This is a gem of a book. I listened to it on audio, narrated by the author.

A young woman (unnamed) leaves home to help her brother who has returned to the village his ancestors fled last century. He’s a successful businessman, but needs the help of his youngest sister as his wife has left him.

The mood in the is haunting, foreboding. There is an ever-present sense of doom. Indeed the book opens with the sentence It was the year sow eradicated her piglets, and I was reminded of the horses eating each other on the eve of Duncan’s murder by Macbeth.

The brother leaves on business and while he is away the woman is other-red, indeed reviled by the villagers.

Strange happenings occur. A dog has a phantom pregnancy, a ewe and her lamb die on a fence. Chickens behave weirdly. Cows die. The locals are eerie, suspicious folk. They are silent in her presence, have thinning hair and eat bacon. They blame her for the strange happenings. She practices her own ancient craft making amulets and deposits them on neighbors’ doors.

Yet she is so fearful and shamed that on entering a hardware store she seeks out the owner so that she will not appear to have a negative motive for entering.

She is an outsider, has no citizenship in this place, and sees her own people as survivors whose only raison d’être is survival. She is shamed by this and talks of young people silencing free speech. Asking is this not the equivalent of book-burning? The Holocaust hovers, ever-present, ghostly, unspoken.

Her whole life has been one of servitude and submission. It’s as if she’s trying to be invisible. She spends much of her time on menial housework duties and making artifacts using crafts of her ancestors who were “put into pits”. She believes herself unworthy, taking her low self-esteem to the level of the absurd.

In the monologue that comprises the book she asks, does a society need a person or object to exclude for the sake of societal cohesion?

Obedience is exquisitely written, a sheer delight. It needs more than one reading. I found myself too often trying to work out the main characters geographic location, instead of just listening to the prose. ( )

Study for Obedience is shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize. It's also a novel full of a weird something-isn't-right foreboding from the very first sentence: It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. What follows is told from one woman's point of view, a woman who comes to this northern land to be a housekeeper for her brother. She doesn't speak the language or understand the culture of this isolated village, she's worked hard to live a life of service, to be humble and unassuming, yet every effort she makes to fit into village life seems to cause the locals to be more wary of her. As the novel progresses, certain comments she makes, corrections or late additions to the record, suggest that she may not be the innocent she represents herself as, that her story of her own past might not be as simple as presented.

Nothing had happened, I told myself, no catastrophe, no untimely encounter. I was fine, I thought, pressing my face into the pillow, I was whole. All might still be well. Perhaps all manner of things might after all be well.

This is a subtle book and one that requires a slower reading. It's beautiful on a sentence level, with long, complex sentences in places that ask to be read carefully. The sense of menace is enhanced by the writing, the purposefully ambiguity as to the setting, and the way the sentences twist back upon themselves. ( )

(55) Really? This is on the list for the Booker Prize? I am not sure why I am surprised as sometimes there is a tremendous pretentious dud that is critically acclaimed. This is less than 200 pages which is probably the only reason I made it through. I am still not sure I figured out what was supposed to be going on. Is this woman a witch? Just misunderstood? Autistic perhaps? Who the hell knows or frankly cares? A woman in current times moves to a rural area in "the North" where her ancestors live to tend to her brother who is newly divorced. While she speaks to shared ancestry between her and the townsfolk and hints at Jewishness - it is never really spelled out. Is she in an ethnic enclave in Germany, Poland? Is she a Brit or an American Jew there? Cryptic; unnecessarily so, in my opinion. No one seems to like her. She seems a bit deranged and a loner and then begins to do weird things. Weaving little talismans and leaving them on doorsteps? "Dry brushing" her brother - WTF? as it is, she seems to wash and dress him. Again mentioned as if it's not unusual... umm, yes, it is. The dog Burt was the only redeeming character.

But for all the weirdness, there is absolutely NO PAY OFF. No unifying allegory or mystery revealed. Or perhaps I am just too obtuse. It really was frankly, awful. The prose was fine - but nothing so spectacular that it made up for elliptical nonsense. Anyway, I found myself reading the same inane lines over and over again. Nope - it still makes no sense. On to the next opaque sentence about nothing. . . Do yourself a favor and skip it. Maybe I'll just wait for the eventual winner and consider reading that. But, if this selection wins the Booker, then I will have to face the fact that I am demented and no longer 'get it.' ( )

First read: Good book but I need to reread it. Well worth the effort. Communication, Language, History, Jewish persecution

Second read: An astounding but challenging read. A carefully sculpted work of the power of the victim. ( )

This book presses upon its reader in many ways.
In its language it often compresses.
In its theme and tenor it oppresses.
Its main character it represses.
Its point and meaning it definitely suppresses.
The overall reading experience depresses.

I think that the measure of a work of fiction is how eagerly you will await the author's next work. Will I await Ms. Bernstein's next foray into fiction with the same fervor as I will Tan Twan Eng and Abraham Verghese? No pressure. No. ( )