Fascinating and intricate literary fiction. Bernstein has an incredible relationship with language, and her work is a rewarding pleasure to read

The download date was unfortunately missed, I would be happy to re-review if it became available again. I have awarded stars for the book cover and description as they both appeal to me. I would be more than happy to re-read and review if a download becomes available. If you would like me to re-review please feel free to contact me at thesecretbookreview@gmail.com or via social media The_secret_bookreview (Instagram) or Secret_bookblog (Twitter). Thank you.

I know it isn’t for some, and I wouldn’t necessarily find this novel easy to recommend but I enjoyed it. The language and sentence structuring was very different to what I’ve been reading recently and surprisingly the long sentences and flowery language made me want to continue reading - more so than the thrillers I’ve been reading lately.

Not for me - I found this somewhat confusing. Some beautiful writing and lines, but I never felt particularly drawn to the characters or the plot. Not that my thoughts are that important given it was Booker listed.

Shortlisted for the Booker prize 2023 so I’m sure many found this a worthy and interesting novel but I struggled with both the writing and the story. Not for me but perhaps I missed the point.


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Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

The unnamed narrator agrees to leave everything behind and moves to the north with her brother to take care of his estate. In other words, to work as his maid for free. While reading, I was often outraged and wondered why the narrator would allow that.

I loved the writing. Even though the sentences are very long, they are also poetic. And every sentence invites you to read on.

I’m not sure if I can review or even understand this novel properly without reading it one more time. But in its essence, this novel is a meditation on obedience and dominance, abuse, and prejudice. And overall, I liked it.

Thanks to Granta for the advanced copy and this opportunity! This is a voluntary review and all opinions are my own.

This is a strange book. The narrator moves to a village in a northern country to stay with and look after her brother. She can’t speak the language and is isolated at once from the villagers and then strange things start happening. There’s superstition but it’s a modern world, there’s a weird subservient relationship with her brother but he then goes away for work leaving her all alone. And there’s a lot more. So I can’t say I know what this book was trying to do, but I couldn’t stop reading and I had to read every word, it’s not a book you can skim. A very powerful read.

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

The narrator (unnamed) has moved to the cold northern part of the country (the name of which is also never mentioned) at her recently divorced brother’s request to take care of work around the house. He lives unexpectedly on business and now she is house sitting alone in a new place with her weird thoughts.

She mentions to herself that she knows multiple languages but cannot master the local language, can't even speak of one word to manage in this place but hints on being intelligent enough to use current technology in other places. There is also creepy thoughts about how she helps her brother in bath and dressing daily. She also shows behaviour of being submissive while growing up. No other details of her life or family is given. There is also not much conversations in the book even though the narrator roams around the town, goes to shops, helps in farm.

She is paranoid about everything and blames herself for issues unrelated to her!!

The book flows randomly to next chapters with more descriptive language but nothing else. May be the author wanted to show the power of words!?

I took longer to finish this tiny book than big books I have read this year!

A woman moves to an isolated region of a northern country to be her brother’s housekeeper. Soon, the unnamed narrator finds the habitually suspicious villagers are fearful of her and they blame her for an outbreak of catastrophes.

This is an unsettling read, which will have you questioning the narrator, and in which age-old histories jostle alongside modern communications technology.

My thanks to NetGalley and Granta Publications for the ARC.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Listen, I get VERY skeptical when a text is compared to Kafka's work, because in my not-so-humble opinion, Franz Fucking Kafka is the best German-language author who has ever graced the world with his ideas, thank you very much (yes, you heard that right, Wolle Goethe). But while Bernstein of course cannot touch the master for whom an eternal light is shining in the cathedral of my heart, I understand why people see a connection between the Canadian poet and Franzel the Great: Bernstein finds abysmally dark and haunting images to illustrate the absurd nature of humankind, and her protagonist is so psychologically deformed by what has been written into her, so the character she has developed under internal and external pressure, that the almost non-existent plot still reads like a horror story about a woman whose brain has been poisoned by internalized cruelty.

Our narrator and protagonist, an unnamed Jewish woman, has learnt all her life that her worth is measured by the title-giving obedience, that she as a woman is a projection surface and tool for the comfort of others. Now, as an adult, she moves to live with her recently divorced brother, who resides in an unnamed country that was involved in the Holocaust (it's probably Romania, because we do have the mythical sheepdog, but it's a Carpathian one). The family used to live at the place before the terrible events that are never specified happened, and now the protagonist is ostracized by a society whose language she doesn't speak, no matter her roots. When the brother comes back from traveling, he falls ill...

This novella heavily relies on atmosphere, partly to its detriment, because it tends to be very descriptive and to meander off into different directions. What I applaud though is that this text is daring, not only in its scenes, but also when it comes to the language: To me, it felt like a translated text, like the rhythm the words develop is not that of English - and I mean that as a compliment, because the effect isn't that of clumsiness, but of alienation, of looking through a lense, and this underlines the message, namely that we encounter a narrator that struggles with internalized hate and sees the world through a specific veil, often tending to accept cruelty because there is no energy, no self-love left to resist: She does not "live in her life". She has disappeared, been murdered from the inside, struck by "permanent although latent terror".

Bernstein also delivers some brutal lines with immense power. Take this one sentence horror story, for example: "I recalled my own aborted attempts at intimacy, with men, with women, and all that I had ever come away with was a sense of my essential interchangeability." - welcome to the pits of hell. Or this one, reminding me of my favorite Kafka story, In the Penal Colony: "I was caught in the machinery of certain manias and maladies, the engines of their compulsory performace urging me on." - wow, just wow.

Still, I was overall bothered by the author's tendency to meander and the long descriptive passages, which throw off the pacing. I'm happy this one got nominated though, because it has drive and unusual ideas, two things that most of this Booker longlist has been tragically lacking.

Description:
A woman goes to live with her brother in a remote town. The locals take against her.

Liked:
The untrustworthiness of the narrator was interesting - there's a slide between positions that feels quite insidious. Has a good sense of place. The themes it centres around are interesting.

Disliked:
Honestly, I really didn't get on with this one at all. The writing is wilfully obtuse and highly irritating; lots of run-on sentences with too many clauses and diversions. The amount of times the narrator goes off on one to such an extent that I ended up finding it impossible to even parse what she was talking about... ugh. I held on till the end in the hope that things would become clearer - that some kind of key would be provided to decipher some of the tangled mess, but it seems it was just dross. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to understand the meaning behind all of this, but I haven't seen anyone else able to decode it either. Feels like the worst Lynch films, but less evocative or sumptuous.

Wouldn’t recommend. Quite baffled that this made the Booker shortlist.

Anything Else:
I love the cover for this one, which makes this doubly disappointing!

I wasn't a huge fan of this book. The premise sounded interesting enough but as soon as I started to read it, the style and setting seemed to clash. It's written in the style of a pre 20th century novel yet it is set in the modern day, and the mentions of technology and modern concepts are very jarring. It doesn't help that the main character's family seems really old-fashioned, further solidifying the sense that this is historical fiction.

Our narrator is the youngest of a seemingly large family, the “runt of the litter” we are told, and grew up catering to her siblings’ every whim. She travels to stay with her eldest brother, on his request, as he seeks support after the dissolution of his marriage. This particular support is far more involved and infantilised than one might expect a grown man should desire, but it’s never questioned. Our narrator seems entirely lacking in self confidence and self esteem, and the more we learn of her upbringing, the less surprising this is, as she learns as a child that “it would be my life’s work to reorient all my desires in the service of another, that was the most I should expect to achieve”.

I found the language entirely inaccessible, often impenetrable, and my but I longed for shorter sentences. I’d often lost the beginning before making it to the end. I don’t know if it was too clever for its own good, or I was just not clever enough to appreciate it. After struggling through 70% I allowed myself to just give up.

Longlisted for the Booker prize 2023

Book 7/13 and the last I plan to read before the shortlist is announced in two days.

'The question of innocence is a complicated one' – Sarah Bernstein about the novel

Pfff. I am in such a confused state. It is my favourite novel from the ones that I’ve read from the longlist and I have no idea why. How can I share what I loved about Study for Obedience when I do not even know why. It is different from the others, is stands out both in themes and writing. It is a very strange novel, the writing is peculiar, sometimes impenetrable, meditative, meandering, sometimes darkly funny. There’s a lot of metafiction inside, which mostly passed me by. The very low rating probably reflects that and I do not think it is a novel that would appeal to everybody. Nevertheless, I thought it was extraordinary.

I will copy a bit of the synopsis from the Booker website “ A woman moves from the place of her birth to a ‘remote northern country’ to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs: collective bovine hysteria; the death of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy etc, She notices that the community’s suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. She feels their hostility growing. Inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill” 

The story is narrated from the point of view of the woman. From the beginning, she keeps pointing out her obedient character and her lack of own personality and ideas. She was born and raised to serve and she does her best to be the perfect carer also her brother. She bathes him, feeds him, dressed him and even administers homemade health remedies.

“I continued to spend the long years since childhood cultivating solitude, pursuing silence to its ever-receding horizon, a pursuit that demanded a particular quality of attention, a self-forgetfulness on my part that would enable me to bring to bear the most painstaking, the most careful consideration to the other, to treat the other as the worthiest object of contemplation. 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.”

It soon becomes apparent that her narration cannot be trusted, that maybe she is not that innocent, that maybe she is not as obedient as she want us to believe. The author confessed she was reading a lot of Shirley Jackson at the time she wrote the novel and it does have a similar atmosphere, it could easily be classified as a bit of a folk-horror story.

It also a novel about xenophobia, and how easy we can start blaming or categorize strangers based on external factors or their culture. Yes, it is also a story about Jewish culture and its persecution, even the survivor guilt is mentioned.

Thirdly, it is a novel about language and its absence. Language is mentioned extensively in the novel. She has problems communicating with the locals because she does know the language, her job was to transcribe lawyer speeches, she mentions silence as a way to be obedient. The author pushes the boundaries of language with the narrative voice, it plays with it and the meaning of words.

Finally, it is a novel about the traditional role of women and the dangers of imposing it.

I will end my disorganised exposition with an extract from an interview with the author from the Booker Prize website, which explains better what the author tried to do with the novel:

“I was trying to think through what it might look like if certain (usually feminised) characteristics associated with passivity could take on a kind of power, especially over the people reinforcing those sorts of gendered norms. That idea comes from the painter Paula Rego – that obedience can, in a sense, also be murderous – it can be harmful to the person demanding obedience. I was also interested in the question of innocence and the really bizarre expectation that, in order for someone’s suffering to be recognised as legitimate, that person needs also to be innocent – whatever that means. The novel’s narrator is a character who has been disempowered and badly treated in a variety of ways and who has also abdicated moral responsibility in other areas of her life, so the question of innocence is a complicated one, for her as well as for us. The question of agency is I think also complicated by the narrator’s sense of her own fatedness – her sense of living in a cycle of history she can’t work her way out of. “

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

I’d describe this one as less of a story and more a vapour, less of a plot and more a vibe, and very typically Booker - obtuse, literary, almost impenetrable and compelling/boring in equal measure.

Our unnamed and unreliable narrator has arrived in an unspecified northern European country (Germany? Finland? Norway?) to care for her brother, a wealthy man living in a country pile, in the wake of his divorce and the departure of his teenage children.

The narrator is an outsider in the community from the moment of her arrival, and from her perspective (however reliable that may be), somewhat of a hex. She observes a dead lamb born to a ewe, a sow suffocating her six piglets and the ritualistic burial by the townsfolk of some doll-men she crafted from reeds.

It’s all rather creepy and it’s hard to know if much of what is happening (and very little actually happens) is a figment of her imagination or a product of her paranoid mind, exacerbated by a lifetime of anti-Semitism and a harsh, unconventional upbringing. The author has said she took inspiration from Shirley Jackson.

There are hints of an incestuous relationship with her brother. The narrator sets about caring for him, nursing him through some unspecified malaise by bathing him and dry-brushing him.

Stylistically, the writing is quite unique; it reminded me of Olivia Laing, Catherine Lacey and Sara Baume, with the narrator describing her daily ablutions, dressing and movements in minute detail. There’s a mindfulness to these passages but they become repetitive after a time.

She drifts off on tangents on every page - you really feel this book could have been around 90 pages and achieved what it wanted to (it’s around 200 pages so it’s not lengthy). I can’t say I liked it much. It’s weirdly compelling but at the same time pretty tiresome as a reading experience.

I’ve spoken before of my (and other readers’) occasional fondness for a weird little book. Some of you will lap this up and others will avoid it like the plague. You’ll know yourself which side you land on just from reading this hopefully. I’ll be shocked if this doesn’t make the shortlist. 2/5⭐️

*Many thanks to the author, publisher Granta Books and @netgalley for the opportunity to read this book. As always, this is an honest review.*

I went into this with zero expectations and was really enjoyed the journey! I felt it resembled the writing of Ishiguro with a focus on service to others and the narrative felt similar to Drive Your Plow. In all, a great read but I'm not sure that the plot will remain with me after some time.

My10th read from this years Booker long list and the most challenging so far. But yet one I really enjoyed puzzling out what was going on! Written in the form of an interior monologue, it’s narrated by a nameless woman, oppressed by her family for years. Set in an unknown country (possibly in Northern Europe), our narrator has relocated to a rural town to be her brothers housekeeper. She believes herself to be “not good”, unworthy, undeserving. There’s a strong Shirley Jackson vibe to this book; ostracism, repression, an unstable female narrator, an open ended conclusion. Its a book I’ll read again & hope to see shortlisted. Delighted to see it long-listed for the Giller Prize also.

With thanks to @netgalley for this arc in return for my honest review.

Bernstein slowly lets us learn about the main female protagonist whose perspective the story is told from. She has just moved to help her brother in his farm who lives in a country where our protagonist struggles to learn the language and is based in the North.

I found it challenging to have so few facts. Which country are we in? Why does she have to help her brother? Why does she find it hard to make friends? Why do the locals dislike her so much? It really makes you have to think, trying to pull together all of the clues and hopefully coming to the intended conclusions.

A few clues led me to decide the country and why these people reject her. If I’m correct, from reading about some legal cases about that country, I can see why the author chose this style. It really does make an impact about nations struggling to admit their collective faults for past atrocities. Though I could be mistaken!

⭐ ⭐ ⭐
Study for Obedience
by Sarah Bernstein

Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize

This is my 4th read from #2023bookerprizelonglist and so far the shortest. It is an unsettling, at times confusing but intriguing novel written in vague narrative with an undefined setting, North Country (Canada? Scandinavia?) in a time that feels decades old but is unexpectedly revealed to be the present through a reference to Twitter and later to Microsoft Teams.

Our narrator describes herself as cautious, pliable, deferential to the rest of her siblings and easy to exploit. She has agreed to move to another country to care for her recently separated brother, who has always been a dominant force in her family. In this isolated town, where she doesn't speak the language, she feels the townspeople may blame her for a series of strange occurrences that coincide with her arrival. There's a taste of menace in the air, a hint of antisemitism.

The narrative is meandering and at times incoherent, tailing into rambling and cryptic stream of conscious style dialogue.

It hard to see where this is going, a sense of foreboding underpinned by ambiguity and obscurity evoked much speculation on my part. If you enjoy the writing of Iain Reid: We Spread, FOE or I'm Thinking of Ending Things or more recently Sophie Mackintosh's Cursed Bread this is probably something you would appreciate.

I find it more interesting than impactful, but would relish a group analysis.

Thanks to #NetGalley and #grantapublications for the ARC

I requested this after it made the Booker Longlist and it is definitely bottom of my personal shortlist so far. (I've read 8 out of the 13)

An unnamed woman goes to an unnamed country, where she doesn‘t speak the language, to be a kind of housekeeper / carer for her older brother. (And that will give you the ick! 😬)

All of the locals seem to be afraid of her, even before terrible things start happening. There is definitely some kind of undercurrent of anti-semitism but, other than that, I couldn‘t fathom any kind of allegorical meaning.

It‘s the kind of book where it makes you feel stupid for not understanding what‘s going on (well, me anyway!) rather than intrigued and anxious to find out more. 18h