Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Just before this one, I read Anne Michael’s Held, and that too is one that raises more questions than it answers. With ‘Held� I couldn’t figure it out, I really couldn’t get a grip on the story and I was left disappointed. But with this novel, by the Scottish-Canadian writer Sarah Bernstein, I did manage to find a key to understanding the text, at least a bit. Of course, that is also because this story is more homogeneous: in contrast to the separate vignettes in ‘Held�, here we follow the adventures of a woman who tells what happens to her when she goes to live with her brother in a northern area. Bernstein clearly uses some of the conventions of the gothic genre: no names of people or places, a fairly remote farm in an area where a different language is spoken, and mysterious phenomena and actions that are at once enchanting and terrifying.

And most of all, there is the first-person narrator, the unnamed young woman. From experience I know that you always have to be careful with a first-person narrator in a novel: they are almost by definition unreliable. And Bernstein does everything she can to emphasize that here too: both the descriptions and the constantly recurring reflections of the young woman regularly contain very disturbing elements. Sometimes this seems to be heading in the direction of an abuse or even an incest story (what is the exact relationship between brother and sister?), then again there are hints towards racism and even antisemitism (are the villagers a sect?). And then we haven't even mentioned the narrator's constant references to her self-imposed 'obedience' program with which she tries to deal with supposed challenges (hence the title), while she herself also performs suspicious actions; absolutely disturbing. But Bernstein keeps it all vague enough so that the tension is not relieved. I only had a little trouble with the ending; that seemed to me a rather cheap measure to put this novel down.

With this book, rightly included in the Booker Shortlist, Sarah Bernstein proves that she has something up her sleeve. I also refer to the passages in which she tries out other stylistic registers: sometimes poetic, sometimes purely enumerative, in short and then again long sentences, even once in slow motion. So, let's say I am curious about her next work! 3.5 stars