A review by chrisbiss
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

2.0


Very occasionally I come across a book that I find to be almost completely impenetrable, a book that causes most of my time spent reading it to be time spent scratching my head and wondering what the hell is going on, what meaning am I supposed to be drawing from this, what is this book saying? Study For Obedience is one of those books.

On paper it's simple enough. A nameless woman moves to a remote area of a foreign country to look after her ailing brother. She doesn't - can't - learn the local language, and both she and the locals make no effort to integrate her into society. They seem to believe that she is a witch who is coursing their animals, and they shun her. She withdraws into the family home with her now-mute brother, isolating her even further as the book ends.

My overwhelming feeling as I reached the end of this novel was that I surely must have missed something or not understood something, because that synopsis can't be all there is to it. And yet I think that really is all it is - a simple story made much longer and incomprehensible by rambling, directionless prose as impenetrable as the language the narrator fails to speak. Every sentence seems to take a week to get to where it's going, so that by the time you reach the end you have no idea where it began. Here's one example, chosen by opening the book to a random page and looking for the beginning of a sentence:

I had learned much on the subject of silence, about its uses, from my brother, whose expert modulation of speech and silence, the interval between the two which could not quite be called conversation, which I often thought must be a space of transcendence, of mutual annulment, communicated as much if not more of his mood, of his tastes, of his dissatisfaction, than either of the two polarities.

This is exhausting to read, and this is the whole book. There are brief moments of clarity in which things actually happen - the narrator buys brushes from a shop in which the shopkeeper is lying down on the floor to avoid here; she tries to order coffee and a drink in a cafe and watches as the waiter spills things - but it often descends into philosophical musings that use endless, labyrinthine sentences to say nothing much about anything.

This has been well received by many people, including the Booker committee, and so it's clear that this book is doing something right for a very specific audience. I, unfortunately, am not part of that audience, and I'm just happy that it's short.