- This novel was shortlisted for this year's Booker, and was predicted to win by a number of critics.
- It didn't win but it certainly deserved its place on the shortlist. It's absolutely brilliant. (Paul Lynch's Prophet Song actually won).
- Early in the novel our unnamed narrator lands at an airport in an unnamed country, walks towards the automatic exit doors, but 'the sensors did not at first register my movement, however exaggerated, so I had to wait until another recently deplaned passenger passed though the doors...' This says everything about the novel's essential meaning. She is a young woman (negative number one) and, as is slowly and subtly revealed, Jewish (negative number two).
-She goes to her older brother’s mansion in the north of this unnamed country to be his 'retainer' (really a domestic slave). There's a ‘surface placidity...a kind of idiot impenetrability’ to him. He’s a very successful businessman, recently divorced, insufferable and self-entitled, and politically on the right. She's not bothered. She loves him, as she does all her siblings.
- Previously she had been a journalist and an audio typist for a legal firm. She doesn't speak the language of this 'northern country' and the inhabitants of the town she now lives in don't speak English (or don't bother too).
- The fact that the country is not named is frustrating at first. But as the novel progresses that lack of specificity amplifies the universality of the treatment she receives - the abject prejudice.
- Interestingly, and because of the antisemitism she experienced at school, she doesn't like identifying as Jewish. She ‘gave the impression of being clean and without history, like gentiles, like people unstained by ancestral shame...I steadfastly refused to say the bracha over our classroom Sabbath ceremonies’.
- Bernstein broadens her focus to the subtle savagery of majorities in regard to minorities, whether Jews, Indigenous, or ‘foreigners’. They’re forced to shrink and hide. She depicts victimhood so well. In the local cafe for example the racist vibe is ugly.
- Strange things happen in the town to various animals, all pretty normal, but the residents feel her presence among them is the cause.
- Bernstein provides an interesting twist at the end which is very satisfying and apt. There is no horror or victory or evil but there is peace. 'I know they will not come because they do not need too'.
- I read this novel twice, luxuriating in the delicious prose and subtlety. It's so good.
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