Sarah Bernstein (1)Recensioni

20. Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
OPD: 2023
format: 195-page hardcover
acquired: December read: Mar 30 – Apr 6 time reading: 5:4, 1.6 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Booker 2023
locations: outside a small village in a contemporary unnamed northern country with a non-English language and mountains, possibly fictional.
about the author: A Canadian writer and scholar who teaches literature and creative writing in Scotland. She was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1987.

I've stalled on this one. I just don't have a review in me. My first reaction on finishing, which I wrote down, was mainly: "Seriously, whoa. What did I just read?"

This book has such a curious interesting and maybe quite wonderful opening, tossing at us unnatural happenings, a hint at the Holocaust, and some very odd phrasing by a narrator who tells us she can only shed "a weak and intermittent" light on her own actions.

"It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. It was a swift and menacing time. ... it was springtime when I arrived in the country, an east wind blowing, an uncanny wind as it turned out. Certain things began to arise. ... I knew they were right to hold me responsible."

What witchery is this?

Shirley Jackson’s [We Have Always Lived in the Castle] was always in my mind, our narrator a Merricat of sorts. But different. Merricat was openly bitter and judgmental and superior to those commoners in town. Here our narrator is a Jewish immigrant who doesn’t speak the language. She’s not superior in the same way. She professes a humbleness, a life "cultivating solitude, pursuing silence to its ever-receding horizon".

I was lost enough in this book that many things I read about afterward in reviews were things I completely missed (Here in the spoiler is a list. Don't open if haven't read it: incest, antisemitism, the narrator's dark intents). I was, if you like, beguiled by this curious narrator.

What I think I picked on was a sense of surreal dread and a notable cultural critique on our communal crimes, like our unabated creation of climate change, in full knowledge of what we are doing. How we are all guilty of communal crimes because we obey the rules of the world we live in, perpetuating its crimes to take care of ourselves.

Not sure I've provided anything useful here in this post. I enjoyed this curiosity, found it wonderfully done, found the writing, which focuses so much on the sound, always interesting and terrific, with its own rhythm and life. And I say this even as I didn't really get it. Anyway, I encourage anyone interested to plunge in. This maybe should have won the Booker over [Prophet Song], as terrific as PS was.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/358760#8514318

Survivor’s guilt, historical and group-based, filtered through the influences of Thomas Bernhard and Shirley Jackson. I have not read any Bernhard or explicitly Bernhardian influenced novels that I have much liked, it is evidently not a style that agrees with my personal taste in literature, so maybe this is like me asking a country music listener to rate a new ambient record. Predictable results, right? You can move on.

The narrator of the novel turns Bernhardian vituperation inward to castigate and attack herself rather than direct it outwards to society, which is at least an interesting twist. Bernhard would (and did most enthusiastically!) attack the society that produced the Holocaust; Bernstein’s narrator claims to love it:

For all things come to an end, yes, as the lives of my forebears had come to an end, life itself and life as they knew it, never knowing, never understanding why or wherefore, only that a feeling, running under the seams for centuries, had broken to the surface. How then could I not love these people, who represented the closest thing to an inheritance I could be said to have?

How can you love the society that produced centuries of violence, pograms, genocide against your group of people? How can you not blame them but rather find the fault within yourself for the feelings they bear against you as part of that community? It can only be through internalized oppression, an OBEDIENCE to the beliefs of the dominant society around you. Our narrator practices such an obedience as a child through the gender-based oppression she is met with inside her own family and tribe and now later practices obedience towards ethnic based prejudice. Her obedience is allegorically explored through, for instance, a neighbor’s belief that her dog has been impregnated by the narrator’s neutered dog; our narrator finds reasons to go along and accept and justify the neighbor’s belief. If you can do that, what sort of proposition can’t you be obedient to.

It seems to be survivor’s guilt that motivates this drive towards obedient self-abnegation. Why should she be here existing when so many were destroyed? Our narrator points to a guilt handed down the generations, guilt and trauma reproducing themselves coming up on a century past the Holocaust, though you could well indeed look back further to centuries of enduring violence. Addressing the villagers in the novel’s absurdist ending, she asks,

The fundamental question that I pose now, that has been posed before and elsewhere, more or less word for word, here it is, my brother, prepare yourself, is whether one can go on living after all, whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. One asks it of oneself, this question posed by all the faces seated before me in the town church, the question that reverberated through the cavernous suburban homes, that was transmitted in the lullabies.

So that’s the main thing I think it’s doing after a read through, though I recognize other things as well. The problem is I am perhaps not capable of enjoying a Bernhardian style. I have little patience for it. I found myself counting the numbers of commas separating short phrases, looking for the sentence with the most (25 in my reading, though there may well be a sentence with more). You might as well ask me to rate a country music album; however much country fans highly rate it, I’m not likely to. But maybe one day that exceptional example will break through… never know.

2.5 for me but I’ll round it to 3.

Shortlisted - Booker Prize 2023

“The prose refracts Javier Marías sometimes, at other times Samuel Beckett.” Her prose certainly does not “refract” as Marías and Beckett actually have talent. Pure MFA schlock.

I don't really know what to write about this book. It won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for 2023 and was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. So obviously people have found it worthy of acclaim. But not me; I found it difficult to read mostly because the author uses run-on sentences that sometimes take up a whole page. Also, the narrator is either unreliable or one of the most naive persons ever imagined.

Here's what the Giller jury said about the book:
“The modernist experiment continues to burn incandescently in Sarah Bernstein’s slim novel, Study for Obedience. Bernstein asks the indelible question: what does a culture of subjugation, erasure, and dismissal of women produce? In this book, equal parts poisoned and sympathetic, Bernstein’s unnamed protagonist goes about exacting, in shockingly twisted ways, the price of all that the world has withheld from her. The prose refracts Javier Marias sometimes, at other times Samuel Beckett. It’s an unexpected and fanged book, and its own studied withholdings create a powerful mesmeric effect.”

The narrator is the youngest of a large family who was trained to meet the various needs of her older siblings. When her entrepreneurial oldest brother calls her to come look after him in his home in some unnamed northern country because his wife and children have left him, she drops everything. The area where the brother lives is a rural community with a few small shops and a communal farm. The family's ancestors lived here before they were driven away by the other inhabitants which was probably due to them being Jewish. The narrator's brother has learned the local language and seems to get along well with the neighbours but the narrator cannot speak the language despite taking lessons and, soon after her arrival, is made the scapegoat for various livestock deaths. This isn't helped by the brother's prolonged absence from home although he seems to be in touch with community members. He advises his sister to put her name down to help at the communal farm. She is put to mucking out the barn where the cows were kept before they all had to be killed due to some communicable disease. Despite her hard work on the farm she still isn't accepted by the locals. Even when her brother finally returns home, she is shunned by them. The brother shortly becomes ill (perhaps at the sister's hands) and there seems to be no medical help available and the locals won't approach the house. So the narrator is left in this huge house looking after her brother much like one would a pet while the outside world fades away. The book ends with this sentence: "Nevertheless, I say to myself, softly, I am living, I claim my right to live."

Is that really living? If so, it's a bleak prospect.½

A young woman moves to an unnamed northern country to take care of her brother, whose marriage has recently collapsed. She tells us this is “the country of her forebears.” But she is new to this land, a stranger and—though somewhat of a linguist who has learned Italian and German without difficulty—unable to speak or understand the local dialect. When, soon after her arrival, her brother decamps to see to his business dealings and visit clients, her isolation is complete, but for her brother’s dog, Bert, a “small and sickly animal.” Coinciding with her arrival are some distressing events: a case of collective hysteria among a herd of cows that results in the animals being destroyed, the death of a ewe while giving birth, the failure of a potato crop. When she is not occupied by household chores, the woman spends her time hiking the wilderness adjacent her brother’s property. But in her brother’s absence she is forced against her will to venture into the town to purchase supplies, and here she witnesses first-hand the confused distrust with which the villagers regard her. Still, she attempts to mix with the town’s inhabitants, eating at the diner, buying local produce. She even signs up for volunteer work at a farm. But their misgivings persist, and her interactions with her neighbours are without exception awkward, bristling with misunderstanding and suspicion. Study for Obedience tells a profoundly claustrophobic story. We spend the entire novel in the young woman’s head as she ruminates on her past and present lives. She is the youngest of many siblings—“more than I care to remember,” she admits—and at a very young age was charged with taking care of them, serving their needs, complying with their demands. It was a life spent learning obedience, training she carries with her to her brother’s house, where she quickly assumes a subservient role. Much of the narrative maintains an eerie and shadowy vagueness. At one point a woman with a dog inexplicably appears in the garden behind the house. No words are spoken, but the woman’s stance and expression are accusatory, and through a mysterious process of silent suggestion the narrator is made to understand that the dog is pregnant, that Bert is responsible, and that this is further cause for the general antagonism toward her. Oddly, instead of questioning or resisting the notion that she represents a threat to the residents of the town, the narrator internalizes it, admitting that she’s always been an outsider: “it was something in my blood”—as if to say, she understands why they are uncomfortable in her presence. Toward the end, the brother returns from his business trip but soon falls ill and becomes secretive and reclusive, and the narrator is left to await what comes next. Sarah Bernstein’s prose is fluid, if dense, and carries the reader along on its sinewy rhythms. In Study for Obedience Bernstein spins a weirdly compelling tale, heavy with foreboding, that describes one woman’s attempts to come to terms with being alive in a world that never lets her rest, that is always challenging her right to exist. It is a book with no resolution that raises many more questions than it answers, but is fascinating for precisely this reason. Winner of the 2022 Giller Prize.

Study for Disobedience
Review of the Daunt Books paperback edition (April 22, 2021)

Bernstein has had to adjust to the accolades. Her first book, "The Coming Bad Days," received little attention, perhaps in part because it was published during the first half of 2021 when the COVID-19 pandemic prevented the usual publicity events that surround a book launch.
"The only two events that I did were over Zoom," she recalled.
The plaudits for "Study for Obedience" came as something of a surprise, she said, because it isn't very different from her debut. Both examine separateness and femininity, and neither is particularly plot-driven.
"It's a style of writing that people are encountering that they may not have encountered before, because it's less focused on narrative," she said. "That doesn't tend to be the case with books that have a wide readership." - excerpt from an interview with Sarah Bernstein in The Toronto Star by Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press, November 6, 2023.

With Sarah Bernstein's recent win of the 2023 Giller Prize and her shortlisting for the 2023 Booker Prize for Study for Obedience, the above interview made me curious to read her first novel, which had been mostly ignored at the time of its release.

I actually found The Coming Bad Days to be more approachable with its academic setting as opposed to the more surreal world of Study for Obedience. There was more humour to it as well, even though there was an overall atmosphere of oppression and disaster which loomed at every turn. I think the dark humour combined with the sense of dread shows in the status update quotes which I noted along the way (which should be available below this review).

I managed to source a copy of the original Daunt Books (UK) paperback release. I wonder whether after the breakthrough success of Study for Obedience that a wider audience may yet discover this first novel as well.

Other Reviews
I highly recommend Paul Fulcher's review on Goodreads which contains links to some interviews with Sarah Bernstein and one of her essays.
A Study in Unknowability by Lauren Elkin, The Guardian, June 3, 2021.

It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. It was a swift and menacing time.

From the very first lines, Sarah Bernstein creates an eerie atmosphere of foreboding. The entire book is a monologue spoken by a women we suspect of duplicity or madness from the earliest pages.

I was the youngest child, the youngest of many—more than I care to remember—whom I tended from my earliest infancy, before indeed I had the power of speech myself and although my motor skills were by then scarcely developed, these, my many siblings, were put in my charge. I attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion, so that over time their desires became mine, so that I came to anticipate wants not yet articulated, perhaps not even yet imagined, providing my siblings with the greatest possible succour, filling them up only so they could demand more, always more, demands to which I acceded with alacrity and discreet haste, ministering the complex curative draughts prescribed to them by various doctors, serving their meals and snacks, their cigarettes and aperitifs, their nightcaps and bedside glasses of milk... In this process, I would become reduced, diminished, ultimately I would become clarified, even cease to exist. I would be good. I would be all that had ever been asked of me.

The unnamed woman's eldest brother is recently divorced and asks her to come manage his house, as he travels often for work. Ever compliant, she settles her affairs in the city and moves to the countryside, to the land of their ancestors, and moves in with her brother. Not speaking the local language, despite being fluent in many, she is at once an outsider. When her brother leaves on a business trip, she is left to fend for herself. At first she tries to ingratiate herself to the townsfolk, but it becomes apparent that they blame her for a series of mysterious ill omens, mostly involving animals. Being an unreliable narrator, and the only voice we hear, it is unclear to what extent her increasing paranoia is justified.

Permeating the entire novel is the shadow of the Holocaust and the locals' continuing antisemitism. Like much in the novel, however, it is an undercurrent, never made overt, but is insidious. On the one hand, everyone is guilty of wanting to take the easy road, to go with the flow: "which while entirely and understandably human was at the same time the most barbaric, the most abominable course of action. So, listen. I am not blameless. I played my part." On the other hand, terrible crimes had been committed, and yet the local people continue with their lives as though nothing had happened at the "pit parties" on the other side of the woods. It is in part the woman's struggle to live with the townsfolk, knowing what she knows about them, that contributes to her breakdown.

So here it all was at last. I had come to this place, when my ancestors had fled, out of what I recognised at last as an unkillable longing for self-annihilation, no more than I felt I deserved and, moreover, what I felt had been meant for me, the wayward child of a people whose only native merit was that they had survived. They had kept on. For ages they had kept on. And here I was, meeting history at last, proof that my deference, anyone's deference, was the surest and swiftest route to one's own eradication. It would be total.

The claustrophobic merging of the public and the private in her self leads to tangled threads of guilty, complicity, the desire to belong, and the fear of the other. There is a tremendous amount packed into this slim novel and many themes to explore. It is both an eerie novel of an individual's madness, and an indictment of society's complacency toward acts of aggression against those who are different. An impressive work by a young novelist.½

"[A] technique I learned from watching instructional videos I found on YouTube,"

A study of desperate-social-rejection-in-rural-country-life (bitter Sweden), which could not have been written prior to the current decade. A pattern of nameless abuse and exclusion (social-illness as metaphor), suggesting the anonymous online avatar. (In parochial tales of Jewish exclusion, as in Fiddler, we expect a more thoroughly defined antagonist.) Given our narrator's unspoken high-speed internet connection which permits streaming of instructional videos for lymphatic tissue massage on YouTube, we are very certain the narrator is surreptitiously spending an inordinate amount of time on social media. (Except by constant distraction, how is it possible that our graduate-level polyglot has not learned a single communicating phrase in "native tongue.") As corollary, the Narrator's self-aware flagellating mental constructs (obviously doing the master-slave dialectic thing with her brother), is the kind of dynamic which only exists before an (online) audience.

But it’s not a demerit for a novel to depict a natural history of online dissipation (many modern texts are strong by dint of fidelity to this project). More troubling is a betrayal of stage dressing. We doubt stupid things: Whether the narrator has ever been a stenographer at a multinational law firm representing that oil conglomerate ('I just type'), whether the narrator has ever split firewood ('twigs in the air'), woven a basket of birch ('as if innately'), and, in more audacious moments, whether she really had a (revanchist) metaphor for a brother.

I had to read this because it was somehow up for so many awards this year. Oddly enough, it seemed like an amalgamation of a BUNCH of books I read this year -- 'Pond' by Claire-Louise Bennett, 'The Book of Goose' by Yiyun Li, 'Temporary' by Hilary Leichter, 'The Book of X' by Sarah Rose Etter, and a book that I read years ago and has been haunting me since: 'All the Birds, Singing' by Evie Wyld. There was a theme of books this year, I guess! Ultimately, this is an odd narrative about an odd woman who goes to take care of her eldest brother and how the community reacts to her, mostly based on historical assumptions. It's an odd little puzzler, like most of the books I mentioned above! I will say, it confused me. Some events are very weird and vague. I got the gist of the point a couple pages from the end, but I don't agree at all with the argument the main character makes. It's a little dark, and a little sad that this idea is even mentioned. I don't fully understand the award nominations. The book is just okay with so many confusing, weird happenings. Probably the judges saw more in it than I did. But I don't regret reading it, if only to add it to the roster of similar books above.

I enjoyed this short novel much more than I expected (although, at the same time, found it quite long enough - it's not a book I wanted to linger over for too much longer). What I enjoyed most about it is that it's completely open for interpretation thanks to the wholly unreliable narrator.

Our narrator has clearly not enjoyed a good life, thanklessly caring for her siblings from a young age and struggling to fit in at school and every job she's held down. When she moves to a remote northern town to care for her recently separated brother and his house, the small town becomes increasingly hostile towards her as an increasing number of bad omens coincide with her arrival.

A number of reviews I've subsequently read about this book view it as a depiction of extreme prejudice and of being cast as an outsider. Whilst the town is definitely against her, it came across to me as a fear rather simply a prejudicial loathing. Perhaps an initial prejudice is driven by her family's history of being outcasts in the area generations before, but as the novel develops and our narrator's mental health becomes increasingly questionable, a genuine terror of her seems to take over the town's folk.

The narrator feels it is her place to be small in life and feels that people's reactions to her are totally acceptable and understandable. It's not clear if she is on the spectrum, is traumatised from a lifetime of mental abuse or suffers some other mental disorder, but I did not trust her narrative. She wants the reader to read as much or as little into the local happening's as she does, which is exactly what makes the book so interesting and intriguing. Is she a crushed soul who is simply treated appallingly, or is it a case of no smoke without fire? Personally, I felt increasingly the latter, and that the narrator was only telling us part of the story. There were too many odd actions, such as leaving the talisman in the middle of the night on people's doorsteps, and with her brother it seemed as if somehow she was somehow responsible for his rapidly ailing health. Her cloistering of him and excessive attention put me in mind of the creepy antagonist Annie Wilks in Stephen King's Misery. And what of the town's folk all being dressed in the same clothes at the end in the church? Did that happen? Did she imagine it?

I usually like my ends neatly sewn up, but it worked for me that this novel left me in disarray at the end. Whilst many might read it that the town's people won in the end, to my mind our narrator was the victor who ultimately came out on top as untouchable.

I can see how this novel will divide people, but I enjoyed the unnerving psychology behind the narration.

4 stars - a very clever piece of writing.

I can see why this was on the Booker Shortlist, and also why it didn't win. The nameless narrator is persuaded to move to the northern climes, origins of her ancestors, but a place where she doesn't speak the language, to look after her brother who has been living there. She is, to all intents and purposes, his willing servant, but a woman who is othered by the local community, and is blamed for all sorts of things that go wrong.

The writing is fine as she describes her life in this village, her witting collusion in her obedience to the rule of her brother. However, the end just lets the novel down. Despite that I'm pretty sure at some stage I will reread it.½

This is a gem of a book. I listened to it on audio, narrated by the author.

A young woman (unnamed) leaves home to help her brother who has returned to the village his ancestors fled last century. He’s a successful businessman, but needs the help of his youngest sister as his wife has left him.

The mood in the is haunting, foreboding. There is an ever-present sense of doom. Indeed the book opens with the sentence It was the year sow eradicated her piglets, and I was reminded of the horses eating each other on the eve of Duncan’s murder by Macbeth.

The brother leaves on business and while he is away the woman is other-red, indeed reviled by the villagers.

Strange happenings occur. A dog has a phantom pregnancy, a ewe and her lamb die on a fence. Chickens behave weirdly. Cows die. The locals are eerie, suspicious folk. They are silent in her presence, have thinning hair and eat bacon. They blame her for the strange happenings. She practices her own ancient craft making amulets and deposits them on neighbors’ doors.

Yet she is so fearful and shamed that on entering a hardware store she seeks out the owner so that she will not appear to have a negative motive for entering.

She is an outsider, has no citizenship in this place, and sees her own people as survivors whose only raison d’être is survival. She is shamed by this and talks of young people silencing free speech. Asking is this not the equivalent of book-burning? The Holocaust hovers, ever-present, ghostly, unspoken.

Her whole life has been one of servitude and submission. It’s as if she’s trying to be invisible. She spends much of her time on menial housework duties and making artifacts using crafts of her ancestors who were “put into pits”. She believes herself unworthy, taking her low self-esteem to the level of the absurd.

In the monologue that comprises the book she asks, does a society need a person or object to exclude for the sake of societal cohesion?

Obedience is exquisitely written, a sheer delight. It needs more than one reading. I found myself too often trying to work out the main characters geographic location, instead of just listening to the prose.

Study for Obedience is shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize. It's also a novel full of a weird something-isn't-right foreboding from the very first sentence: It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. What follows is told from one woman's point of view, a woman who comes to this northern land to be a housekeeper for her brother. She doesn't speak the language or understand the culture of this isolated village, she's worked hard to live a life of service, to be humble and unassuming, yet every effort she makes to fit into village life seems to cause the locals to be more wary of her. As the novel progresses, certain comments she makes, corrections or late additions to the record, suggest that she may not be the innocent she represents herself as, that her story of her own past might not be as simple as presented.

Nothing had happened, I told myself, no catastrophe, no untimely encounter. I was fine, I thought, pressing my face into the pillow, I was whole. All might still be well. Perhaps all manner of things might after all be well.

This is a subtle book and one that requires a slower reading. It's beautiful on a sentence level, with long, complex sentences in places that ask to be read carefully. The sense of menace is enhanced by the writing, the purposefully ambiguity as to the setting, and the way the sentences twist back upon themselves.½

(55) Really? This is on the list for the Booker Prize? I am not sure why I am surprised as sometimes there is a tremendous pretentious dud that is critically acclaimed. This is less than 200 pages which is probably the only reason I made it through. I am still not sure I figured out what was supposed to be going on. Is this woman a witch? Just misunderstood? Autistic perhaps? Who the hell knows or frankly cares? A woman in current times moves to a rural area in "the North" where her ancestors live to tend to her brother who is newly divorced. While she speaks to shared ancestry between her and the townsfolk and hints at Jewishness - it is never really spelled out. Is she in an ethnic enclave in Germany, Poland? Is she a Brit or an American Jew there? Cryptic; unnecessarily so, in my opinion. No one seems to like her. She seems a bit deranged and a loner and then begins to do weird things. Weaving little talismans and leaving them on doorsteps? "Dry brushing" her brother - WTF? as it is, she seems to wash and dress him. Again mentioned as if it's not unusual... umm, yes, it is. The dog Burt was the only redeeming character.

But for all the weirdness, there is absolutely NO PAY OFF. No unifying allegory or mystery revealed. Or perhaps I am just too obtuse. It really was frankly, awful. The prose was fine - but nothing so spectacular that it made up for elliptical nonsense. Anyway, I found myself reading the same inane lines over and over again. Nope - it still makes no sense. On to the next opaque sentence about nothing. . . Do yourself a favor and skip it. Maybe I'll just wait for the eventual winner and consider reading that. But, if this selection wins the Booker, then I will have to face the fact that I am demented and no longer 'get it.'

First read: Good book but I need to reread it. Well worth the effort. Communication, Language, History, Jewish persecution

Second read: An astounding but challenging read. A carefully sculpted work of the power of the victim.

This book presses upon its reader in many ways.
In its language it often compresses.
In its theme and tenor it oppresses.
Its main character it represses.
Its point and meaning it definitely suppresses.
The overall reading experience depresses.

I think that the measure of a work of fiction is how eagerly you will await the author's next work. Will I await Ms. Bernstein's next foray into fiction with the same fervor as I will Tan Twan Eng and Abraham Verghese? No pressure. No.

Dreadful,self-indulgent,obscure whining. Horrible read.

Not a review but a reaction:

The prose is occasionally intelligible. More often, it is excruciatingly pretentious and torturously longwinded—painful, like fingernails slowly grating across a chalk board. Meaning gets lost in excess verbiage. Bernstein obviously loves her thesaurus. I found the discordance of the writing to be a kind of (anti)aesthetic assault. If a thing of beauty is a joy forever, what is a thing of ugliness?

Take this, for example:

In spite of all this, all these efforts, I felt radiating from the landscape, surely as ever now, the anger of the townspeople, who after all could not help but think historically, and who, having been in a sense exiled from the modern world to their own home town, a town like any other, whose people had behaved like those in any other, who thus understood the need for roots, whose continued existence depended on this understanding, depended in fact on the pact of silence, on groping, blindly, for the future, saw me as nothing more than a stranger of a fixed, old age, who had appeared out of nowhere to herald, perhaps even bring about, a truly inauspicious time.

Or this:

I had learned much on the subject of silence, about its uses, from my brother, whose expert modulation of speech and silence, the interval between the two which could not quite be called conversation, which I often thought must be a space of transcendence, of mutual annulment, communicated as much if not more of his mood, of his tastes, of his dissatisfaction, than either of the two polarities.

Here’s an idea for the author: rewrite this text in controlled, coherent prose. What would this novel read like if the prose weren’t so bizarrely stilted? I pity the poor future translator.

This is a claustrophobic and oppressive novel which seems much longer than its page count. A bizarre creation or some sort of weird joke? An experiment on the part of the author to see how gullible the reading public or book-prize judges might be? It is just so completely over the top. For some reason, I kept thinking of the old Saturday Night Live spoof on Jane Campion’s ever-so-artsy The Piano: The Washing Machine. This book just begs to be parodied. How about a film adaptation?!

Can’t say I appreciated or saw the point of it (beyond the obvious). I have got to believe there were books so much more deserving of nomination for a prize than this. How did this elbow out other submissions? As I approached the longed-for conclusion, I figured there was a very good chance that the author was in fact insane or very close to it..

If any one of us submitted a piece like this to a publisher, it would certainly be rejected and rightly so. It’s one of worst long-list titles I’ve ever encountered.

As another reviewer remarked: avoid books with images of dead birds on the cover.

Ambiguous Novel Alert
Review of the Net Galley ARC for the Knopf Canada edition (August 22, 2023) with reference to the original Granta Books hardcover (July 6, 2023).

Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.

The nature of Study for Obedience requires going a step beyond my standard Ambiguous Ending Alert™, although it earns that tag as well. A nameless narrator arrives at a nameless northern town in a nameless northern country to become the caregiver to her eldest brother, whose wife and children have left him. She does not speak the local language. We gradually piece together that the woman is of Jewish heritage and that the townspeople have an ancestral animosity towards people of that faith as pogroms are hinted to have taken place in the past. Soon after her arrival, the brother departs and doesn't return until towards the end of the book when he appears to sicken.

This follows on from the heart of the book where, although she attempts to ingratiate herself to the town by participating in community farming chores, the woman is suspected of causing a mad cow infestation & resultant herd extermination, a still-born birth by a sheep, a phantom pregnancy of a dog, the containment of the chicken population and a potato blight.

The woman doesn't help her cause by one night travelling around the town leaving handmade dolls woven out of grass and herbs on doorsteps. Although that is a foreboding sign, no apparent actual witchcraft occurs. She in fact sees the dolls as protecting "talismen." The townspeople see them differently however.

Although there is no real resolution and much remains a mystery, I still found this to be a very compelling read due to the author's rather hypnotic prose which was often poetic and used repetitive strokes, as if to insist on various points. So it earns a 4 rating regardless of its ambiguous nature. The ambiguous end comes with a paraphrase and allusion to the "Lecture on Nothing" in John Cage's Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961).

I am here and there is nothing to say. - John Cage.

I read Study for Obedience through its being longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and especially due to Sarah Bernstein being the only Canadian author on the longlist. Readers who are prepared to accept its ambiguous nature will likely find it just as engrossing as I did.

My thanks to the publisher Knopf Canada and Net Galley for the opportunity to read this Kindle ARC in exchange for which I provide this honest review.

Other Reviews
Life in Limbo by Chris Power, The Guardian, July 19, 2023.
An Unnervingly Modern Tale by Emily Donaldson, The Globe and Mail, August 17, 2023.
A Haunting Novel by CBC Books, August 29, 2023.

Trivia and Link
There is a background article and a brief interview with author Sarah Bernstein about her being longlisted for the 2023 Booker Award at Global News by Sonja Puzic, The Canadian Press, August 12, 2023.

I finished Study for Obedience a few days ago but, to be honest, I still don’t know how I feel about it. It is beautifully written but the story…

The story is told by an unnamed female narrator/protagonist but, although I wouldn’t call her an untrustworthy narrator, what she provides is a stream of consciousness-like monologue that often raises questions which she never answers. She tells us she is the youngest of too many siblings to count and she has learned to take care of their every need.

Her oldest brother, a successful businessman, asks her to come look after his household after his divorce. He lives in an unnamed northern country where their people had been persecuted and driven out. He proudly explains that his mansion had, in fact, once belonged to the man responsible for this persecution.

Along with her usual duties of cooking and cleaning, she is also expected to bathe and dress him and no doors are to be closed including her bedroom door. Shortly after she arrives, he leaves on a business trip and she spends her time wandering around the countryside. On one such ramble, she finds a ewe tangled in a fence, a dead lamb hanging out of her. But this is not the only weird happening since her arrival. A dog has a phantom pregnancy and a herd of cows go mad and the townsfolk clearly seem to blame her, the outsider, for these occurrences. In an attempt to appease them, she fashions dolls out of reeds and leaves them on doorsteps at night, an action which only make things worse. When her brother returns, their relationship seems to return to normal. However, she believes she sees signs that his health was failing and she plans a regimen of health aids to restore him and, in the process, takes over his life.

This book is the most beautifully written story I have read in a very long time but also one of the oddest. There is little real action or terribly shocking events. Yet, there is a fairy tale kind of feeling of creeping foreboding throughout. There is also a comment on antisemitism as well as misogyny and, perhaps, a warning to perpetrators to be careful not to push victims too far or they might eventually fight back. But I don’t know - I suspect I will have a better understanding after a second read and there will definitely be a second read. In the meantime, I can only say, this is a very unique, very beautiful novel that has been long listed for the Booker prize and, if this sounds like something you will enjoy, you really should check it out for yourself.

I received an arc of this book from Netgalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review