Canadian Writers Abroad

Eleanor Proudfoot reviews Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (Knopf Canada/Penguin RandomHouse, 2023)

Reading Study for Obedience (Knopf Canada) made me understand how the label “weird” – while somewhat unimaginative – is not necessarily an insult. This book is weird. It is also pleasantly confusing at times, sometimes scintillating, irksome, and even humorously surreal.

But the overall impression it leaves is just… weirdness. There’s a lot going on for a book that comes in at just under 200 pages. At its surface, this is the narrative of a woman who moves to a foreign northern town (a region that her ancestors migrated from) to live with her brother and tend to his every whim. The villagers superstitiously blame her as unfortunate animal deaths start occurring.

What is the book really about? Hard to say. It’s about what is means to be a stranger, it’s about narrativity, truth, and power. It’s an exploration of Jewish identity. But to claim it is any one of these things feels reductionist.

The narrative voice is eccentric: sometimes she comes across as extremely pragmatic and factual, sometimes she meanders into pseudo-philosophical musings, sometimes revealing these in reference to moments of her past that the reader is not privy to. More than once I tried to follow the almost Proustian sentences, only to feel like the narrative itself was feinting away from me, leaving me lost.

While the reading experience has so much going on, I find myself with so little to say. Motifs of blankness, of vacancy, appear in the landscape that the narrator inhabits. The windows of her brother’s house are described as blank, they “reflect the weather back to itself.” This echoes the narrator’s ability to fill the roles expected of her (another sense in which she is being obedient). By the end of the story one wonders how reliable this narrator is. She portrays herself as weak-willed, and yet, as the story progresses, one realizes that for the narrative itself to exist, she must have gone against what we are led to believe is her nature.

If you enjoy a book that leaves you asking more questions the more you read, this one is for you. I felt frustrated at times: there are interesting references to her past, but none of these end up being explored. If you are looking for any kind of strong characterisation, I wouldn’t say it’s there (other than in the narrative voice itself).

Uncanny moments gave way to a sense of mounting dread, compounded by the realization that I’m dealing with a very unreliable narrator. Nor is it possible for me to parse together what could actually be true. And this, I suppose, is the point.

If you read for plot, maybe give this one a miss, as it might feel like a scavenger hunt with no prize. If, on the other hand, you love literary fiction, this book is its concentrate.

In the end, it seems like the book itself gives you the key to reading it, that perhaps it is a study for our obedience: “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.” Or are these the obfuscations of a narrator with something sinister to hide?

From Montreal, where she studied at Concordia University before attending the University of New Brunswick, Sarah Bernstein now lives in Scotland, where she teaches at the University of Strathclyde. Her first novel, The Coming Bad Days, was published by Daunt Books in 2021, and her prose-poem collection, Now Comes the Lightning, by Pedlar Press in 2015. In 2023, Granta included her in its list of Best of Young British Novelists. Study for Obedience won the 2023 Giller Prize (the award ceremony was interrupted by protesters) and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

• Listen to an excerpt of Study for Obedience at Penguin RandomHouse.
• The Giller Prize announcement.
• Watch the Booker Prize Q&A on YouTube.
• Naomi Guttman’s review of Now Comes the Lightning, by Sarah Bernstein (Pedlar Press, St. John’s NL, 2015).
• Monika Warzecha’s profile review of Sarah Bernstein in The Walrus.