Bernstein, Sarah. Study for Obedience. Knopf Canada, Toronto, 2023. F;10/23.

This story is another one of the 2023 Booker short-list group. The author is Jewish, originally a Canadian from Montréal now living and teaching in Scotland. The story, which – let’s not pretend otherwise – is difficult is about the protagonist’s internal struggles. It jumps back and forth in my understanding from a profound abnormal-psychology self-exploration by the narrator to a treatise on anti-Semitism, to a rambling statement of a variety of internal experiences. Ms. Bernstein can write, and that helps her draw from her protagonist a fair bit of credibility.  It captured my interest – when I wasn’t quietly cursing its apparent incoherence and could-be-intentionally difficult sentence structure – because the protagonist’s conflict at times (because of the author’s art and if we take a leap of faith) seemed potentially universal.

Oh dear. Nameless narrator apparently older middle-aged Jewish youngest of a large family arrives at a nameless “northern country” from which her family had been historically exiled, to care for her brother. His marriage has broken up and although he is a successful businessman and lives in a large house up the hill outside the local village, he needs care. Our narrator tells us she is well accustomed to looking after and obeying not only family members, but just about everybody she has encountered in her life so far. Early on we seem to be warned that her obedience may not add up in a conventional way:

I was the youngest child, the youngest of many – more than I care to remember – whom I tended from my earliest infancy, before, indeed, I had the power of speech myself and although my motor skills were by then scarcely developed, these, my many siblings, were put in my charge. I attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience.

Youngest tending to older siblings’ every desire? From infancy? Where are the parents? We are being invited to understand there’s something a bit strange about this servitude…

Wealthy older brother goes away for months and while alone in the house narrator is, or imagines she is, treated as a pariah by local townspeople. Plus multiple dreadful things (apparently out of the ordinary) are happening to local animals: ewe trapped in a fence with dead half-delivered lamb’s eyes pecked out, lovely cows with sweet feminine names all going berserk and having to be euthanized, nice woman presenting her dog as impregnated by the brother’s (castrated) male, virus eradicating chickens, et cetera. Plus narrator with ambiguous motivation late at night puts reed dolls she has made on various people’s porches and places of business. At this point it felt like that 1990 film The Blair Witch Project where supernatural spooky stuff is taken seriously.

Big brother returns but then in spite of the kindest possible treatment by his sister develops a mysterious illness and looks moribund. Townspeople are seen to be burying the reed dolls, and then our narrator attends a strange church service with herself as the main object.

As I read this plot summary the whole thing sounds laughable.  But wait: it’s all delivered in the most serious, obviously educated, and frankly intriguing literary language (and the Booker jury took it seriously). Okay I’m wondering: is this eccentric Jewish lady persecuted in this country which could be Germany (but the setting is modern with reference to texting, internet, etc.)? Is it a modern Franz Kafka knockoff nightmare? Is our narrator just an atypical schizophrenic? Or what else? I wasn’t sure.

Narrator’s dark and bizarre self-culpatory thoughts are mixed in with less personal, beautiful but still sinister reflections some of which I found emotionally impressive. At least they argued against any straightforward schizophrenia interpretation:

… the solstice had come and gone and the summer days were beginning to take on a different texture, things drying up and diminishing, and one felt it, one felt it just as the dogs felt it, the sadness of the passing days, the melancholy of autumn approaching, it was only the strangeness peculiar to the time of year, the disruption, the death one felt in the air and in oneself, the swift contraction of the days acting as a reminder of all the things one had overlooked, one had forgotten, and now the time for those things had passed, it was too late, far, far too late.

At times there’s near-normal and even wryly humorous commentary:

… what little I knew of men suggested that they were constitutionally incapable of being alone, terrified of not being admired, and seemed to regard ageing and its effects as a personal failing.

I even sensed in some of the introspective passages reflections verging on personal growth that almost sounded like me trying to get my inner life transparent at least to myself:

If in the preceding weeks I had loved too well my walks among the budding trees of the forest, if I had felt the smallest temptation to withdraw my obedience, I knew that once again I had to gain mastery over myself, over the motions of my spirit, various and vain.

… If something could happen, was indeed ever happening, did it not then follow that nothing, too, could happen? One might, in later years, develop an ability to pull up short, to stop at last and sit down on the path, one had grown weary, one’s feet become sore, the boots worn through…

Maybe in dealing with troubling events involving other people you could just step back and see those events as unimportant, even not having happened. This very troubled lady has ideas about herself that suffer mainly in comparison to or in interaction with other people. Her internal voyage may be some tortured escape from the tyranny of imaginary standards imposed by people who, she may incorrectly fear, seem to know her inner secrets. This (as she says) would necessitate separation of the internal and external world which seems to me fundamental to adulthood, so a normal person can claim a bit of peace and quiet. Maybe she is just growing up?

But elsewhere, the narrator’s self analysis loses its way as far as I can tell:

What was required to make a life was the disclosure of space. In my case, for various reasons, not a carving out, but instead a reorientation of myself: form as a gesture of the will. I would become legible, I would flatten and disperse, inhabit a composite ‘I’, refuse my own plane of perception.

… I don’t quite understand “the disclosure of space”, but get completely lost with “form as a gesture of the will”. What’s that? Okay I might be able to catch a glimpse of something sensible in “refus(ing) my own plane of perception.” But is this the narrator or the author talking? Either way it leaves me behind.

So what’s going on? Jewish Kafka I imagine is considered a dark genius because of his apparently sincere obscuring of plot reality so it seems dreamlike but also something most of us experience, and because his characters’ oppressive self-deprecation feels like creativity’s bewilderment especially after World War I. Ms. Bernstein is at least doing most of that, including maintaining the obscurity, but she wouldn’t just be updating Kafka would she? There has been too much water under the bridge in the last hundred years. Her narrator held my interest partly because I couldn’t figure out what was going on, and seeing glimpses of a kind of serious worried confusion that might represent contemporary inner life for a lot of people these days.

Anyway. There is some captivating writing here and I’m guessing a partly-successful sincere attempt to picture how modern people feel (maybe should feel) in the face of our contemporary world. As I’m sure is often the case I could be missing something profound. But for me it’s heavy going for an obscure and questionable reward except only for the beautifully educated language. Apart from enjoying that I’d want to be transported by literary grace, not having to take myself to task for a lesson I can’t understand and maybe don’t need to be taught.

I think there’s better stuff on the rest of the Booker shortlist.

8.3/9.0.