Sarah Bernstein
Allen & Unwin
Otago Daily Times, November 25th 2023
The nameless narrator of Sarah Bernstein’s slender but weighty novel is a cipher. Raised from infancy to serve her family and ‘encouraged’ by her siblings “to suppress any hint of ambition or self-love as it arose”, her life is contingent on the whims of others, a projection of desire simultaneously needed and reviled. Summoned to her eldest brother’s service after the collapse of his marriage, she finds herself in a cold, remote Northern country from which her Jewish ancestors, “obscure but reviled”, were brutally expurgated.
Regarded with intense suspicion by the local community and estranged by her inability to master the language, she slowly becomes attached to the place and its people, recognising that her brother’s dependence and her social exclusion (“a service undertaken in the interests of community cohesion)” gives her the power to claim her place within it. Glimpses of the narrator’s history are obliquely visible alongside contemporary events: repeated allusions to her family’s need to subdue her “uncommon pride and self-love”, her striving for goodness despite being marked by original sin, of a life of permanent and latent terror.
It is clear why the novel made the shortlist; its clever construction and weighty themes are hard to overlook. At one level, it is the story of an abused woman exacting revenge by refusing to be broken. At another, it is that of the Jewish people, her presence a reminder of the townsfolk’s complicity in her ancestor’s brutal eviction (a subject further complicated by current events). The writing, which skirts the borders of interior monologue, is equally challenging. Discursive, multi-clausal half-page meanderings are punctuated by short, descriptive sentences, creating a musicality that feels almost 19th century in tone. Study for Obedience will infuriate some readers, enrapture others. Where I stand on this continuum, I have yet to decide.
https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/booker-prize-finalists
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