You know that feeling when a book could have been good if it was just written by somebody else? The writing was just not it. Some of the weird folky stuff was really interesting, but then there would be these meandering and vague passages that make up 90% of the book and were completely pointless. I do often like a vague narrative, but this just wasn't good. It felt pretentious in its vagueness, like I wasn't part of the club, because I didn't get it at all. It's a no from me.

Booker Longlist #7

A short book The narrator travels north to a strange land to become housekeeper and general factotum for her brother. Everything revolves around the protagonist and we are t quite sure what is “truth” and what is just her perspective..

I usually struggle with “internal dialogue” books and so struggled with this a bit. In places I was engaged, in others a bit bored.

The author is Canadian, born in Montreal, and now lives in Scotland. The country to which the protagonist travels is “North” and there are definite North American references and also European. I found this mish mash distracting as I would tick off a Canadian/US reference and then a European one..

Having said that I think it is a worthy longlist and might even reread if it is shortlisted - despite my two star review!

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

A strange, enigmatic novel that is beautifully written but at times hard to read. Bernstein’s prose feels like cold, still water - managing to somehow be both sparse and long winded simultaneously at times, and I found it hard initially to get a grip of when the novel was set because of the stilted, almost old fashioned language. It was a little plotless in places for me, but nevertheless I found this an unsettling but evocative read. I’m unsure if ‘enjoyed’ would be the right word - but it certainly stuck with me for long afterwards.

'Study for Obedience' is narrated by a woman who has travelled to an unnamed northern (European?) country to keep house for her older brother after the breakup of his marriage. Following her arrival, she is blamed by the townspeople for a series of unexplained disasters affecting local animals and crops, but she is unable to speak their language and remains distant and isolated.

Like Bernstein's first novel, ' The Coming Bad Days', this is a strange and unsettling novel where much is left unsaid. It may remind readers of other contemporary literary novelists - I thought of Rachel Cusk and Jenny Offill - but there is also something highly distinctive about its narrative voice. Writing in long, trailing sentences, the narrator accepts the suspicion and hostility of others as her due and is used to being shamed. As the youngest of many siblings, she has been brought up to serve and obey her elders, to submit herself to the desires of others - whether those of her brother whose 'words seemed to take on an actual presence in the room', or her the company who employs her as an audio-typist. 'It's not the meek who inherit the earth. The meek get kicked in the teeth,' she reflects, but she shows little desire or ability to rebel. The narrator's passivity reminded of many of Kazuo Ishiguro's narrators, particularly the butler Stevens from 'The Remains of the Day'; like Stevens, this narrator also questions the ends to which her obedience may be used and the degree of culpability she should feel about this. I also couldn't help thinking of Shirley Jackson's 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle'; this novel offers a similar sense of dark mystery.

As the novel progresses, it also becomes clearer that the narrator is Jewish and that her family has some sort of history in the country in which she finds herself, and that her treatment by the other townspeople is connected to her Jewishness. Her acceptance of her position becomes even more troubling in the light of this. Nothing is spelled out, and a second reading might well yield more insights into this aspect of the novel. The ending is ambiguous but quietly powerful.

Overall, I found this a striking if enigmatic depiction of alienation, isolation and obedience. Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for sending me an ARC to review.

Study For Obedience by Sarah Bernstein is a haunting and atmospheric contemporary novel that delves into themes of isolation and the complexities of familial relationships. Bernstein's writing is evocative and atmospheric, immersing readers in a sense of unease and tension. The exploration of isolation and family dynamics adds depth to the narrative, highlighting the intricacies of human connection. Study For Obedience is a thought-provoking and unsettling read that lingers in the mind, showcasing Bernstein's skill at crafting a captivating and disquieting tale.

A spare and enigmatic novella from Sarah Bernstein, “Study For Obedience” might appeal to readers who loved Sophie Mackintosh’s Cursed Bread. It is a well-written and intriguing story but fails to reach the emotional heights of Bernstein’s excellent debut “The Coming Bad Days”.

I adored Sarah Bernstein’s The Coming Bad Days. This second novel is written in a similarly distinctive style – opening lines: 'It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. It was a swift and menacing time.' The plot, such as it is, is broader in scope, or maybe it’s just that it’s a little more unfocused, or felt that way to me. The narrator is a woman who sees her life as having been defined by obedience to her ‘many’ older siblings. In keeping with that, when her eldest brother asks her to stay with him in an Anna Kavan-esque ‘remote northern country’, she acquiesces without question. From there it unfurls in several directions: the brother’s ailing health, the suspicion of the locals, a thread of what seems like folk horror, and ultimately, a sort of reckoning with the weight of history. As in in Bad Days I found the writing very striking, but these pithy, glacial sentences are most successful when the narrative concentrates on the personal; less so when applied to bigger themes. A book for those who appreciate the eerie and ambiguous – it reminded me (again) of Fleur Jaeggy, and also Marie NDiaye’s That Time of Year.

Struggled a bit with this one. Bernstein is clearly a talented writer and this will definitely have its fans, but the writing style is not for me. I found her tendency towards long, drawn-out sentences a little difficult to engage with, and occasionally difficult to follow. The novel as a whole is quite slow-paced and contemplative - not a bad thing in itself, but combined with the writing style I found it came across a bit meandering, and the novel dragged as a result. I’d be interested in reading more of Bernstein’s work, but this one was sadly not for me.

Many thanks to Granta and Netgalley for the eARC!

A seemingly simple but almost impenetrably complex novel about the outside and the ways in which one relates to the interiority from an outsider position. Or, rather, the ways in which one is made to relate to an interiority of a family, social group, ethnicity, nation or whatever through various forms of coercion (shame, custom, religion, education, work, language, habit), some of which are even self-inflicted - the titular obedience. There's a research paper or two in it about the role of animals and plants in the production of obedience of human animals and how non-human animals and plants are made obedient in their turn.

If you asked me to recount any plot points of this book, I would have nothing to say. This book struggled to keep my focus and I genuinely have next to no idea what was going on for the majority of this short novel. I just don't think Bernstein's writing style is for me and I know I will be in the minority on this, but I'd still like to thank NetGalley for allowing me to read this before the release date regardless of how much I did or didn't like this book.

I read this novel as it is the second novel, to be published in June 2023, from an author who in late April 2023 was selected for the decennial Granta Best of Young British Novelists list.

Both in her choice of epigraph, and in some interviews after her debut novel, the author has made clear that a key inspiration was the late artist Paula Rego and a quote from a 2004 Guardian interview about her work – “I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger, I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time”.

The novel itself explores precisely that theme – an unnamed narrator, who has almost been trained for obedience from day one of her life in a life of service which turns to sacrifice to conscious self-abnegation

The book is set when the English narrator is a fairly unsuccessful adult, with almost no non-familial ties and working as an audio typist at a legal firm (a role she can easily perform remotely). She accepts (of course in obedience) a request from her recently separated oldest brother (who has always made it his personal mission to refine her self of self renunciation and service) to act as a housekeeper/valet/housesitter for him while he concentrates on running his increasingly successful business interests in an unnamed cold and traditional region in a distant Northern country from which their persecuted ancestors (the family appear to be some form of obscure Jewish people) originate.

There she is regarded with something between hostility and wariness by the superstitious locals, something not helped by her, despite her linguistic skills as a student, being unable to grasp the language and so cut off from the myriad customs and conventions of the nearby town – in contrast to her brother (who is absent for most of the book on business travels) apparently complete integration.

Her and the locals difficult relationship is not helped by a series of animal-victim incidents which appear to start after her coming, introducing menace and fear to the town.

For much of the book we see the narrator (filtered of course through her own thoughts) as a victim of injustice and exclusion bought on by coincidental circumstance: but in keeping with the Rego quote, a second strand starts to emerge – the villagers start to be more fearful than hostile, we begin to question both her reliability and professed innocence in the incidents. What initially seems like a token attempt to make overtures to the villagers via the nocturnal placing of some grass dolls she makes, starts to take a darker interpretation as we see how the villagers react and question her motives. And this feeling of taking control, of turning the tables not just on the villagers for their sleights to her and possibly their atrocities to her ancestors, but to her family for the role they trained her to adopt - only becomes stronger when her brother returns and immediately starts to suffer with some form of unspecified ailment with the narrator increasingly controlling him. Towards the end (reminding me of “Pew” in a book which already reminded my of Catherine Lacey) there are some fascinating power dynamics in a scene at a church service

This is a very enigmatic story – one which I think would repay a re-read but which I think even then is unlikely to reveal its secrets as it is not the type of book designed to have a solution or explanation – the author said of her debut “One question I struggle with most is what the book is about” and I think the same applies here as it is really more of an oblique exploration of themes such as familial and societal pressures to conform, and the historical and present day rejection of the outsider..

Overall recommended.

Every ten years, Granta publishes an anthology featuring the Best of Young British Novelists. The very first edition, back in 1983 picked, among others, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rose Tremain and Julian Barnes, that of 1993, Alan Hollinghurst, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi and AL Kennedy. I therefore read with particular interest Study for Obedience, my first encounter with Sarah Bernstein, considering that she is one of the authors who have made the cut for the 2023 edition published earlier this week.

The (unnamed) female narrator of this slim novel is the youngest of several siblings. She has – from early childhood and throughout her life – made it her mission to serve their every desire. As a result, when her newly-divorced businessman brother asks her to give up everything and move to the “northern country” where he lives so as to be his companion and housekeeper, she readily accepts, seeing this as an opportunity for further self-abnegation. She also makes an attempt to integrate into the village community where he lives and to ingratiate herself with the locals. This, however, proves challenging. She finds their language difficult to learn and understand and, despite her best efforts, the villagers consider her an outsider. Worse still, soon after her arrival, the village is plagued by several tragic events – deaths of farm animals, a potato blight – which seem to point to some supernatural or, at the very least, unnatural powers triggered by the narrator. Her penchant for distributing doll-like figures as a “peace offering” does not help, being taken by the villagers as evidence of witchery. Soon after, her brother’s health also starts to fail. Is the narrator “guilty”? Or is this some sort of metaphysical turning of tables?

Bernstein’s anointment as a leading “young British novelist” prepared me for a novel that would be original and different. Study for Obedience certainly is that, although I’m not sure I understood its point. Bernstein plays around with the rule book. Traditional writing advice tells you to ground the narrative into a defined temporal and geographical setting, ideally described early on. This novel does the opposite. It is tantalisingly – and sometimes frustratingly – vague on details. It is clearly set in the present day (as evidenced by the references to Twitter, meetings on Microsoft Teams, multinational lawfirms, cancel culture), yet the writing style sounds archaic, often employing the sort of rhetoric one would find, for instance, in old religious tracts. It is suggested that the narrator speaks English as a first language and that although she is good at languages, she cannot master the language of the “northern country” where her brother lives. We don’t know what this is, but vague references to ancient pogroms and persecutions against the narrator’s people (she is of Jewish extraction) would point to (possibly) a country in central continental Europe. All this creates a feeling of detachment and alienation, reflecting the feelings of the narrator who feels scapegoated by the villagers, in a chilling repeat of past histories. Her brother, in an apparent betrayal of his roots, seems to have assimilated into the community which once persecuted his people. The narrator simply cannot bring herself to do that even if she tries. She remains ever “different”.

The sense of dread is intensified by details of the narrative which seem to take a page out of the folk horror genre: the villagers indulge in a strange ritual at their church; the narrator is branded as a sort of witch – a harbinger of a string of unnatural occurrences.

My interpretation of this strange work is that it is a metaphorical fable about the recurrence of past sins and wrongs, as if the land is steeped in the blood of the narrator’s forebears. But meanings, alas, remain elusive.

3.5*

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2023/04/study-for-obedience-by-sarah-bernstein.html

Novelist, poet and academic Sarah Bernstein’s latest book shares many of the concerns explored in her first The Coming Bad Days, both are infused with a feeling of overwhelming dread featuring stories in which isolated women struggle to make sense of their existence against the backdrop of a world that’s rapidly falling apart. Bernstein’s debut novel was labelled as minimalist, in common with writers like Amina Cain, her writing was seen as representative of trends common to the work of many millennial authors – unnamed narrators, hazy plots, a timelessness and gravity of tone. This piece is similarly serious, distanced and detached in tone, narrated by yet another nameless woman but it’s also more austere and far more disciplined.

Bernstein was initially inspired by a visit to an exhibition of Paula Rego’s artworks, surreal, rooted in fairy tale, but also in histories of oppressed women, Rego’s women are shown to be both obedient and murderous. Obedience is fundamental to Bernstein’s narrator’s view of herself and how she moves through space. Brought up in a large family, from a young age she recounts how she was quickly made aware of her outsider-ness, her position as carer and scapegoat for her siblings. A status she now seemingly embraces, has even transformed into an art.

The narrator appears to be confessing or bearing witness to mysterious events in her own life producing a narrative that sometimes reads like an extract from a Freudian case study but also explicitly draws on Kafka, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Samuel Beckett. After years of self-effacement and marginalisation she’s moved to serve as a kind of housekeeper for her wealthy, successful brother. Recently divorced, he now lives alone in a far-off country, it’s never clear where exactly but there are references to Europe - particularly Switzerland and Romania - and to the darker aspects of European history. It’s remote yet not shielded from the reaches of capitalism’s particular form of blight. The brother’s mansion stands alone on the edges of a small village, where their family ancestors were once killed – although nothing’s ever clearly stated in the narrator’s account, which is riddled with gaps and deliberate omissions, everything has to be gleaned from hints and brief references. It seems that the narrator’s Jewish and her ancestors most likely lie in a pit somewhere across the land close to the house, victims of the Holocaust or of pogroms or both.

The legacy of mass annihilation seems to be manifested in the narrator’s own interest in self-annihilation, which she strives to achieve on a daily basis through self-effacement and devotion to the needs of her family rather than herself. And rather like Simone Weil – whose work also surfaces here – she has a troubled relationship with her embodied self, but through a carefully-honed, personal philosophy of sacrifice, or martyrdom, professes to be attempting to reach some form of the ‘good.’ But when her brother goes on an extended business trip the narrator is unable to assume a suitable role in the community. She can’t speak the local language and the villagers seem increasingly threatening, particularly as her arrival coincides with the onset of a spate of ill-omened happenings. The possibility of collective scapegoating fits with the narrator’s self-perception but also stirs an awareness of the possibility of refusal, beginning with small forms of subversion first manifested in the strange, woven figures she secrets into the village at night-time. As time passes there are further sinister occurrences, but slowly it seems the narrator appears to be the one finally taking control.

It’s a challenging, unsettling, slippery novel which delves into the trauma of survival, the legacy of history, fascism, and the impact of denying the past, but it’s also an ambitious, complex exploration of issues around women and various instances of familial and cultural repression. I found it deeply compelling but equally dense and elliptical, a novel I will definitely need to revisit.

3.5 stars

There's a very good chance I didn't understand this book at all.
I seemed to be always looking out for an explanation, the writing style didn't match the time it was set, though I can't actually be sure when it was set.
Despite feeling a bit lost with it, it pulled me in, the writing was superb.
I'm left having enjoyed it, but not entirely sure of the details.