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	• Fieldwork: A Novel Mischa Berlinski Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent

I read a lot, and I've also done fieldwork myself. The story is interesting and compelling and feels very authentic. I actually read it and loaned it to three friends (and counting), all of whom also enjoyed it. Highly recommend!

Thank you Stephen King!

I first heard of this obscure title while reading Entertainment Weekly. Stephen King had an article referring to the publisher's ability to "kill a book." In hardcover format, King pointed out the terrible title, pointless cover art, and complete lack of critical and publisher support for the book. All of this, and King found the book to be exemplary. 'Nuff said, I thought.

I listened to "Fieldwork" and was absolutely fascinated. Berlinski knows how to weave a story--hiding the reasons Martiya ended up slaying a missionary until the very end. The characters were well developed, and the descriptions of Thailand vivid.

I highly recommend listening to the book. The reader really understood and conveyed the wry, ironic humor as well as the seriousness of Thailand tribal religions.

Excellent book!

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First rate

A deserving prize winner. Given its subject matter -- Christian missionary culture (among other things) -- it ranks right up there with Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. A wonderful, engrossing read.

Wonderful; Please write more!

I bought this novel after reading an online, professional review, and also because I had once done anthro fieldwork myself. A very fortunate whim, as I took it on vacation with me and could NOT get my nose out of it!
What a delight to read intelligent prose, wry and witty insights and what is obviously the distillation of a tremendous amount of research on the part of the author. Sigh. If only all fiction were this well-written....
Berlinski draws the reader further and further into the worlds of his characters, giving us at once a third-party (and remarkably humane) vantage point in the person of his narrator/fictional self, and an intimate look at the universe as seen through the eyes of both a family of missionaries and an anthropologist, all involved with the same group of native people. The reader almost risks becoming as immersed as the missionaries and the anthropologist.
It is the exceptional voice of the narrator that holds the story together for the reader, providing a perch of normalcy and humor to balance perfectly the unusual world-views and almost abnormal lives of his other characters.
I see that others have found the plotting of the novel too slow: I cannot disagree more. The novel moves exactly at the pace of human interactions and conversations, and there is something of a tropical languor that seeps in--anything faster would have felt very out of place.
I SO hope this young man continues to write novels of this caliber.

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Good for first novel

I think my expectations for this book were too high. I'd read many rave reviews here plus the Stephen King piece about the all-around poor handling it received from its publisher. And the book starts out very strong.

However, I agree with those who've called it slow. I think it bogs down in the section about the Walker family. Too much space devoted to what came off to me as generations of caricatures. Berlinski's non-missionary characters are much more well drawn.

I think Berlinski is talented. Also very interesting and imaginative. I look forward to his next book. I hope he gets a better editor.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

When his girlfriend takes a job in Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, planning to enjoy himself and work as little as possible. But one evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story: a charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead--a suicide--in the Thai prison where she was serving a life sentence for murder. Curious at first, Mischa is soon immersed in the details of her story. This brilliant, haunting novel expands into a mystery set among the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life became a battleground for the missionaries and the scientists living among them.

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