Study for Obedience
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Study for Obedience Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Sarah Bernstein (Author, Narrator), Granta Books (Publisher)
3.2 3.2 out of 5 stars 737 ratings
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A powerful, compressed masterwork for fans of Shirley Jackson and Claire-Louise Bennett.

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. The youngest child of many siblings - more than she cares to remember - from earliest childhood she has attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion. The country, it transpires, is the country of their family's ancestors, an obscure though reviled people.

Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; the containment of domestic fowl; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. What is clear is that she is being accused of wrongdoing, but in a language she cannot understand and so cannot address. And however diligently and silently she toils in service of the community, still she feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property...

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  1. Listening Length
    3 hours and 59 minutes
  2. Author
    Sarah Bernstein
  3. Narrator
    Sarah Bernstein
  4. Audible release date
    October 5, 2023
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Granta Books
  7. ASIN
    B0CK2DQDVV
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 3 hours and 59 minutes
Author Sarah Bernstein
Narrator Sarah Bernstein
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date October 05, 2023
Publisher Granta Books
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B0CK2DQDVV
Best Sellers Rank #47,080 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#274 in Psychological Fiction (Audible Books & Originals)
#348 in Small Town & Rural Fiction (Audible Books & Originals)
#1,258 in Small Town & Rural Fiction (Books)

Customer reviews

3.2 out of 5 stars
3.2 out of 5
737 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

C. Perez
3.0 out of 5 stars One giant ball of weirdness
Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2023
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A businessman asked his sister to come to live with him to help him cope after his estrangement from his wife and kids. Soon he is away from business and his sister, who doesn’t speak the local language, stays behind to care for the house. In the adjacent small town, strange phenomena start happening to the animal life, things that haven’t happened in fifty years, if ever, coinciding with the woman’s arrival. At first, she ignores the passive resistance the townsfolk seem to demonstrate towards her, tries to put herself in their shoes, trying appeasement by way of weaving reed offerings and leaving them in their doorstep, but even those actions have unforeseen consequences.

Study for Obedience, which made this year’s Booker long-list, is one giant ball of weirdness. It is set in an ancient house in the countryside, in modern day—very recently, in fact, because there’s high speed internet access and streaming services available—, though there’s an element of timelessness about the story. It is a study on introspection, with easy, matter-of-fact prose, that reads fast despite being somewhat dense, and there’s a sense of foreboding, but… where is it going?

The account is narrated in first person by an unnamed woman (actually, no character is named), possibly in her thirties, Jewish, employed remotely by a legal firm, a reader, possibly American—her brother’s home is abroad in a northern country that is never identified but some clues point out to America being her country of origin, and Canada being the country where the events take place. She speaks three languages fluently (English, German and Italian), but hasn’t mastered the language of the people she is living amongst (I assumed it was French). She has been conditioned from childhood, by her family, to submit —they claimed she was wayward and too rebellious of spirit— and being a perpetual caretaker, role she has relished. She treasures silence and introspection, tries to mold into a lesser version of herself to soothe people’s anxieties—this appears to be effective because strangers usually open up telling her secrets of all sorts; these qualities drive the narrative forward, as we learn, via her inner reflections, how befuddled she is by what is happening around her and by the townsfolk’s attitudes and assumptions.

Ultimately, the narrative is a story about how “otherness” plays and has played a historical role in people’s attitudes towards those they deem unworthy or undesirable, those that do not fit the criteria to be considered “normal”.

Study for Obedience may not be to everyone’s liking, but for those readers who persevere it may prove a different experience than what’s traditionally published out there.
25 people found this helpful
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switterbug/Betsey Van Horn
5.0 out of 5 stars Exile and more
Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2023
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’m Jewish; I’m familiar with direct and indirect indignities foisted on my tribe. The unnamed narrator is a master of obedience, a side effect of her upbringing, perhaps a perverse protection from antisemitism. What she ultimately does with her traumatic childhood and history of sustained victimization by others--and now scapegoated by an entire town, is riveting. At no time did I feel myself wandering away from the story, despite her penchant for Pynchonian dependent clauses (hers are lyrical rather than baroque). The protagonist is too compelling to ignore.

Is it paranoia if everyone hates you? Bernstein uses already cultivated symbols and similes to subversive effect. It's another way of looking at the biggest crimes against Jews and moreover how it looks when the victims traumatize their own children in other ways.

The unnamed narrator, who cannot speak the language of the northern country that formerly persecuted her people, where she went to take care of her brother after he was left by his wife, speaks to us with fierce clarity, beyond the silence imposed by a language barrier. Look under and behind her words for more understanding. “In silence, yes, for words have more than once led us away from the truth.” Her voice captivated me, which never wavers. It just gets stronger over time.

A woman, once a journalist, highly educated but now doing a mundane audio typist job for a firm who is ravaging the planet, comes to stay with her successful, wealthy brother, to take care of him and his enormous house in this rural area. He soon takes off on a business trip, and she is at the mercy of the superstitious townspeople, who blame her for the death of farm animals, a phantom dog pregnancy, and other unfortunate events, usually to do with animals.

Instances that seem generally innocent to her are viewed as provocative by these village-like townsfolk. She is scapegoated, a position she has found herself in before. She has no allies here; her brother is gone, and despite the age of cell phones and social media, he doesn’t seem to communicate with her while gone. When she comes face-to-face with these people, she finds them unreadable, but menacing. Isolation doesn’t protect her; they find a way to debase her without using words. “What was underneath it all, vibrating beneath the faces of the people I saw, something in their expressions?”

What she has gleaned from living here is that these people kept “beliefs one needed to hold about oneself, stories one told oneself in order to live, to go on living with oneself, knowing what one was capable of, knowing the things one had witnessed, the things one had done.” Some things she says obliquely, but for good reason. Even through times she was (seemingly) opaque, more is yet revealed.

While I was reading, I thought of literature that had a similar atmosphere or voice, such as Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck; the movie (original one with Dustin Hoffman) Straw Dogs (not literature but it was literary); and Orwell’s Animal Farm; and Shirley Jackson. Of course, it is none of those, but this epigraph written by painter Paula Rego that Bernstein used sent shivers down my spine:

“I can turn the tables and do what I want, I can make women stronger. I can make them murderous and obedient at the same time.”

I anticipate that every reviewer will mention this, for good reason. It’s not about the narrator’s intentions; however, it does advance the paradox of weaponizing obedience after a lifetime of it. Can one’s lifetime of being a scapegoat be fortified to turn the tables? After all, we are Jews, are we not? Some of us? Just 2% of the world, which is less people than the dogmatist formerly known as Kanye West has followers on Instagram.

This may be my #1 book of the year. It has made the Booker shortlist, and it is deserving. If it hadn’t been nominated (I bought it before the longlist came out), I would have called this a sleeper, a gem of an understated novel of ideas and events. Bernstein’s prose is elegant, beautiful, tragic, sizzling. You can read this short novel over and over again and keep getting more out of it.

Bigotry, obedience, exile, complicity, silence—both enforced and by choice—deviance, and identity are some of the big themes in this book.

“So much was refused in advance. So much transpired on a scale of time and space that was longer than a lifetime, wider than a country, vaster than the story of the exile of a single people. And bigger still.”
22 people found this helpful
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Evelyn Koperwas
4.0 out of 5 stars Holocaust
Reviewed in the United States on February 29, 2024
The writing was intelligent, fluid, and macabre. Am I reading about the obedient Jews who followed passively to their deaths, and any survivors had no rightful place in a town anti-semites, or am I reading too much into so much self denial?
One person found this helpful
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Carol
2.0 out of 5 stars A very strange story
Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2023
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This a very moody story. As I read it, I could imagine this book as a psychological horror movie. With one major problem - the book has no real ending. The story just ends leaving many unanswered questions. Did the townspeople think the narrator was a witch? What was the purpose of the scene in the church? Was she poisoning her brother or was his declining health due natural circumstances? I could go on and on. If you enjoy highly descriptive prose, no dialog, characters with no names and little background stories and pages and pages spent on the tiniest detail you might enjoy this book. All I can say positively is it was mercifully short and I purchased a a great discount.
2 people found this helpful
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D. Schauer
1.0 out of 5 stars Disliked but finished because
Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2023
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I was hoping the one-big-paragraph of a book, would go somewhere. Some plot would emerge. It didn't. I should have stopped and not finished it.
4 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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A_Miller
3.0 out of 5 stars It was actually fine.
Reviewed in Canada on December 27, 2023
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I always buy my wife the Giller Prize winner for Christmas and she always hates it. Would have been 5 stars if he hated it but she didn’t.
So 3 stars because she said it was ok.
Pro: is written very lyrical (sort of).
Con: as others have said, there is no plot.
2 people found this helpful
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thop
3.0 out of 5 stars Beschädigt
Reviewed in Germany on March 23, 2024
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Der Schutzumschlag ist auf der Vorderseite beschädigt. Das Buch selbst in Ordnung.
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thop
3.0 out of 5 stars Beschädigt
Reviewed in Germany on March 23, 2024
Der Schutzumschlag ist auf der Vorderseite beschädigt. Das Buch selbst in Ordnung.
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Darma Elena
3.0 out of 5 stars Difficile dire...
Reviewed in Italy on December 30, 2023
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A me non di madre lingua inglese non piace il
suo stile di scrittura. Ma forse il mio giudizio non vale.
È una storia angosciosa, tristissima.
La protagonista, inafferrabile e incoerente nella descrizione, è irritante, insopportabile. Fa stare male anche fisicamente!
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PIYALI
2.0 out of 5 stars Make of It What You Will
Reviewed in India on November 17, 2023
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So, what was this about? Oh!! I am supposed to tell you that after reading the book. But quite frankly I don't have a clue...it can mean so many things. There is reference to Jewishness & possible undertones of pre-ordained persecution..what else?
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Phil
1.0 out of 5 stars The most boring book our book club has ever read.
Reviewed in France on July 21, 2023
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Out of 35 members only two of us finished it. Only time this has happened in 10 years. It just drones on and on.
One person found this helpful
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