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.
