Iam excited to tell Sarah Bernstein about a T-shirt that reads “PLOTLESS FICTION.” It’s from Type Books in Toronto, a merch offshoot of a beloved shelf of the same name in the bookstore. “I want that T-shirt,” she says.
Bernstein is the author of the Booker- and Giller-shortlisted Study for Obedience, where “little actually happens,” according to a positive review in the Guardian. A critic for the Scotsman lauded the prose but admitted to sighing, “Where’s the bloody plot?” But things do happen in Study for Obedience. The book is set in motion when the unnamed narrator moves to an unnamed country: “the country, it transpired, of our family’s ancestors, an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits.” She uproots her life at the behest of a demanding older brother, who had decided early on that “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.” The brother abruptly leaves days after her arrival, and she lives in isolation. She can’t pick up the local language. And despite efforts to join in village life, the townsfolk are terrified of her. They shield their children from her glance and surreptitiously cross themselves in her presence. She is blamed for a potato blight, a local dog’s phantom pregnancy, and an outbreak of bovine madness. The book grapples with many below-the-surface themes: power and gender dynamics, exile, antisemitism, and survival. It’s a slim, atmospheric novel that’s both unnerving and darkly funny.
