl Marie-Laure and the German soldier boy Werner seem to be new actors and are pretty refreshing in their roles. With only four episodes in the series, the script seems to move at a brisk pace, faster than the novel it’s based on. Someone said the ending differs from the book, so I will prepare for that.
Also on Netflix we liked the movie Nyad based on the true story of Diana Nyad’s long-distance attempts with her team to swim from Cuba to Florida in her 60s. It’s quite an interesting and unreal story … and I think Annette Bening spent a couple years training for the role. She’s a dedicated swimmer now. Jodie Foster is also good as her coach and long-time friend Bonnie Stoll, and the shots from the ocean are pretty compelling and put the miraculous feat into perspective.
Earlier we finished the final season (Season 3) of the British crime drama Happy Valley with Sarah Lancashire as Police Sergeant Catherine Cawood and Siobhan Finneran as her once-addicted sister. They’re both excellent in their roles, dealing with a demented bad guy who years ago hurt Catherine’s daughter. But man that small town in Yorkshire is riddled with dark crimes. It’s not exactly a ‘happy’ place. We followed that with Season 3 of the news drama The Morning Show, which was a pretty crazy season and sort of soap opera-esque. I’m not sure I’d recommend it, but at least the large cast was entertaining enough. During the season, Jon Hamm plays an Elon Musk kind of character who tries to take over the network and much shenanigans ensues. I still think Season 1 was the best of that series.
And now I’ll leave you with a couple reviews of books I finished lately.
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein / Knopf Canada / 208 pages / 2023
(3.5 to 4 stars) I think Shirley Jackson (and Lydia Millet) might have liked this strange little novel … which includes an off-kilter narrator who goes to her brother’s rural estate in a northern country to help him with things after his wife leaves with their children. The narrator is a solitary “inept” person who took care of her siblings growing up, left journalism and is a typist for a firm, and tries to maintain control over herself and adhere to obedience at all times.
When her brother suddenly leaves for a trip, she is left at the place alone with his small old dog and begins to take long walks into the woods and mountains, eventually having to go into town in the valley for supplies, which is a bit hard since she doesn’t know the country’s language. Then weird things begin to happen (on properties in town) and she feels the animosity and suspicion from the townspeople, which she tries to make right by volunteering at the farm co-op and leaving some woven stick dolls, but things don’t exactly go as planned and you wonder how it will end.
The plot seems simple enough to understand, but the off-kilter solitary narrator goes off on tangents that may or may not be too understandable. She’s mentally out there … and reflects a bit about how the townspeople might belong there but not her. Some stuff she talks about flew over my head. Still the writing is pretty smart and with its long, long sentences is quite lyrical and alluring. It’s a nice wonder that this little unsettling novel won the Giller Prize and made the Booker Prize shortlist. Whoa. Though I was hoping the ending would have had something a bit more happen. The townsfolk seem to hold her to account for several bad things that happen, but the ending perhaps wasn’t as big as I was looking for, though plenty of murky oddness abounds.
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Canada for allowing me an advance copy to read and review.
Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim / 207 pages / 1898
(3 stars) I’m learning about this author and her books a bit late in life. I listened to the audio read by British actress Lucy Scott of this semi-autobiographical 1898 classic tale, which reads like a memoir. In fact some people call it a memoir, others say it’s a novel, but I guess the publisher calls it a novel.
I liked hearing about how a garden in the Prussian countryside made this woman — the protagonist Elizabeth — feel very happy and free from things that constrained her in her life. Her husband was an aristocrat, and life for women in her day was pretty confined, but it was made better when she moves to an old house in the countryside with a large garden. There she takes pleasure and refuge in outdoor life, planting, and nature, and with her writing and three babies — the oldest being 5 and the youngest 3, whom she refers to as “the April baby” and “the June baby.” Of course she has a governess for them and neither cooks nor sews but spends her time with books in the garden, and many see her as eccentric.
Her husband — who thinks very little of women’s capabilities — she refers to as “The Man of Wrath.” And on Elizabeth describes in a diary-like style the seasons and the flowers in the yard, the servants, gardeners, and visitors who come by. It’s a pleasant enough tale as Elizabeth is in good spirits and making light fun of society and things of the day. Her memoir-like tale seems quite modern — as if she were talking about the refuge of gardening during the recent pandemic instead of what it offered her back in 1898. I’m not sure I knew women were talking about all she describes in the book — their rights, roles, and happiness — back then, so it has relevancy.
I will have to read Von Armin’s most popular novel The Enchanted April sometime. Judging from her bio, she lived quite a well-traveled life, living in England, Switzerland, Prussia, France, and the U.S. and being born in Australia. So she was out and about and knew various languages and writers of her day, including EM Forster and HG Wells … and she fled WWI and WWII lands, spinning 21 tales and dying in South Carolina in 1941. Whoa I didn’t know much about her before I came upon this book, which was her debut and apparently a hit back in her day.
That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these books, or seen these shows, and if so, what did you think?