If you like the narrative style used by Rachel Cusk in Outline, you will enjoy Study for Obedience. Its author is a Canadian from Montreal, and the novel received the most prestigious literary prize in Canada recently.
In my ongoing journey across Canadian literature, I’d only done strictly realist novels before alighting on Bernstein, and Study for Obedience is my departure from that. It’s a very Jewish novel, but not in a typical humorous and playful way of Philip Roth or Mordecai Richler. Bernstein is Jewish like a primal scream or a ton of bricks falling on your head. This novel gave me the best (and also the only) glimpse into why English -speaking Jews are so massively and aggressively left-wing.
I looked at some reviews of the novel and discovered that most readers chose not to understand it. One review after another says it’s a novel about “xenophobia and exclusion.” I don’t know what else Bernstein could have done to demonstrate that the “xenophobia”* her protagonist experiences is a complete fabrication. For crying out loud, this character tells us that the entire population of the “xenophobic” village dressed in identical white tracksuits and gathered at church to signal their white supremacy to a Jewish woman who suddenly and mysteriously turned brown. Yes, let’s take that in a literal way because churches are filled with racisty white people dressed in white to make sure everybody knows how white they are.
There are two ways of being Jewish in the novel. One is the pragmatic, success-oriented kind that doesn’t want to burn the world down but instead enjoy it. In Study for Obedience, that type of Jewishness is silenced and beaten down by the enraged, resentful kind that wants to remake the world and curse it for resisting.
Unlike Cusk’s Outline, this is not an enjoyable book. It’s short but I read it for two weeks. The subject matter is unpleasant and so is the Jewish narrator, and it’s supposed to be that way. Study for Obedience is a novel about the ugliness born out of an experience of a genocide. And yes, every ethnicity experienced a terrible calamity (or a dozen) at some point in history. But just like not everybody is evolved enough to get beamed into the skies by reading a book, not everybody is at the level where a holocaust will evoke anything beyond bovine resignation.
I don’t know if I can recommend this book. It’s very talented and important but it was very unpleasant to read. It’s like you are suddenly beamed into the sick brain of one of those screeching “activists” at a BLM rally, and all you want to do is get out of there. I could barely read 5-6 pages of the book in a single sitting because it creeped me out to see the world through the eyes of these fanatics. They feel so sorry for themselves, it turns out.
In short, Canadians have a literature and a half. Everything I’ve read so far is very dark. And outstanding in quality.
Is there any French-Canadian literature I should be reading in translation, anybody? It’s the year of Canada in my reading life, and I’m very open.
* It’s actually Jew-hatred but, like back in the USSR, we are now too scandalized by the word “Jew” to utter it.
Clarissa's Blog 
Xtian religious revisionist history compares to tits on a boar hog.
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Bernstein is definitely not a Christian.
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Does not make him assimilated and married to a shiksa.
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“Is there any French-Canadian literature I should be reading in translation, anybody? It’s the year of Canada in my reading life, and I’m very open.”
Everything stops and I must answer you…
Translated, I need to check. What kind of fiction? Long, realist novels? I know you like long novels. Very contemporary? From the canon, and probably translated, you might want to read anything from Marie-Clarie Blais and Anne Hébert. You might also want to read some of Michel Tremblay’s early theatre (The Sister in Laws), and probably a novel like The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant. More recently, I really like Kevin Lambert. He writes literature. His last novel, Que notre joie demeure , is extraordinary. The novel somehow reminds me of Galdós for the non-judgemental treatment of the characters. I checked online and Lambert’s first novels, You Love what you Killed and Querelle of Roberval, have been translated to English. The first I did not read yet. The second I did and I loved it.
Québécois literature is experiencing a kind or revival now, after 40 years of bleh. This comment is of course highly subjective as I am not technically an expert in Québécois literature.
Ol.
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Oh! I’m really really grateful for the recommendations.
It’s getting to the point that the next book might be “Canadian literature for Ukrainians.”
I’ve started Querelle of Roberval.
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I cannot believe you started that book already! Not Galdós here, but Jean Genet. Some say he is woke. I disagree.
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I’m halfway through. Not, it’s not woke. It’s a novel that shows why woke was invented to eviscerate labor, among other things.
A full review is coming but thank you for the recommendation. This is powerful stuff. I wish I could read it in the original because I have a suspicion that the transaction is a bit too literal.
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I agree with you that the novel is a critique of the weakening of the working class through ideological maneuvers. I would add that it is a critique of the working class, incapable of seeing through those maneuvers and creating a sense of community. Lambert is walking on a tightrope throughout that novel and he does it admirably.
Woke has been used to describe the poor guy because he used a “sensitive reader” for his latest book, about a black character, but honestly it is a non-issue.
I cannot judge the translation, but yes, we are talking about working-class Québécois French, from Saguenay at that. I am convinced you could read the original, but it would probably take you more time.
I am so glad you are enjoying the book!
Ol.
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See? That’s the thing. These workers talk like college professors in the translated version. Slang is hard to translate but it’s jarring that characters speak in this very correct, prissy English. I’ve met some working class people in QC, and they didn’t sound like that.
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Oh wow… If I had been the translator, I would have used the midwest working class slang or something like that. I just hope that the translator managed to do something with the intentional spelling mistakes in the original.
Ol.
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“workers talk like college professors in the translated version”
A constant problem in translation which tends to compress the language variety of the original (when language varieties are important) into a bland ‘neutral’ register…..
It’s an even bigger problem with subtitles (which are usually more like translated summaries of what’s been said rather than full translations).
“hope that the translator managed to do something with the intentional spelling mistakes”
If a translator does that they’re liable to be overruled by an editor above them (happened to me recently) or will be criticized for using ‘incorrect’ forms….
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“I wish I could read it in the original”
I thought you could read French, or is it just academic French while literature is another beast?
Or is it psychological flashbacks? or has reactivating Ukrainian burdened your brain so that languages you’re less fluent in suffer?
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I can read French but if it’s actual art it becomes a very long and grueling process.
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