Field Study: Stories [Hardcover]

Rachel Seiffert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 20, 2004

From the author of the award-winning The Dark Room, here is a strikingly powerful collection of stories that explores with haunting precision themes of guilt, love, and sacrifice. In a variety of settings–from the Scottish seaside to post—Communist Germany–Rachel Seiffert’s stories map the terrain of human behavior with a nuance and subtlety that are at once dazzling and unsettling. Powerfully evoking our need for connection, Field Study takes us on journeys that demonstrate both the fragility and adaptability of our emotions, and the vast potential for danger and vulnerability created by all types of love.

In “Reach,” “Dog-Leg Lane,” and “Tentsmuir Sands,” Seiffert explores the dynamic between parents and children, the special knowing that children have but don’t always express in ways their parents can understand. In “Francis John Jones, 1924—” she draws a portrait of an old man recounting an experience as a soldier in World War II that saved his life but left him with deep regrets. In “The Late Spring,” a man who has led a solitary life begins to accept what he knows will be his solitary death. And in “Blue,” two teenagers try to come to grips, in conflicting ways, with their first pressing desires for independence. Seiffert isolates and captures not only the underlying and compelling sorrow of love but also the joy and desire for love that keep us alive.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In clear, pared-down prose, Seiffert, author of the critically acclaimed novel The Dark Room, crafts 11 intimate stories echoing with the dissonances of family life and massive historical upheaval. Set mostly in post-Communist Europe, the stories often start with Seiffert's characteristic sentence fragments, reminiscent of stage directions: "Summer and the third day of Martin's field study," begins the title story, in which Martin, a biology student, spitefully withholds information about the pollution levels of a river he's studying from a woman who rejects his advances. Descriptions are similarly telegraphic: in "Reach," a hairdresser mother is startled into fresh awareness of her seven-year-old daughter when the girl is ill, then cuts school ("Just looking at the slope of her daughter's shoulders, the nape of her neck, her sodden hair"). Though her settings are sharply rendered, Seiffert often omits crucial bits of information, turning her stories into puzzles, sad games, as in "The Crossing," in which a mother and children are helped across a river by a man whose accent betrays him as an enemy in an unspecified conflict. In "Second Best," the last, longest and best story of the collection, Seiffert allows herself more specificity in time and place (Poland and Berlin, 1996), as well as a more complete exploration of her characters' thoughts and feelings. Disciplined, spare and unsentimental, these are accomplished, often moving tales.
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From Booklist

Seiffert, a Booker Prize nominee for her debut novel, The Dark Room (2001), offers 10 penetrating stories and a novella, most set in traumatized postwar Europe. The opening story finds a German graduate student testing a polluted Polish river where a woman and her son are swimming, then the two reappear in the concluding novella, Second Best, in which the woman journeys to Germany in search of her husband. An architect mysteriously losing his skills; a mother desperate to lead her children out of harm's way; an old, guilt-ridden soldier telling the story of how he went AWOL as his company was being decimated by land mines; a German father exiled from his son's life because of his role as informant during the war--each is portrayed in Seiffert's powerful yet understated prose. With just a few words, a glance, the touch of a hand, she is able to convey the inner thoughts and hopes of her varied characters, and her tales are all the more poignant for what is left unsaid. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (July 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375422595
• ISBN-13: 978-0375422591
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,840,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark, Brooding Tales, February 12, 2005

By 

Louis N. Gruber "Author of Jay" (Lexington, SC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Field Study: Stories (Hardcover)

A young biologist, running tests for pollution in a border area between two countries, tries to form a relationship with a local woman and her son. A young single mother tries to cope with a difficult, hard-to-reach child. A promising architect has some kind of mental breakdown. A child has some type of mental breakdown, shattering the life of his family. An elderly beekeeper finds himself responsible for a lost child. The young woman from the first story embarks on a hopeless journey in search of the husband who abandoned her. Such are the stories making up this slender volume.

And what happens? Do any of these characters learn from their experiences, turn their situations around, or achieve redemption? Sadly, no. At best, relief, or acceptance.

The stories, most of which take place somewhere in Eastern Europe, after the fall of communism, are uniformly dark and brooding. They are written in a literary style with excruciating description, lots of adjectives. Author Rachel Seiffert is clearly talented, but sometimes her choice of words misses the mark, sometimes in a way that is jarring. She seems to like alliteration, and sometimes gets a bit carried away with it. The stories don't really come to a satisfying ending, they just sort of--end.

Seiffert's characters are intriguing and they do draw the reader in, but, they never seem to grow or learn, they never laugh, and they never triumph. They tend to be kind, good people who want to do the right thing. As a reader I kept hoping for something good to happen to them. If you like this kind of dark, literary fiction, you might like Field Study. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber