Customer Reviews

Fieldwork: A Novel

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Well-researched and excellently paced novel. I was fascinated by the level of detail and found the non-judgmental tone of the author refreshing. The novel ended up being an anthropological study of 3 separate tribes--the fictional Dyalo (who appear to be based on the Lisu tribe the novelist studied extensively--look on [...]), American Protestant missionaries, and the curious tribe that lives in figurative ivory towers who spend their lives studying other tribes. The author seems to suggest that the universal tragedy that serves as the basis for the murder mystery aspect of the novel is the result not merely a simplistic clash between East and West, but one that can happen to any peoples who do not share the same world view or to anyone in any culture subject to common human emotions.

Terrific read, and highly recommended. I look forward to Mr. Berlinksi's future literary output--maybe something set in Italy, or perhaps involving Haitian voodoo cults?

Ten stars. Best book I have read in ages. The author's prose style is impeccable and transparent, and he tells an interesting story in a manner fair to all the overlapping and colliding worlds he describes (missionaries, anthropologists, hill tribes, Thais, and his own generation's Western wanderers in the East). This is worth a million grad school MFA seminar meanderings. Terrific reading; hope he writes another book soon and many, many more in the future.

I decided to read this book after reading Steven King's review of it in the Entertainment Weekly magazine. I found that the beautiful thing about this book is that everyone who read it has opinion about it. It does not matter if it us the title of the book, the characters in the book, or the attempt to figure out which genre the book can be slated for. It is wonderful that all readers find Mischa Berlinski to be talented and smart young writer with a lot of potential. I have truly enjoyed this book because it speaks on many levels at once: beauty of Asia, complexity of people and cultures they are part of, religious conflict(s), tragedy of human existance no matter how hard we all try to understand it and conform to it in order to fit in the society we are part of. I strongly recommend this book -- it is a wonderful read.

This is not the best book I've ever read (I'd actually give it four and a half stars if that was an option), but I really liked it alot, and for a first novel it's great. It's completely different than anything I've ever read before, and it kept me interested throughout. While the passages about the admittedly "weird" Dyalo are intriguing, I thought the best part was the insite into what causes someone to give up their life to live among strangers for years at a time, all in the name of research. If you're looking for something different and unpredictable, this is highly recommended.

A lot of hard work and research went into this excellent work of historical fiction. It is fiction, as the author reminds us at the end of the book and yet, the characters are so excellently described and brilliant that you could swear that this is a biography. The main character is a dedicated, unselfish, female anthropologist doing work with a tribe of Chinese/Thais in Northern Thailand. We find out early on that she may be involved in a murder and the author painstakingly researches her life and work through interviews with her friends, boyfriends, teachers, the Thai people she is working with and finally, with a family of Christian missionaries who have been involved in missionary work in China since the 30's. The observations about differences in cultures and what it takes for an anthropologist to leave behind pre-conceived notions of God, sprirituality, morality and what makes the world tick, and then enter into a world so different and yet spiritual and religious in its own way, is the real eye opener of the book. The dedicated anthropologists who do this fieldwork have an experience vastly different and scary compared to say a chemist or physicist doing experiments in a lab somewhere here in the US.

We also get a good dose of what the Christian missionaries are trying to do and how their work can sometimes seem somewhat arrogant and un-needed. And yet, to some of the converts, leaving their old belief system and joining a much simpler belief system like "The Good News" of Christianity, can be liberating. But once our main character has virtually become a member of this Thai tribe and falls for one of the male members, she is devastated as some of them convert to Christianity.

The story is very well told and I walked away with a better understanding that this is a huge and complicated world with many interesting belief systems. I think Mischa Berlinski is here to stay. (Mischa, maybe you should come up with a more marketable name.)

Five Stars and, like Stephen King, I highly recommend that you read it.

While Mischa Berlinski's debut novel may not be a heart-pounding, page-turning mystery, he does an excellent job of creating believable, yet captivating characters in a realistic and engaging scenario. The reader can truly feel Martiya's struggles and obsessive curiosity with the Dyalo ways as she transforms from a secular anthropologist grad student to a tribal animist fully adopting the ways of the people she is studying. Although clearly not presenting himself as a Christian, his missionaries are likeable and sincere though fallible people. A typical book in our day would be written from one of these perspectives and disparage the others. Berlinski gives room for the reality of spiritual forces of all types without making a final conclusion in the end.

As a Christian leader I especially appreciated the fresh perspective he brought to investigating missionaries and Christianity from an outsider's perspective. Though a lot of the content would offend some Christian readers, this book challenged me to consider how I interact with those who do not fully embrace the faith.

I was really glad that Stephen King recommended this book, or I most likely never would have discovered it. It is every bit as fascinating as he said it would be. I really felt as I was seeing Thailand through Mischa Berlinski's eyes. That the author is so young surprised me. That is is a story within an anthropological tale, and somewhat autobiographical is intriguing.

This is the best piece of contemporary fiction I have read in quite some time. It is an absolute thrill to discover a smart and complex novel that is also compulsively readable. I'm baffled by the ambivalence of the PW review -- Fieldwork is HIGHLY suspenseful; a complete page-turner (at one point, I was so absorbed that I missed my subway stop and didn't notice for ten minutes). It's easy to see, then, why Stephen King chose it as a discussion point in his (mostly rightful) critique of the painful divide between popular and literary fiction; Fieldwork indeed problematizes these genres by writing a thriller that could also easily be taught in universities (in Anthropology and English courses alike).

Please do yourself a favor and pick up this entertaining read immediately.

"Fieldwork," by Mischa Berlinski, is a fascinating literary hybrid--part mystery novel, part fictionalized memoir, and part well-research (but completely fictionalized) cultural anthropology. The writing is outstanding--easy and unadorned with lyrical touches that appear out of nowhere to delight and beguile. There is also a surprising amount of subtle humor that pops up unexpectedly throughout. The characters are spot-on perfect--so utterly authentic that it's almost impossible to believe the author when he admits in the end notes that: "None of this stuff happened to anyone."

I found this book absorbing, unique, and fascinating in just about every respect. What interested me most, was not the plot so much as it was the chance to immerse myself in a multitude of exotic new worlds--worlds that I would never have experienced on my own. In this book, readers are invited inside many diverse worlds, in particular: the culture of evangelical Christian missionaries working with the hill tribes of Northern Thailand, the culture of worldwide present-day expatriates in Thailand, the culture of 1980s UC Berkeley Graduate School of Anthropology students, the culture of the fictional Thailand hill tribe of the Dyalos, and a number of other minor cultural experiences both historical and contemporary along the way.

For me, the entire reading experience was like one entertaining intellectual armchair adventure ride!

Briefly, the book tells the story of a female UC Berkeley-trained anthropologist, who murdered an evangelical Christian missionary around 1990 in the wilds of Northern Thailand. Before the murder, the anthropologist had been studying and living with a single Dyalo hill tribe for 15 years. The man she murdered spoke Dyalo like a native. He loved the Dyalo as if they were his own family because he was raised alongside them in China near the Thai border. As an infant and small child, his missionary parents raised him in an American-style home built with enormous difficulty in an isolated valley populated primarily by Dyalo tribesmen. The family had to flee to Thailand from their "Eden Valley" home in the 1950s when China expelled all foreigners. The missionary family moved to Northern Thailand. Eventually the anthropologist and the missionary crossed paths, and the murder took place. The anthropologist was tried and convicted for her crime. She served 15 years of a 50-year sentence in a Thai prison before taking her own life. An American expatriate freelance journalist living in present-day Thailand investigates the whole story and relates his findings to us. In a twist that may make some purists cringe, the author names his fictional narrator after himself. Thus, the novel takes on the quality of a memoir, albeit, a totally fictional one.

Obviously, this is a book about clashing cultural values. To the author's great credit, he treats both sides with enormous humanity and understanding.

Little by little over the course of this detailed novel, we learn about the precise circumstances surrounding the murder. In the end, all the physical pieces come together. But knowing the exact circumstances of the murder, however satisfying they are to know, is not what this book is all about. Once readers finishes this book, they will start pondering all the diverse global political, economic, social, psychological, religious, and ecological issues that the work stirs up. Somewhere in the middle of all those issues, each reader will come to terms with the underlying motivations behind the murder. So the plot is just the enticing thread that leads us toward and into a lot of major contemporary social issues.

You have to love reading all three parts of this chimera--the novel, the memoir, and the pseudo-nonfiction cultural anthropology--or this book will fail to please you. At first, it wasn't easy getting used to reading this hybrid. For me, it was a wholly different type of reading experience, and I actually needed to adjust my normal reading pattern in order get into the swing of things, and start enjoying the experience. Perhaps I'm not like other readers, but I tend to read novels, memoirs, and nonfiction works in different ways. I started out reading this book as if it were a novel, and that was wrong for me. I ended up reading this book as if I were reading nonfiction and that seemed to work better. If your reading tastes are broad and happily encompass novels, memoirs, and nonfiction works of cultural anthropology, then you'll probably love this book as much as I did. If you don't enjoy one of those three types of reading, or if you want the book to be only one type and not all three, then you'll probably have difficulty getting into and through this work...or, if you do, you'll probably find significant fault with the work as a whole. My advice: expect a hybrid, read it as a hybrid, and you will probably not be disappointed.

I can easily see why this unique novel caught the attention of nationwide book critics and was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. I will certainly recommend it to many (but not all), of my book-loving friends. I look forward to more books by this talented new author. Personally, I hope he sticks to this unique hybrid format, but if he branches out into new territory next time, I'll happily tag along. He's certainly made it to my "must-read" list.

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.

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.

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.

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.