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77th out of 435 books
—
271 voters
Fieldwork
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Berlinski's mesmerizing first novel blurs the line between fact and fiction. A young American couple living the expatriate life in Thailand, Mischa and Rachel struggle to keep one step ahead of insolvency. Rachel works as a first-grade teacher; Mischa is a freelance journalist. When they meet up with a bibulous fellow expat who...more
Berlinski's mesmerizing first novel blurs the line between fact and fiction. A young American couple living the expatriate life in Thailand, Mischa and Rachel struggle to keep one step ahead of insolvency. Rachel works as a first-grade teacher; Mischa is a freelance journalist. When they meet up with a bibulous fellow expat who...more
Hardcover, 320 pages
Published
February 6th 2007
by Farrar Straus Giroux
(first published 2007)
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This was a strange, but intriguing work. The mystery and culture were both elegant and engaging, the characters well drawn and real. However, the author was self indulgent in several ways: most obviously by casting himself as the narrator and most notably by suddenly steering away from the main story to delve into a too-detailed family history that seems like it could have been its own novel--and not one I would have read. In the end, the author reveals that he is himself an anthropologist and t...more
Stephen King recommended book. He says: "This is a great story. It has an exotic locale, mystery, and a narrative voice full of humor and sadness. Reading Fieldwork is like discovering an unpublished Robertson Davies novel; as with Davies, you can't stop reading until midnight (good), and you don't hate yourself in the morning (better). It's a Russian doll of a read, filled with stories within stories. The first belongs to the book's narrator, also called Mischa Berlinski. The fictional Berlinsk...more
This was given to me as an audio download gift from my stepdaughter, an anthropologist. We both listened at the same time. She didn't like it (thought it was too superficial a depiction of the field of anthropology and the reader got on her nerves); but I loved it.
This story had me in its grip on so many levels. First, it is a murder mystery (which I love) and I found it set up and then unraveled in a very interesting way. The reader, through the protaganist, becomes the anthropologist as you pi...more
This story had me in its grip on so many levels. First, it is a murder mystery (which I love) and I found it set up and then unraveled in a very interesting way. The reader, through the protaganist, becomes the anthropologist as you pi...more
This novel (whose existence I learned of through Rodney's Goodreads, if I'm remembering right) was such a delight. With its thoroughness (e.g., some would say it spends too long on the various generations of the missionary family) it is a bit reminiscent of an anthropological study--appropriate to the story of a mysterious anthropologist-turned-murderer. But it's bursting with wonderful subplots & sensory details & really captures the strangeness of expatriate white Westerners' lives &...more
i picked fieldwork by mischa berlinski on the recommendation of my local independent bookseller. (since that’s how i found the history of love, it didn’t even occur to me that i wouldn’t utterly fall for this book too.)
it’s an interesting premise: mischa berlinski (and we could spend the rest of the afternoon discussing the implications of a novelist naming his fictional protagonist after himself), while in thailand with his girlfriend, stumbles on this improbable murder story. an anthropologis...more
it’s an interesting premise: mischa berlinski (and we could spend the rest of the afternoon discussing the implications of a novelist naming his fictional protagonist after himself), while in thailand with his girlfriend, stumbles on this improbable murder story. an anthropologis...more
Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski is a well-crafted, absorbing novel that fuses travel, anthropology and mystery. In many respects it feels a bit like a Paul Theroux travelogue, albeit Berlinski is far kinder to most of his subjects. And while this is a work of fiction, the main character certainly bears a strong resemblance to the author in more than just name.
How do I know this? I worked with Mischa briefly in 2001. Though our ‘relationship’ can be, at best, characterized as a casual acquaintance,...more
How do I know this? I worked with Mischa briefly in 2001. Though our ‘relationship’ can be, at best, characterized as a casual acquaintance,...more
Jan 26, 2008
Doug Bradshaw
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Anyone who likes historical novels
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...more
I liked this book a lot, but it unravels too quickly at the end. I don't find Martiya's final undoing to be very convincing, nor inevitable. A tragic sense of doom should be hanging over her a lot more heavily than it does. Maybe the distance I'm feeling from the plot is due to Mischa Berlinksi's writing style -- he is very fast-moving and detached, like he's afraid to lose the reader's interest. This doesn't leave a lot of time for feeling characters' pain. (Also hard to feel the pain of a char...more
In a way, this was high-grade guilty reading: travelogue and murder-mystery. The book dragged a bit in the middle and could have benefited from less time drawing out the native encounters of a graduate student and more time teasing out the conclusion. I was disappointed by characters who were all but forgotten in the end, but I think that would have mattered less if the book had maintained a faster clip.
The book was incredibly cinematic, but the payoff in the end was not what it could have been...more
The book was incredibly cinematic, but the payoff in the end was not what it could have been...more
I honestly don't know how to rate this book. On the sentence level, it's no great shakes, but wow, is it a good story. As an anthropologist, I can't help but enjoy the fictive ethnographic detail, the references to famous and infamous "forefathers" (Malinowski, Pritchard, etc.), to the long, drawn-out saga of fieldwork, with its dislocations and its epiphanies. There's a fascinating way in which the obsessive Curiosity of the anthropologist gets mirrored in the obsessive search for answers by ou...more
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Mar 19, 2008
Jill
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
those crazy folk who enjoy religion and mystery (no--it's NOT "The Da Vinci Code!!")
Recommended to Jill by:
Stephen King & his article "How to Kill a Book" in EW
In order to enjoy "Fieldwork," you must have an interest in world religions and spirituality. A good deal of the book observes the Dialo tribal rituals in Thailand.
I found the book to be interesting, rye and fast-paced. The only part I thought slowed down the book was the background of the Walkers--the missionary family whom Martiya visited and ultimately murdered youngest son David.
My suggestion is to listen to the book. I don't know that I would have caught the wit of the author through readin...more
I found the book to be interesting, rye and fast-paced. The only part I thought slowed down the book was the background of the Walkers--the missionary family whom Martiya visited and ultimately murdered youngest son David.
My suggestion is to listen to the book. I don't know that I would have caught the wit of the author through readin...more
1 like · like · see review
Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski. B-plus. Narrated by William Dufris, produced by Tantor Audio, and downloaded from audible.com.
When his girlfriend takes a job as a schoolteacher in northern Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, working as little as possible for one
of Thailand's English-language newspapers. One evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story. A charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van
der Leun, is being imprisoned in a Thai prison where she was serving a 5...more
When his girlfriend takes a job as a schoolteacher in northern Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, working as little as possible for one
of Thailand's English-language newspapers. One evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story. A charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van
der Leun, is being imprisoned in a Thai prison where she was serving a 5...more
Mischa Berlinski’s novel “Fieldwork,” which was a runner up for the National Book Award in 2007, is a remarkable novel about the overlapping and colliding lives of two American idealists in the remote Hill Tribe region of northern Thailand. It is also a novel that any former volunteer who had the opportunity (or misfortune) to live and work in a remote isolated area of the developing world will enjoy reading.
The story is narrated by a young journalist who hears about the intriguing tale of the...more
The story is narrated by a young journalist who hears about the intriguing tale of the...more
At first, this book seemed extremely promising. Berlinski clearly has done his time in Thailand and knows how to describe the experiences of a foreigner there. Plus, the story began with an interesting mystery: A woman has done time in Thai prison for killing a well-liked local missionary, but why? Unfortunately, by the time I got to the end of this book, I didn't particularly care anymore and found the explanation to be pretty anticlimactic. Berlinski has made a platform for his story by creati...more
Sep 19, 2012
Bill
added it
This came up for a book club I'm in, which of course means two things:
1- I probably wouldn't have chosen to read it on my own (that's why you join a book club, after all)
2- Rather than assuming my usual leisurely pace, I read it in three days.
Before I start, let me say that there seems to be a bunch of literature that seems overly burdened with facts and research. These books never seem to be captivated by flights of imagination; they are constrained by the need to expose and relay weirdly integ...more
1- I probably wouldn't have chosen to read it on my own (that's why you join a book club, after all)
2- Rather than assuming my usual leisurely pace, I read it in three days.
Before I start, let me say that there seems to be a bunch of literature that seems overly burdened with facts and research. These books never seem to be captivated by flights of imagination; they are constrained by the need to expose and relay weirdly integ...more
The very readable and fascinating frame narrative of “Fieldwork” by Mischa Berlinski takes us to the hill country of Thailand, where ethnographer Martiya van der Piel has murdered a young missionary, David Walker. His family had been bringing Christianity to the area for four generations, and his death sent a shock wave through the area. The narrator is a sometime journalist named Mischa Berlinski (yes, same name as the author, although the story is entirely fictional) who accompanies his girlfr...more
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 Dy...more
The novel tracks the story of three generations of Protestant missionaries dedicated to converting the Dy...more
I first read about this book in Stephen King's EW column where he praised it highly. I ordered the hardcover at once, and then found it curiously difficult to get into - it lay on my shelf for almost a year. I finally picked it up a couple of weeks ago and began reading it and enjoying it, at first. The pleasure soon evaporated as the book turned into yet another backpacker novel - and I don't mean that in a good way. It reads like a too-rich too-spoiled NY WASP kid travelled to the Far East, di...more
This is a truly serendipitous find. I would not normally pick up a book with such an “eloquent” title and not think it was not a book on boring anthropological investigations. That said, one of the best things about writing a book review for the whole world (or in my case with the world being an oyster and all that there are probably about 2 people likely to read this) to see is to showcase one’s spectacular ignorance. This book is a gem of a find and were it not for a thoughtful birthday gift t...more
Feb 27, 2011
switterbug (Betsey)
added it
I appreciated and enjoyed Berlinski's novel that infuses scholarly information on anthropology with a suspense story set in rural Thailand. It is written in a memoir form (although it is fiction). I did wonder why he used his real name rather than changing it. This distracted me at times--it made it difficult for me to separate the author from the narrator, which is important in any book that is not a memoir or autobiography. I do think it would have been helpful if he had changed his name. I th...more
Fieldwork is the story of a journalist who becomes obsessed with the story of an anthropologist. Both the journalist (who inexplicably has been given the same name as the book's author, Mischa Berlinski) and the anthropologist (Martiya van der Leun) are Americans who have ended up living in Thailand. Martiya went there to do fieldwork as part of her doctoral studies; Mischa went because his girlfriend signed up to teach English there for a year. Early on, we learn that Martiya killed a missionar...more
As an anthropologist this book attracted my attention alsready by its title. The synopsis gave me all reason to start reading. I could relate immediately to the story: an anthropologist incriminated to be a murderer of a missionary.
Berlinski embeds this story in his (?) personal account of living in Thailand. That adds a nice perspective to the story, as it shows life in a foreign country apart from the challenge of doing fieldwork.
Also, the author gives thorough descriptions of every involved...more
Berlinski embeds this story in his (?) personal account of living in Thailand. That adds a nice perspective to the story, as it shows life in a foreign country apart from the challenge of doing fieldwork.
Also, the author gives thorough descriptions of every involved...more
This book started out with a lot of promise. An American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, living in a remote Thai village, is tried for murder of a young Christian missionary. The narrator of this story, Mischa Berlinski (who names their main characters after themselves?), is an American ex-pat living in Thailand as a freelance writer. When he hears about Martiya's story, she has been in prison for several years and has recently committed suicide. Armed with some notes from her journal, Mis...more
Nov 08, 2010
Sandra Grauschopf
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
read-in-2010
Fieldwork starts with a compelling mystery. An American expatriate journalist in Thailand is approached by a friend who tells him a story about another expat who, seemingly without motive, shot and killed a much-beloved young missionary.
The main character, named Mischa (like the author) starts investigating, and soon becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about what happened.
The story is about what happens to expatriates who struggle to understand the foreign cultures around them, told fro...more
The main character, named Mischa (like the author) starts investigating, and soon becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about what happened.
The story is about what happens to expatriates who struggle to understand the foreign cultures around them, told fro...more
This is without a doubt, one of the best books I have ever read. This story of an anthropologist who murders a missionary in Thailand reads like the best journalistic nonfic, from the details of the remote Thai tribe's customs to the footnotes that referred to specific personal letters that belonged to the anthropologist. But here's the kicker--IT'S ALL FICTION. If I didn't have so many books on my TBR, I would read it again to see how the frick the author pulled off such a feat. And he's the sa...more
2 likes · like · see review
I really wanted this to be a fantastic book, and for the first third or so, it was. Fieldwork is a novel told by a journalist following the trail of an anthropologist who had been working in northern Thailand and Burma for decades before being imprisoned after a strange murder. The building of the story was great, and I had some high hopes for how the author would tease out the intricate bits of what might have been a fantastic, exotic tale. However, around the middle of the book, I started feel...more
Feb 05, 2009
Bookmarks Magazine
added it
Mischa Berlinski originally intended to write an account of the real-life Lisu tribe of Thailand, but held scant interest in the project until he decided to fictionalize the natives and turned his research into a novel. In this readable and clever debut, told almost entirely in backstory, Berlinski explores the problems inherent in trying to assume the perspective of another person or culture and the enduring conflict between faith and science. While he treats each perspective with genuine empat
...more
Dec 05, 2010
Peregrine 12
rated it
1 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
People interested in anthropology who can wade through generations of family history
Recommended to Peregrine 12 by:
A friend who just finished an Anthropology course
Shelves:
books-i-gave-up-on
After a friend sent me a copy of Fieldwork, along with Stephen King's glowing review from Entertainment Weekly (April 6, 2007), I thought I was sure to love this book. I wanted to love it. But I didn't. I was occasionally bored and sometimes frustrated by the side-paths the author kept taking from the actual main characters.
Two things killed it for me: 1) Most of the book is relayed in a third-person history of GENERATIONS of people - many people, too many for me to keep up with sometimes. There...more
Two things killed it for me: 1) Most of the book is relayed in a third-person history of GENERATIONS of people - many people, too many for me to keep up with sometimes. There...more
WHERE: Picked this up at a half priced books in Redmond. I think I liked the cover (and the price, of course)
AND? It was pretty good! I was frustrated with the ending, but, I enjoyed the story -- the characters were well formed, and the author spent a lot of time building a history that brought you to the climax with a nice roar.
HOW WAS THE ENDING? Mm, so-so. The story is written a bit back-to-front, in that you know the end when you get started, you just don't know how you got there. The middl...more
AND? It was pretty good! I was frustrated with the ending, but, I enjoyed the story -- the characters were well formed, and the author spent a lot of time building a history that brought you to the climax with a nice roar.
HOW WAS THE ENDING? Mm, so-so. The story is written a bit back-to-front, in that you know the end when you get started, you just don't know how you got there. The middl...more
A meandering, but pleasantly paced, existential and semi-literary detective story of a 20 year-old murder in Thailand involving missionaries and anthropologists and a hodgepodge of eccentric characters.
The point-of-view changes consistently from the under-employed journalist narrator to the different characters he interviews, going back multiple generations and following a myriad of anecdotal plot detours. The story switches back and forth from first-person to third-person, until a final, opium...more
The point-of-view changes consistently from the under-employed journalist narrator to the different characters he interviews, going back multiple generations and following a myriad of anecdotal plot detours. The story switches back and forth from first-person to third-person, until a final, opium...more
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Books Stephen Kin...: * Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski General Discussion | 44 | 59 | Dec 01, 2011 03:39pm | |
| Books Stephen Kin...: Overal Impression/Final Comments (SPOILER ALERT) | 6 | 17 | Nov 24, 2011 11:11am | |
| Books Stephen Kin...: Epilogue (SPOILER ALERT) | 4 | 5 | Nov 24, 2011 11:09am | |
| Books Stephen Kin...: Part 5: The Pendulum-Edge of the Soul (SPOILER ALERT) | 5 | 14 | Nov 24, 2011 10:32am | |
| Books Stephen Kin...: Part 4: Possessed (SPOILER ALERT) | 7 | 8 | Nov 24, 2011 07:25am | |
| Books Stephen Kin...: Part 3: The Native's Point of View (SPOILER ALERT) | 4 | 10 | Nov 23, 2011 07:02am | |
| Books Stephen Kin...: Part 2: The Story the Walkers Told of Themselves (SPOILER ALERT) | 6 | 11 | Nov 18, 2011 04:02pm |
Mischa Berlinski studied classics at Columbia University and at the University of California at Berkeley.
Among other jobs, he has worked as a journalist in Thailand.
He lives in Rome.
His first novel, Fieldwork, is widely popular and has even been chosen as a book to read in school.
More about Mischa Berlinski...
Among other jobs, he has worked as a journalist in Thailand.
He lives in Rome.
His first novel, Fieldwork, is widely popular and has even been chosen as a book to read in school.
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