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Fieldwork: A Novel |
Author: Mischa Berlinski
Published: 2007-02-06 |
List price: $24.00
Our price: $16.32
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As of: January 07th, 2009 01:31:39 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski
This novel started out great and really held my interest but then he got way too into the background of the missionaries and it became a snoozer for me. I stuck with it, found myself skimming a bit and then it picked back up and ended great. So the middle part was weak for me but still worth the read. He is a good writer for sure and I would recommend it as long as you don't need to be thrilled beginning to end.
 Balanced, Vivid and Enlightening
This review is for the Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover first edition, 2007, 317 pages. FIELDWORK, a debut novel, does not appear on the USA Today's Top 150 Best-Selling book list. In his "Pop of King" column in The New York Review of Books and Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King lamented that FIELDWORK did not sell well because the publisher used a dull title and drab cover. Indeed, the cover is a yucky out of focus overview of green trees.
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br /In FIELDWORK, the narrator, Mischa Berlinski, is a freelance journalist living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. His friend Josh tells Mischa about Martiya van der Leun, a Dutch American anthropologist, who was in Chiang Mai Central Prison for murder and recently committed suicide with an overdose of opium. Mischa then embarks on a quest, lasting more than a year, to unravel the life story of Martiya.
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br /The novel tracks the story of three generations of Protestant missionaries dedicated to converting the Dyalo, a fictional tribe in Burma, Southern China and Northern Thailand. Martiya studied the Dyalo for over ten years, and lived in a Dyalo village near the Burmese border. The novel gives a fascinating and balanced account of the opposing worldviews of the missionary intent on enlightening a people with the Word and the anthropologist determined to understand them as they are.
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br /In the author's endnote, Berlinski tells the novel began as a non-fictional account of the conversion of the Lisu people of Northern Thailand to Christianity. He lived in Thailand, and his descriptions of that country are vivid. FIELDWORK is well researched and beautifully written.
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 A Great Escape
Henry Miller said that a good book is only important to you if you read it at the right time in your life (which is why no one, in the history of ever, has actually liked reading Edmund Spencer's Fairie Queene). I suppose that a cold, grey February in middle Tennessee was a good time and place for me to read Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski. Sitting here between jobs shivering in the night it didn't take much reaching for me to read Berlinski's descriptions of the lush greenness of Thailand and transport myself back to Singapore and Hong Kong where I used to enjoy the thick, hot, humid air and wonderful differentness of exotic cultures. God, I only wish I had gone to Thailand. So that is part of why I really enjoyed Fieldwork.
br /The other reason is that it is just a wonderful story. Fieldwork is the story of a promising student anthropologist, Martiya ven der Leun, who goes to live among the Dyalo, a little studied hill tribe in the mountains of northern Thailand. A large extended family of American missionaries is also there, doing the Lord's work, converting the Dyalo tribe to Christianity, a mission which family patriarch Raymond Walker had started sixty years before. The novel begins with Martiya in a Thai prison for the murder of David Walker, the charismatic heir apparent to the Walker missionary dynasty. And you'll like David, trust me. You will.
br /The story is a told through the information Mishca Berlinski (okay, I do wish the author hadn't used his own name for his lead character) unearths while tracking down and interviewing anyone who knows anything about Martiya, David Walker, and the murder that took place around 1991. Berlinski does some freelance work for a couple of English language publications and thinks he can sell the story.
br /In Fieldwork Berlinski does an outstanding job revealing metaphysical ideas and insight into the scientific method of field anthropology while framing such potential drudgery in a well paced, page-turning narrative. At no point does he come off as disparaging to any of the conflicting philosophies that comprise the book. Missionary, anthropologist, and tribal animist all get a fair shake and all get a couple of humorous jabs thrown their way.
br /Reading Berlinski is like going on a trip, both spiritual and physical. It is great escape literature that will stay with you long after you've turned the last page. God what a cliché line I just used. But this is a remarkable novel.
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Fieldwork - An Anthropological Memoir
This tale started so quietly, but Mischa Berlinski's meticulous research and intricately woven stories within stories; produced an impressive cast of characters --- and spirits that made this novel a compelling read. Berlinski's "fieldwork" is fictional and yet is so believable. At the heart of all this, is the struggle of an indigeneous tribe in the hinterlands of Thailand; to keep its way of life --- and their unlikely champion to preserve this way of life.
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Anthropological and mission work among a hill tribe in Thailand
The American journalist Mischa Berlinski is the narrator in this novel, so at times one feels it might be an autobiography, especially as in an autobiography you might find the rambling structure you find in this book; and a number of footnotes contribute to that impression. But in a note at the end the author tells us that `none of this stuff happened to anyone'.
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br /The thread that holds the book together is the fictional Berlinski's obsessive attempt to unravel the mystery of Martiya van der Leun, an American-educated anthropologist whom he had heard about but never met, who had been working with the animist Dyalo hill tribe in Northern Thailand, had been in prison for murder and had apparently committed suicide there.
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br /(If you google Dyalo, the references are all to this novel. Its name is invented, but the author's note suggests that the inspiration for it might be a tribe called the Lisu. The other neighbouring tribes mentioned in the book all really exist.)
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br /The fictional Berlinski goes to meet as many people as possible who knew Martiya; and he then gives you such long and detailed histories of their lives that we quite forget about Martiya: at one stage there is no mention of her for some ninety pages.
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br /The person she was accused of having murdered was one David Walker. We learn more and more about Martiya's life - and very interesting it is - without getting any clues, until very near the end, to the mystery of why she killed David. In fact the first meeting between Martiya and David comes just seventeen pages before the conclusion of the book.
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br /David belonged to an extended American family, several of whom were or had been Christian missionaries. Mischa seeks them out, and we get the life story of David's missionary parents, whom Mischa meets, and of his missionary grandparents. Though one wonders why were are told all this (only one incident in the parents' life, briefly alluded to, will have a bearing on Martiya's story), it is still very well and atmospherically done. The author Belinski writes very well, brings people very much to life and gets the reader interested in them. These missionaries may be a little odd in their total faith, their belief in evil spirits, their prayerfulness and their expectation of an imminent Rapture; but, unlike those in, say, Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, they are presented affectionately and without mockery or condescension.
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br /Author Belinski, we are told, has worked as a journalist in Thailand, so he is clearly knowledgeable about that country and beautifully evokes its sights and its atmosphere. Though he curiously spells the author of the Golden Bough as Frazier, he is also knowledgeable about anthropology, its theory as studied in academic institutions and its often far from glamorous field work practice - but every now and again an anthropologist goes `native'. One wonders, of course, whether he has invented the dyal, the rice planting rites of the Dyalo people; perhaps he has based them imaginatively on the customs of some other tribes described by Sir James Frazer: at any rate he has made them sound very convincing. They play a crucial role in the story, but, characteristically, we learn about them only on page 237, three-quarters of the way through.
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br /Despite its structural oddities, this is a book full of life. I have enjoyed it very much and was fully involved with it.
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