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“I try always to be good.��

A Study for Obedience is the second novel from Sarah Bernstein and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize of 2023. It’s my second Booker 2023 read of the year, though I also read the already awarded International Booker Prize of 2023, Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov. Obedience is a strange, eerie book, featuring a young woman who has traveled to a country to care for her elder brother, who has lost his wife and children.

The woman’s ancestors are from this country, but she can’t speak the language, she just can’t master it, in spite of the fact that she knows many languages. The youngest in her family, she was raised to dutifully serve her elder siblings, and this mode becomes the central force guidingher life. She has worked in a law office (there’s an echo of Bartleby here, but more pointed perhaps as she is woman serving men). Her brother is a very orderly, disciplined, rational male, unemotional, requiring order of his sister (servant). She tries hard to be like him, to honor him, but:

“I had never been able to live in my life.��

When the unnamed) woman arrives in town, things seem to happen that she gets blamed for: A pregnant ewe, caught in the fence; dead piglets; a potato blight; a pregnant dog--an immaculate/demonic origin, as her own dog is neutered?-- and mad cows that need to be slaughtered. The implication is that she is perceived by the town as a witch. And she sees it herself, would willingly confess it could she speak to them, she's so consistently apologetic.

��. . . it seemed that my obedience had taken on a kind of mysterious power.��

And she is strange; she watches the grass grow, she says. She is referred to as a “spectral presence.�� She leaves totems/talismans made of grasses at the doorsteps of townspeople (intended as a gift, a token of friendship?). She says she wants to be like ice. She wonders about the lives of cabbages. She takes a pinch of salt and tosses it over her shoulder, to the horror of others.

And why can’t she learn the language? Is she a madwoman? Autistic? (I wonder about all the undiagnosed neurodiverse people throughout history who might have been seen as mad, possessed, and so on, bullied and tormented for their differences). She’s an outsider, an “incomer�� that will never be accepted, so there’s the allusion to refugee stories, too.

There’s an interesting addendum to this book--references to related books, not actual quotations, most of them feminist, from Virginia Woolf, Penelope Fitzgerald, Susan Sontag, Simone Weil, Lucille Clifton. In a way, these voices populate the story, bolster it, frame it. So it can be viewed as a feminist allegory. She’s passive, obedient, docile, quiet, never evolving out of the servant role her family gave her. She’s alienated, silenced, self-blaming at every turn. Language gets turned on her.

She is “a perfect specimen of bare life.��

I was reminded of the tone of the Vesaas story of two intensely quiet girls, The Ice Palace (where a girl lies face down looking through the ice on a lake, at the trapped nearly frozen life underneath, which this woman also does), The Birds, The Yellow Wallpaper, Handmaid’s Tale.

Maybe her epigraph is a key to it all, from Paula Rego on her own work �� “I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger, I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.��

I need to read this a second time to unearth more of what is going on here, but it is for me a five star book, one of the best of the year, a book many will dislike for its weird detachment and maybe even for its feminist allegorical approach (as in, is the brother ultimately more than The Male?).

Yeah, not many ŷ������ readers seem to like this book, but like the woman herself, it holds a strange, eerie power. Muted, subtle, uncanny, allegorical, language rich, a means for us to reflect on language, silence, men/women. I recommend it, for sure!