I think I know why Study for Obedience won the Giller Prize this year. Its writing style is unique, powerful and beguiling. I read it and appreciated its author, Sarah Bernstein’s skill in her distinctive, deliberate and oppressive use of language, but to say I enjoyed it won’t be true.
The narrator is a young woman, who is trained to see the sole purpose of her life as obediently serving her family members. She is summoned to a distant northern country by her older brother to attend to his household affairs after he separates from his wife. She does as she’s told. She takes care of everything, from cooking and cleaning to helping him bathe and dress. She listens to him talk about his problems and obediently follows his orders, which often micromanage her life. “My brother knew how to interpret, to impute, to notate, knew in other words how to wield power.”
When the brother goes away on business, strange things start happening in the village below. Animals die, dogs get pregnant, crops go bad, and the woman senses that the inhabitants of the village hold her responsible for the mishaps.
There are no names in the book. The woman, the brother, people in the village, the village, the language and the country remain nameless. The narrator doesn’t speak the language of her new country, so she can only surmise that the villagers blame/hate her, or the woman with the pregnant dog yelling at her is saying the narrator’s dog is the one that impregnated her dog.
Five to ten line sentences and five to six page paragraphs are common in the book. Most of these are the narrator’s observations and inner thoughts on identity, guilt, abuse and the human condition. They are the expressions of a semi-deranged mind of a woman who for weeks on end doesn’t talk to anyone. On identity she recalls, “Each morning I composed myself, as perhaps others all along the suburban streets composed themselves too, before the bedroom mirror and descended the stairs in the skin of a sister. “
On guilt and the human condition she states, “Every single one of us on this ruined earth exhibited a perfect obedience to our local forces of gravity, daily choosing, the path of least resistance, which while entirely and understandably human was at the same time the most barbaric, the most abominable course of action. So listen. I am not blameless. I played my part.”
There’s no dialogue. The narrator is unreliable, the plot sparse and illogical. The ending is abrupt and inconsistent. But the tone is haunting and the language spellbinding. Bernstein says she writes by sound rather than sense. Her dedication at the beginning of the book reads, “For my pops, Nat Bernstein, who taught me to love the sound of the words.”
Although there are parallels between the content of the book and Milgram’s experiment by the same name, I don’t know if Bernstein intended the reader to look up the connection. In the 1960s Stanley Milgram, an American psychologist did an experiment at Yale University in which he asked the participants to administer electric shocks to people they didn’t know, and gradually increase the strength of the shock. Although the participants felt sad, guilty, agitated or distressed during the experiment, they still continued to yield to the authority and obediently deliver the shocks.
Is the brother in the story a Milgram? “He took me under his wing. I became his pupil … he made me understand the necessity of temperance and silence. I had made an essential error when organizing my consciousness early on in life, my brother explained, and this was by entertaining the idea that it was reasonable for me to form my own judgements about the world, about the people in it. It was not an uncommon error, my brother went on, but it was a conviction particularly unwarranted and also deep-seated in my case. It would not be easy to remedy, no, it would be my life’s work to reorient all my desires in the service of another, that was the most I should expect to achieve.”
Don’t expect to find answers to any of the questions the book raises. It’s a laborious read, with exquisitely manipulative language.
Alternate Perspective 