Books
Book review: Study for Obedience a thin read that leaves reader out in the cold
modernist and philosophical novel, set in a bleak north European nowhere, offers little reward for the effort of reading it
Elliptical and challenging, Study for Obedience is Sarah Bernstein’s second novel. The Canadian author, who lives in Scotland, was recently named on Granta’s infamous once-in-a-decade best young British novelists list, which I’ve come to view as rather arbitrary and pointless.
At the outset, time, setting and character are unnamed. What we are told is that the narrator is a woman called on to leave the home of her birth and travel to the remote north ...
