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Also Winner of the Scotia Giller Prize 2023 (Canadian prize).
Update! Yes! So happy and surprised that it was just shortlisted to the Booker Pize 2023

Longlisted for the Booker prize 2023

Book 7/13 and the last I plan to read before the shortlist is announced in two days.

'The question of innocence is a complicated one' �� Sarah Bernstein about the novel

Pfff. I am in such a confused state. It is my favourite novel from the ones that I’ve read from the longlist and I have no idea why. How can I share what I loved about Study for Obedience when I do not even know why. It is different from the others, is stands out both in themes and writing. It is a very strange novel, the writing is peculiar, sometimes impenetrable, meditative, meandering, sometimes darkly funny. There’s a lot of metafiction inside, which mostly passed me by. The very low rating probably reflects that and I do not think it is a novel that would appeal to everybody. Nevertheless, I thought it was extraordinary.

I will copy a bit of the synopsis from the Booker website �� A woman moves from the place of her birth to a ‘remote northern country�� to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs: collective bovine hysteria; the death of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy etc, She notices that the community’s suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. She feels their hostility growing. Inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill”��

The story is narrated from the point of view of the woman. From the beginning, she keeps pointing out her obedient character and her lack of own personality and ideas. She was born and raised to serve and she does her best to be the perfect carer also her brother. She bathes him, feeds him, dressed him and even administers homemade health remedies.

“I continued to spend the long years since childhood cultivating solitude, pursuing silence to its ever-receding horizon, a pursuit that demanded a particular quality of attention, a self-forgetfulness on my part that would enable me to bring to bear the most painstaking, the most careful consideration to the other, to treat the other as the worthiest object of contemplation. In this process, I would become reduced, diminished, ultimately I would become clarified, even cease to exist. I would be good. I would be all that had ever been asked of me.��

It soon becomes apparent that her narration cannot be trusted, that maybe she is not that innocent, that maybe she is not as obedient as she want us to believe. The author confessed she was reading a lot of Shirley Jackson at the time she wrote the novel and it does have a similar atmosphere, it could easily be classified as a bit of a folk-horror story.

It also a novel about xenophobia, and how easy we can start blaming or categorize strangers based on external factors or their culture. Yes, it is also a story about Jewish culture and its persecution, even the survivor guilt is mentioned.

Thirdly, it is a novel about language and its absence. Language is mentioned extensively in the novel. She has problems communicating with the locals because she does know the language, her job was to transcribe lawyer speeches, she mentions silence as a way to be obedient. The author pushes the boundaries of language with the narrative voice, it plays with it and the meaning of words.

Finally, it is a novel about the traditional role of women and the dangers of imposing it.

I will end my disorganised exposition with an extract from an interview with the author from the Booker Prize website, which explains better what the author tried to do with the novel:

“I was trying to think through what it might look like if certain (usually feminised) characteristics associated with passivity could take on a kind of power, especially over the people reinforcing those sorts of gendered norms. That idea comes from the painter Paula Rego �� that obedience can, in a sense, also be murderous �� it can be harmful to the person demanding obedience. I was also interested in the question of innocence and the really bizarre expectation that, in order for someone’s suffering to be recognised as legitimate, that person needs also to be innocent �� whatever that means. The novel’s narrator is a character who has been disempowered and badly treated in a variety of ways and who has also abdicated moral responsibility in other areas of her life, so the question of innocence is a complicated one, for her as well as for us. The question of agency is I think also complicated by the narrator’s sense of her own fatedness �� her sense of living in a cycle of history she can’t work her way out of. ��

I received an arc of this book from Netgalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review