By Medeea Pașca
Medeea Pașca reviews Sarah Bernstein’s The Coming Bad Days (Daunt Books Publishing, 2021)
In fiction, representing the relationship between consciousness and reality is not an easy challenge. In relationship with the world, and inevitably shaped by it, the individual remains a singularity. Yet, at the same time, the subject needs to interact with the surrounding vastness and discern how to carry on, day after day. In her book, The coming of bad days, Sarah Bernstein presents the anxieties of the individual in search of meaning, truth, contentment and liberation through a gracefully crafted feminine perspective. Circumstantial, subjective, overwhelming, the book provides much food for thought and a true opportunity for exploration and relatability.
Published by Daunt Books, The coming of bad days presents poetry, metaphor and fragment not as aesthetic ornaments but as necessary tools for navigating the tribulations of the contemporary individual. The novel explores the theme of identity, the relationship with others, with the world, loneliness, action and choice. It is more an experience than a story, vaguely advancing and vaguely conclusive, softly feminine and intrinsically human.
Sarah Bernstein is a Canadian writer and scholar, currently teaching English and Creative Writing at University of Strathclyde Glasgow. Her focus on literary experimentation, care and the commons is reflected in her prose, prompting the reader to explore their own point of view with regards to such subjects. Her prose is also intrinsically poetic, exhibiting exquisite literary craftsmanship. The coming of bad days was published in 2021, following her debut in 2015 with Now comes the lightning, a collection of prose poems. In 2023 she won the Giller Prize for her second novel, Study of Obedience. Through her work, Bernstein reveals an incredible ability to combine formal precision with philosophical restlessness.
The novel’s unnamed first-person narrator, a young woman, is lecturer in the English and Comparative Literature department in an unnamed town. She leads a solitary life, having just left her partner, “the man with the blue and white collars”. Major and mundane events intertwine, which constitute the foundation for the narrator’s musings. She’s tormented by the lack of coherence displayed by the world around her, but is also passively submissive, preserving herself quietly away from relationships and events. This combination of acute perception and inaction constitute the novel’s central tension.
Although she attempts to pass unnoticed, some notes start appearing at her office door. The first one stated: “Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart.” (6) Later on, friendship develops between her and Clara, the wife of the department chair. This relationship has a particular significance, as it marks the path of her thoughts.As the narrator states:
“In my memory I see Clara ahead of me, looking over her shoulder to offer some brief and penetrating insight as she walks away.” (7)
Clara is mesmerizing, endlessly inspired, an astute critic and daring person, tirelessly writing, thinking and living. She opposes or eludes any rules that constrain her, attempting to be an artisan of freedom, in contrast to the narrator who operates within this system that she finds callous, giving in, powerless, overwhelmed and confined. The bond between Clara and the narrator is marked by ease from the former and cautiousness from the latter. The narrator, shy and quiet, is in awe of Clara, hoping to receive from her answers to her existential questions, but reluctant to ask for clarifications regarding their relationship, although she wants them.The contingent self-sufficiency and consequential loneliness of the narrator’s life could be appeased by Clara’s presence. Still, Clara chooses distance and independence, in an attempt to preserve her freedom and agency.
Through this friendship, the narrator reveals with vulnerability how concerned she is about her own limitations and, ultimately, insignificance. In Clara she identifies the ideal outside observer who could help her apprehend herself, organize herself into coherence. Yet, through this friendship she will conclude once again that the vastness that humans contain will remain unspoken, because mutual understanding is perpetually rendered impossible. The vital thing is not to let anybody get to the bottom of you. Alienation in this book is seen not as an accident, but as a structuring condition of modern life.
“Sometimes we will the darkness into being because the anticipation is a thing much more terrible, and I knew that we both had apprehended even in girlhood the bad days to come.” (9)
In parallel to such introspections, dire events unfold. News circulate about girls being kidnaped or found dead in rivers, about imposed restrictions and curfews, about students’ protests and natural calamities. Much of this violence remains distant, mediated through reports and news, yet its psychological impact is unmistakable. The scaffolding of the world bears the imprint of manhood and is hurtful for humankind and women particularly. Clara comes from a long line of women suicides. The narrator herself has experienced violence, and this awakens in her an anxiety that all women can recognize. The truth is that sometimes we just want the worst to happen, she says, as she keeps wondering what is about to happen. And then it happens, Clara also becomes a victim, the narrator feels she is at fault for this through her anxiety and the cruel world prevails, severing yet another tender thing.
“And I knew too that the avenue that lay behind was also the road ahead, and that it had been laid down long ago, by our very own hands and hands just like them” (13)
Within this quietly burning turmoil, one can catch a glimpse of destiny presented as determinism. As the narrator claims, “we were caught up in the mechanisms of a system in which only certain outcomes were conceivable. I yam what I yam and that’s all.” All of her meditations spark from curiosity, from the need to understand anything that can be understood, since everything seems out of reach for the mind. The narrator doesn’t obtain complete knowledge about herself, but she does understand that she, as all humans, is conditioned by experience – her own and the world’s. She keeps wondering about the past, keeps analyzing it, knowing full well that the future cannot escape it. I find this to fit very well in Robert Sapolsky’s rhetoric, which is becoming ever more present in the current system of thinking. Still, the narrator
“All things now, I thought, seemed to have reached their terminus. In short, I had tried to move forward and yet events intervened. . What was to be done when everything was refused in advance?” (11)
Hopelessness is a constant feeling of the narrator, along with helplessness. Thoughts receive a heavier weight: The Great Barrier Reef has reached a terminal state, she knows she’s not meant to have a family life, she fears her chances at brilliance have come to nothing, this world severs everything tender. She kept pondering, kept investigating, but, as Clara had said, what use has any of this flapping of the wings? The reason behind the narrator’s flapping of wings may very well be her desire for a state of grace, as she elegantly puts it, or, rather the desire to eradicate the sadness I had felt since I was girl but which seemed to me now an extravagance, as she more honestly admits.
The perspective of the book is intrinsically female, and that not only through the narrator’s eyes, but also through her interactions. Out of all the people around her, she only presents the stories of women. Clara is one of the only two characters in the novel who receives a name, the other being Charlotte, a bikini wax technician, slightly older than the narrator and the only sapiential character. We only meet her in the first and last chapters of the novel and only her words of advice, the empirical conclusion of her life, seem to raise no doubt, but rather appease: the best a person can hope for is some time on muted strings, which was to say, a life that reverberated dimly but agreeably. And appease they do. The final paragraphs of the novel are the most poetic and the closest to a conclusion, even though it is improper to call it that. There is solace in a life on one’s own terms and dignity in solitude. We should be intelligible to one another, but we meet as strangers and conceal our vulnerability. There’s only so much one can do and we know many things in advance. A something overtakes the mind. We do not hear it coming. Do we?
Sarah Bernstein’s book, more than anything else, awakens the reader’s wondering. Only questions advance knowledge, but how much can one find out about oneself and about the world? Should these discoveries be passed down? Should anything? As many questions and conundrums resurface throughout the book, we feel with acute accuracy the pulse of the world and understand the need to manage what we cannot escape. The coming of bad days presents the architecture of a human mind, and only contact with the text itself can provide the reader with the real, yet incomplete, closure.
Medeea Pașca is an Assistant Editor for the Democracy and Culture Section. She is a PhD student at the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, where she studies Universal and Comparative Literature. She also has a background in STEM, having graduated Tiberiu Popoviciu Computer Science Highschool. Her primary interests are cultural studies, cultural events and performances and the evolution of educational practices.
