Montreal-born, Scottish Highlands-based author Sarah Bernstein writes books that, on paper, seem like quiet, innocuous affairs. Her debut The Coming Bad Days was a peculiar sell even for literary fiction: a novel about contemporary academia that read with the creeping dystopia of a JG Ballard novel and the crisp prose of Rachel Cusk. Her second, Study for Obedience, released this week, bears this same deceptive mutedness: a contained and seemingly aimless testimonial by an unnamed Jewish narrator who returns to the remote northern country of her people to care for her bullish brother, only to encounter overwhelming hostility from the town’s inhabitants.
Yet scratch beneath the surface of Bernstein’s work and something definitively, and horrifyingly, universal emerges. Her books are studies in the mechanisms of exploitation – enacted both within contexts of labour and intimacy – exploring how power can be shifted and appropriated, and how we all become complicit in its exercise. Recently named one of Granta’s best of young British novelists (an honour, bestowed once a decade, that Bernstein ruefully admits to being “very nice, if slightly humiliating for someone with a vexed relationship to being perceived”), Bernstein is fast becoming one of the most singular voices of a generation raised on austerity and precarity.
We met with Sarah Bernstein to talk about Study for Obedience, the politics of confession, and the possibilities of return after exile.
Anahit Behrooz: Study for Obedience reads as an act of female confessional – a form of narrative that bears increasing cultural weight, especially since #MeToo, but that also has its limits. How does your protagonist’s narration navigate this line between empowerment and disempowerment?
Sarah Bernstein: I have always been interested in the injunction, since #MeToo but also before that, that there’s something necessarily liberatory about speaking trauma. When it came to #MeToo, for example, the injunction to speak was so strong, but there was no real sense of what that might mean. I think it’s possible that the injunction to speak is just another way of controlling women and telling them what to do; it’s the idea of confession coming from the Catholic tradition – this way of controlling your internal moral compass.
I was interested in looking at this narrator [who] on the one hand feels compelled to tell her story and seek absolution. But on the other hand, there is something about the nature of her confession that feels coerced. And something directionless too, because who is she confessing to? And why?
AB: This is going to sound so obnoxious, but your reference to the Catholic tradition made me think of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality …
SB: I didn’t want to say it, but yes!
AB: Foucault talks about confession as a transmission of power: you essentially give the church power because you’ve given it knowledge. Did you want to make us complicit as the receptor of this confession?
SB: Yes, complicit is the word. Although the narrator is positioned in some ways as a victim, she also has a great deal of agency: she herself reflects on how she has morally abdicated responsibility for various things. I wanted to invite the reader [to question] the weight of expectations they might put on a narrator. Often readers approach a book, and I’m saying this as somebody who has done this too, with the expectation that the politics of the novel are supposed to align with the narrator. But I wanted to frustrate that a bit: to deny that innocence to the narrator and then also to the reader.
“I’m interested in the persistence of culture in the face of all of this: when it doesn’t have a place anymore but is still alive” – Sarah Bernstein
AB: I want to consider how you explore time in the novel. The very act of confession is about bringing the past up to speed with the present, but the narrative in Study for Obedience is also very bound up by the seasons and an unyielding kind of time, so that linear time is both obeyed and disobeyed.
SB: There’s a negotiation in the book around the fact that the past is not past, that history is always living alongside us. The brother, for instance, is very future-orientated in terms of a tense that he might occupy. He’s oriented towards ‘progress’: all of these masculinist ideas of the forward march of time, and he doesn’t want to acknowledge the ways in which the temporal order is actually not linear. Everything has collapsed into itself: the future is part of the present which is part of the past. And that’s one of the things that the narrator is trying to work through. How to move forward in the world, given the persistence of the past that she feels and that her brother might feel but refuses to acknowledge.
AB: And of course, there is an explicitly Jewish context with which you explore this persistence of the past.
SB: I am very preoccupied with questions of rooting and rootlessness as somebody who is Jewish and whose grandparents came from Eastern Europe, but has no ties to that place. So trying to understand where I come from is complicated. I [wanted to] look at this through the narrator: what is it that you’re looking for when you return to a place of historic violence against your family?
AB: So many narratives around displacement are about the act of being displaced and seeking refuge, rather than this moment of return. Do you think it is possible to return?
SB: It’s a really good question and I don’t know. I think part of this is my real uncertainty about the so-called homeland for Jewish people – I don’t relate to the state of Israel as a homeland at all, because is it not about where your people actually come from, and where they were? There’s a kind of failure there too, because these are places that expelled [your] people. The question of homeland is a really vexed one.
AB: You mentioned Israel and I wonder if what the novel is partly engaging with is this tension between a cultural homeland and the realities of a nation-state. Your narrator is constantly searching for cultural validity, but what she is really encountering are borders, found in the hostility of the townspeople.
SB: Absolutely. It makes me think of the Yiddish language, which was continuously spoken by people whose people come from Central and Eastern Europe – it’s not localised. It’s just a general language, and that language has survived in the absence of a state with borders. The way I understand Jewish culture is largely through Yiddish culture because it’s how I was taught in school: it’s not something that’s bound by the violence of a nation-state, yet has somehow persisted. I don’t understand the insistence on a localised homeland. I understand it in terms of a yearning, but I think that yearning is something that carries the unrooted culture forward in itself.
AB: There is something almost stateless about it: how do you situate yourself in a place you can never go, or that doesn’t even exist?
SB: Definitely. I’m interested in the persistence of culture in the face of all of this: when it doesn’t have a place anymore but is still alive. It’s a relationship to something that is partially imagined – a feeling more than anything else.
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein is published by Granta and is out now.