Disobedience by Naomi Alderman

I’ve been waiting to read this book for a very long time. Pretty much ever since I saw the movie adaption. I’ve also read Alderman’s latest (at the time of this review’s publication) novel, Power, and enjoyed it very much and am excited to see how Prime adapts it.
Anyway, our library system has just now gotten a digital copy of disobedience, so yey, I set off to read it immediately. And what a mixed bag of impressions…
I shall attempt to sort through them now here.
First off, beginning at the end, I didn’t like the ending of the movie and was hoping the book had a different one. It did…and I didn’t like that one either.
But hey, you know how they say write what you know? Well, Alderman raised into the exact same Orthodoxy in the same neighborhood as the book is set in, really used all she knew of her religion and surroundings in her debut.
And because she is genuinely gifted writer, she makes that world come alive: every texture, every flavor, every claustrophobic mindset and attitude.
It stands to mention that at the time of writing the novel, Alderman was a practicing Jew who has since left the religion or (in her own words) “wrote herself out of it. But she wrote the novel still in her faith, albeit likely questioning, and it shows.
This is no Women Talking, this is a very favorable representation of an extremely oppressive (particularly to women) way of life. The kind that had driven one of the novel’s protagonists, Ronit all the way across the ocean, and left the other, Esti, all but crushed.
Now Ronit return to bury her father, The Rabbi, stirs up all sorts of dormant emotions and sets tremors through the entire suffocatingly tight community.
It shakes it up just enough for something approaching a change but one so minute and insignificant, it barely counts.
Oddly enough, it is neither Ronit nor Esti that seems to be the rmotional backbone of this story, but Dovid, Ronit’s cousin and Esti’s spouse and the Rabbi’s proposed successor. This is likely due to the fact that neither Esti nor Ronit are all that likeable or engaging.
That’s probably the main difference from the movie.
Aside from the fact that the movie cast was much, much older than the book’s. Aside from the fact that the movie was much more romantic than the book. Aside from that WTF-kind-of-message-is-that ending of the book. Wherein in the movie it was just vague and underwhelming.
And then, there’s the fact that each chapter of the book begins with a sermon on Jewish religion, which is enlightening but very…um…preachy.
Yes, it’s important because it helps you understand the characters, their actions, their world. But it’s a lot. And it’s presented in a way that seems to approve and support the very restrictions and attitudes that make the lives of the characters so terrible. So, you know…it’s complicated. And nowhere near critical. In a way, the readers are left to draw their own conclusions. Apparently, the author did too.
Still though, the writing and immersive depictions go, this is first rate dramatic literature. Recommended.