Study for Obedience

If I were an author, this is the book I would write. It is full of complexity, and it will take at least one reread before I'm going to assimilate it in a way that's comfortable. At first, it evoked Milkman for me...the nature of the writing is similar: no people or place names, beautiful and precise but archaic prose, a sense of allegory, and a woman exploited by a man, in this case her brother instead of a terrorist. And the two books are alike in their focus on fear of the other.

But Bernstein's book is very much its own thing. The fears expressed by the unreliable narrator are familiar, and the capture of what goes on in her brain when she is beset with anxieties (which is most of the time) is uncanny. I suspect that most readers will recognize those thoughts that plague us when we're questioning ourselves: "Here I was...nothing any different. The underlying ideology adapting again and again to each liberation as it presented itself. The faces changed, sure they did; but ways of doing just persist, all one's born days."

The main character has moved to an unknown country in the north to be housekeeper for her brother, a successful businessman. She imagines the townspeople are allied against her and believes they blame her for a series of bizarre happenings (dead sheep, dogs' communal howling, mass bovine die off). It is a brilliant portrait of xenophobia, but also of any situation in which we feel like an outsider.

Then there's her enslavement by her brother. She even bathes him. It is the old story of woman's powerlessness in the face of male dominance, and the author explores why it is so hard to shake off inherited burdens, i.e. the hold our histories have over us: "I understood vaguely that I must confine myself to what was possible, but what was to be done when everything was refused in advance? To what extent was I responsible?"

I loved being so close to this narrator's thoughts and what they say about migration, power (especially female power), and the force of history.