About the Book:
WINNER OF THE 2023 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize
Included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2023
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.
Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs – collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.' And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.
With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.
Published by Penguin Random House
Released August 2023
My Thoughts:
My complicated relationship with @thebookerprizes continues with this one, Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein. A slog from the start, this one doesn't really develop into anything, despite an interesting premise.
The unnamed main character, who is narrating the story, has abandoned her own life to work remotely and live in a small town in a foreign country, of which she can't speak the language, so she can be her eldest brother's unpaid help after his wife and children have left him. This sibling relationship is concerning and quite frankly, weird. Not only is there an obvious power imbalance, there also seemed to be something else going on. She washes his back, dresses him in the morning, massages his head after work. It's distasteful, all the more so because it is presented as normal by the narrator.
The main character is quite pathetic, no personality of her own, she accepts everything without question, is wilfully ignorant of the affects of her own actions. She is shunned by the townsfolk because she is an outsider who doesn't speak the language, and she compounds their suspicions by making poppets and placing them on people's doorsteps and in other places around town, shocked afterwards that the townsfolk now suspect her of witchcraft.
It reads and feels like a story that should be set in the 19th century or earlier, but it's very much a modern setting, so this was jarring. It is implied that the main character is Jewish and that she has experienced anti-Semitism all through her life, this situation with the townsfolk just one more example of it. If this was the intent of the novel, I think it failed.
Towards the end of the story, the brother becomes inexplicably ill and the balance of power shifts in the sister's favour and he is all but made hostage within his own home. Was this the motivation all along for her moving in with him? Punishment for a life of sins against her? Was all of her obedience and ignorance simply an act from the start? I was left with more questions than answers at the conclusion of this one. Not recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment