Today we’re reading Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience, which was shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2023.
An Intro
“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.”
Reading this book set my brain on fire. This burning is what I look for when I read, though I’m not consciously seeking it. Certainly, this combustive material is a rare find. There’s a magnetism to it. An intuitive sensing. I’m not really expecting to feel this way when I pick up a book, but then—suddenly—I become obsessed.
I think it’s mainly about atmosphere and sentences for me. Despite being hell-bent on clarity in life, I can’t help but find myself dancing ecstatically in blurry, ambiguous stories when it comes to fiction. I guess I like a challenge. Or perhaps I just like to see a reflection of my own obsessive thinking on the page, so I know that I’m not the only one.
All if this is to introduce the book at hand, so let’s talk about Study for Obedience.
Quick Thoughts
Unsettling, ambiguous, haunting, thought-provoking
I recommend this if you like intense interiority, obsessive narrators, atmospheric novels, slightly-convoluted sentences, and stories that leave you questioning.
A Review
A unnamed woman moves to a small town in a “northern country” that is not her own, to take care of her older brother and his house after his family flees. She’s obsessed with goodness and, as the title suggests, obedience. Her brother—the eldest of many siblings—had a strong hand in teaching her—the youngest of many siblings—this obedience when they were young. She was taught to serve, to please, to obey, to stay quiet, to follow not think, to be good.
“He took me under his wing. I became his pupil and his retainer and he made me understand the necessity of temperance and silence. I had made an essential error when organising my consciousness early on in life, my brother explained, and this was by entertaining the idea that it was reasonable for me to form my own judgements about the world, about the people in it.”
She speaks of her obedience as a form of complicity. Guilt. She speaks of her failed relationships. The unspoken followed her through life everywhere she went. She wanted to please everyone but she was ultimately interchangeable.
“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.”
You have to deny any true self in order to live your life in service of others.
The town is secretive and uninviting, particularly towards her. She doesn’t speak the language, so she is always on the outside. Strange things start happening with the animals as soon as she arrives, it seems. An unborn lamb dies before making its way out of its mother, who is caught in barbed wire. Dogs all over town howl in unison three times a day, like a call to prayer. Bovine hysteria leads to a culling of the cows. A phantom dog pregnancy. Skinned rabbits. The birds must all be cooped up due to avian flu in a nearby region.
“It was soon after this that I noticed that the local suspicion about incomers in general seemed to be directed particularly in my case. I connected this to the incident with the pregnant ewe and knew that I was being held responsible for what had transpired…It was a familiar feeling: wherever I had been in my life I was always an incomer, an offlander, sometimes a usurper, more rarely a conniver, it was something in my blood that made me feel this way and likewise something in my blood that made others feel this too, that I was strange somehow, not to be trusted.”
She speaks of persecution and alienation. She has never been accepted. Here, we could interpret this as antisemitism, misogyny, generalized scapegoating, witchery, xenophobia.
These mysterious circumstances with the animals tell us that nature is haunting. But on her own, our narrator takes great pleasure in what the natural world offers.
“And so as I tramped daily through the woods, feeling for once in the world, I told myself over and over that I must remember this moment, here, now, a moment which could not last and would inevitably be followed by an unhappiness that would be commensurate with if not exceeding it in strength, and that I must therefore carry it with me, the knowledge that once, for a time, for a series of hours, even stretches of days, I had seen what happiness might look like, that would have to be enough.”
Though even in her happiest moments, a sense of paranoia lingers.
If the writing doesn’t mesmerize you, it might frustrate you or confuse you. It’s heavy on atmosphere, and tone, and sense, and sound. We are completely in our narrator’s head, where things feel, at times, impenetrable or hazy or even doubtful. “Story tends to follow voice rather than the other way around,” Bernstein says in her Booker Prize interview. Yes, the voice is strong here.
Bernstein’s sentences are extremely long, and require attention (devotion), but they are satisfying and thought-provoking. I went over many of them again and again, both to parse meaning and for the joy of reading. The story is mysterious and propulsive if, like me, you are drawn to this kind of opaqueness.
“I tend to approach things through the sound of a line – so it’s almost like catching a musical phrase, and then trying to follow the logic of its sound, rather than primarily its sense,” Bernstein says, in the same interview.
Study for Obedience has the air of allegory, particularly in the language and tone, but without the didactic irritation of one. I have no interest in trying to explicate the meaning of this one here. Some things are obvious, some are not. And of course, there are many potential interpretations.
There is an instinctual understanding that makes you sense the unspoken—pinning it down in precise words would make it too ephemeral, removing its power. It is this kind of enigmatic power that consumes our narrator throughout the novel, so we need to feel it too—that heft of secrecy and murkiness.
While reading, I thought of Shirley Jackson (Bernstein does mention she read a lot of Jackson while writing); Ernst Junger’s On the Marble Cliffs; Franz Kafka; Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands; Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes. Not to say “this is like that,” I only want to give you the general atmosphere of my mind while poring through this short novel:
Dread. Paranoia. Obsessiveness. Absurdity. The weight of history. A communing with nature that is both dark and light.
“I had hoped that here in the country I would experience the turn of the seasons differently, with less apprehension, I might come to see the form and plan of the world. Not to frame it within systems of understanding, of domination, no, I would work to allow the world its right to illegibility, to move in darkness. To take shape in its contact with people but to remain essentially itself. In the country, I would overcome this final difficulty at last, renounce my will to knowledge, give up my attachment to expression, and in this way come to understand the meaning of things.”
I borrowed this from the library and read it in two sittings—I didn’t want to put it down! It’s the first time in a while that I felt so drawn into a story, and I plan to buy a copy and read it again. It’s definitely the kind of book that will bring new interpretations to mind upon subsequent readings.
Even now, as I finish writing this, I am starting to think about the book from a new angle. I’m in a rush now, actually, to step away from this review, and send it out, because I know I’ll start obsessing again, and I’ll want to scrap what I’ve just written and start over. But I think this book deserves many readings and many reflections, so I’ll go ahead and let you have this one anyways.
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You might also like Is Mother Dead or The Furies.
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