Study For Obedience – Sarah Bernstein

READ FOR BOOKERTHON

A woman moves to the countryside to become a housekeeper for her brother, whose wife has recently left him. Soon after her arrival, several unexplainable events occur and she feels the community’s suspicion towards her growing.

● Well, regardless of whether it wins the Booker or not I am giving my own award to this book for “Most Likely to Induce Nightmares”. The deep sense of unease I felt while reading Study For Obedience has yet to completely leave me and it’s been a good few weeks now since I finished it. It was sometimes just one small moment that would have the nails-down-a-blackboard effect, but there were so many of them in this book. So many! Sarah Bernstein has done a phenomenal job and I would not be surprised if she takes out the win. – Suzy

In the mornings of those first few weeks at my brother’s house, I cherised the silence. I stood at my bedroom window and watched the greens emerge, the trees, the mountains. How to describe how I felt then, pacing the floorboards in my bare feet, unable to tear my eyes away from the world outside, unable to leave the porch, and finding it impossible to stay still.

● Beneath the surface of Study For Obedience is a seductive tale with uncomfortable undertones of a woman meandering around her brother’s property and community, always there, always opinionated and guiding events and never properly engaging with anyone. She is unreliable and as such there is an interestingly paced reveal of key information throughout. I felt like I was always grimacing expectantly as I turned the pages, wondering what was coming next.

However, these undertones were smothered by the surface which is painfully verbose. Clearly language is a theme of the book but even still, this wordiness – whether intended to be the author’s or the narrator’s – was too much for me, dragging out events unnecessarily and providing a stilted reading experience. For example: ‘In short, the state of extreme precarity to which I had been accustomed up until this point, the state of permanent although latent terror that had characterised my existence until then, had prevented me from believing my current situation was anything other than provisional, and as my desire increased to stay in place forever, to remain at the mercy of the weather on the edge of the forest, so did my conviction that something, yes, something would intervene, something terrible would happen.’

Or, to summarise: ‘I thought something terrible would happen.’

This book could have been exceptional if the author didn’t try so hard to be linguistically clever. – Rachel

Published 2023
Knopf Canada
208 pages