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    Fieldwork: A Novel
    Fieldwork: A Novel
    Fieldwork: A Novel
    Audiobook12 hours

    Fieldwork: A Novel

    Written by Mischa Berlinski

    Narrated by William Dufris

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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, has been found dead—a suicide—in the Thai prison where she was serving a fifty-year sentence for murder.



    Motivated first by simple curiosity, then by deeper and more mysterious feelings, Mischa searches relentlessly to discover the details of Martiya's crime. His search leads him to the origins of modern anthropology—and into the family history of Martiya's victim, a brilliant young missionary whose grandparents left Oklahoma to preach the Word in the 1920s and never went back. Finally, Mischa's obssession takes him into the world of the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life becomes a battleground for two competing, and utterly American, ways of looking at the world.



    Vivid, passionate, funny, deeply researched, and exquisitely plotted, Fieldwork is a novel about fascination and taboo—scientific, religious, and sexual. It announces an assured and captivating new voice in American fiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 6, 2007
    ISBN9781400173648
    Author

    Mischa Berlinski

    Mischa Berlinski is the author of the novel Fieldwork, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Addison M. Metcalf Award.

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    Reviews for Fieldwork

    3.5/5

    270 ratings39 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A wonderful book despite its flaws, this book started out as non-fiction. The author was not able to find anyone who would publish an anthropoligical examination of missionary work with the hill tribes in Thailand. When the pagan tribes start converting, we see the resulting disintegration of a truly unique way of life. Shares many themes with Shusaku Endo's 1996 novel _Silence_.
    • 5/5
      I'm not really sure how much of this book is nonfiction and how much of it is fiction; that's how deftly the author blends the two. Apparently this book did start out as an article, and somewhere along the way he decided to fictionalize his work. The story centers on an anthropologist and a family of missionaries who study/minister to the same ethnic group in Thailand. I think it's asking the question, how does on understand a culture without becoming part of the culture? When does that happen? How? It's also a darn good story that I found surprisingly riveting.
    • 3/5
      I wasn’t a fan of this one because I struggled with the subject matter and the characters, none of whom are very likable.
    • 4/5
      A good read. The story of a young anthropologist who becomes obsessed with her work with a small tribe in northern Thailand. I loved the way the author gradually unfolded her story.
    • 5/5
      What a brilliant read. It is wonderful to see fiction that admits its debt to the anthropological memoir, a genre of literature that would not exist but for human curiosity. Although this is overtly a work of fiction all its nuances felt right and the story, well the story infected me just as well as any flu bug that I can recall. Highly recommended. Read it on a sofa while shutting off the real world as much as is possible. And take joy from it where you can...I know I found plenty.
    • 5/5
      An amazing story for anyone interested in other cultures. A cultural anthropologist lives among a native tribe in northern Thailand, murders a missionary, and spends 10 years in a Thai prison before committing suicide. A journalist delves into the mysteries surrounding past events, uncovering cultural beliefs, the conflict inherent in missionary work, and the perils of "going native." Part ethnology, part murder mystery, this was totally engaging, no doubt because of my anthropology background.
    • 3/5
      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, Mischa becomes obsessed with this story in trying to find a motive or explanation for her crime.

      I picked up this book since I will be vacationing in Thailand and wanted to read a novel that gave me some insight to the country. This book definitely conveys the impression of the happy-go-lucky nature of the Thai people as well as the diversity of the population, especially in some of the remote rural areas. But, the story of this book took a lot of bizarre turns. There is way too much background on both Martiya and the Christian missionary. Adding stories about how each of their grandparents' met is not only unnecessary but detracts from the overall plot. There were long descriptions of how the missionary leaves Thailand and spends years following the Grateful Dead. Is Jerry Garcia relevant to this book? The problem with so many diversions is that when the ending is revealed, it seems anti-climatic. Readers look to find those threads that tie everything neatly together. Instead I was left with a disappointing feeling of 'is that all?'
    • 2/5
      This book started out well. The writing style was very readable without being dumbed down like a lot of popular fiction is. It contains a lot of interesting descriptions of life in Thailand. The story of Martiya was one that I was interested in and I definately wanted to keep reading to find out what had happened.

      About halfway through the book I lost interest. Most of the book is a major digression from the story that peaked my interest in the begining. I finished reading it because I still wanted to know what had happened to Martiya, but I had to suffer through a lot of extras that really didn't really have anything to do with, well, anything.

      After reading the acknowledgements, I think the author was trying to make the book more like an ethnography than a novel. It might be interesting if it stuck to that genre, but it doesn't. The result is a book that seems to be having a major identity crisis.
    • 3/5
      Both missionaries and anthropologists use the word field to indicate the place where they do their work, and sometimes their respective fields are one and the same group of people. Anthropologists want to study these people the way they are. Christian missionaries want to save them, and thus change them. There is a natural conflict here that Mischa Berlinski explores creatively in his 2007 novel "Fieldwork."

      Narrated by a character named Mischa Berlinski, although Berlinski says the story is entirely fictional, the novel tells of the fictional Berlinski's efforts to learn why an anthropologist in Thailand murdered a missionary.

      Tagging along with his girlfriend, who has a temporary teaching job in Thailand, Berlinski learns about Martiya van der Leun, who has killed herself after spending several years in a Thai prison for killing the missionary David Walker. Obsessed by the story, Berlinski tries to find out what really happened.

      Interviewing various members of the Walker family, all of whom are missionaries to the fictional Dyalo people in Thailand, and people who knew Martiya, he gradually puts together the story. Unfortunately he must rely on the ghost of Martiya herself to learn what happened on the night of the murder. That strikes me as a weak way to end a good story.

      Berlinski, a Jew, does a capable job of capturing the missionaries, their language and their beliefs. If anything, the missionaries fare better than the anthropologists in this novel. Berlinski says in a note at the end that his original plan had been to write a book about the conversion of the Lisu people of northern Thailand to Christianity, but then decided to turn it into a novel. Good choice.
    • 4/5
      Mischa is on the path of a murderer. Martiya, a cultural anthropologist who lived with and tried to understand the Dyalo tribe in northern Burma/Thailand, murdered a missionary named David Walker. [Fieldwork] is the story of Mischa's pursuit of answers: why? and how did their paths cross? how did a promising but tortured anthropologist become a murderer and end up in a Thai prison?

      Berlinski tells a great story and effectively moves among the stories within the story. His narrator is always present, but he gracefully yields the first-person narrative stage to other, more central characters. This novel is part ethnohistory, part murder mystery, and part exploration of the impact of culture on who each of us is --- and how invisible our own culture is to us! Berlinski explores the visceral and unquestioning attachment humans have to their most fundamental cultural beliefs, those things that are "obvious" and absolute to each of us. He amusingly tells of Martiya's attempts to draw explanations for rituals and mores out of the Dyalo people --- and their circular answers that boil down to "we do it that way because it is our custom." And while exploring and appreciating another culture is articulated as a valuable and worthwhile endeavor, Berlinski suggests that true immersion --- becoming a member of another culture comes with potentially devastating (lethal!) risks. Thought-provoking, entertaining, and compassionate, this is a book worth reading.
    • 5/5
      If this is Mischa Berlinski's debut novel, I'm going to need to stand in line for his oncoming novels. This one just blew me away!

      Fieldwork opens with an American journalist, oddly of the same name and religion (Jewish) as the author, who meets friend Josh O'Connor in Thailand, a country in which both are living and working at the time. Josh's request is that Mischa investigate the circumstances leading to the suicidal death of American anthropologist Martiya van der Leun. What was known was that she was a grad student working on a thesis about the Dyalo, a hill-tribe located in a rural area of northern Thailand. It was also known that, prior to her death, she had been incarcerated for ten years on a murder charge.

      Through meetings and interviews with people who knew Martiya, Mischa slowly oncovers the truth about her situation. What, at first to me as a reader, seemed a divergent track and one that involved learning about several generations of the Walkers, a missionary family also living among the Dyalo, turned out to be very important to understand how missionary work affects isolated groups of people.

      I was mesmerized by this tale. I'm not sure if it was because it involved cutural anthropology which, to me, is such a fascinating field or whether I was simply wondering how a Jewish man became involved investigating animism versus Christianity. In addition, the story reveals the fervor of an individual who engages in fieldwork or the "living with the tribe" experience of cultural anthropological study.

      For anyone interested in other cultures, this is an amazing story. It's really up to the reader to decide if the Dyalo were, in fact, an invented people or based upon true hill-tribe inhabitants of northern Thailand. In order to decide, though, you must first read this book!
    • 3/5
      A novel concerning archeologists and missionaries in Southest Asia. A good yarn.
    • 5/5
      Mischa Berlinski, the eponymous narrator, is an American freelance journalist living abroad. He becomes fascinated by the mystery of an anthropologist living in tribal Thailand who murders a member of a Christian missionary family which has been working in Asia for four generations. Mischa spends a year piecing together the history of the missionaries and the life of the anthropologist, tracing how their stories finally, and fatally, became intertwined. The use of the author's own name for the narrator was initially confusing and awkward. But other than that misstep, this is fine writing and a fascinating tale of the conflicts in expectations between Westerners with their widely divergent goals and approaches and the subjects of their efforts.
    • 5/5
      I loved reading this book. I learned a great deal about the work of a field anthropologist - the difficulties, the tedium, the isolation, and the joys. The author is also the narrator in the book. Sometimes I found that confusing. I also wondered how much was biographical but the author says the book is fiction and that, in fact, the tribal people studied, the Dyalo, are also fictional. I had to prove that to myself by looking them up on the internet. They seemed so real.
      The story came together very well. The death of David Walker, a young missionary, was explained finally and the reasons for Mitaya killing him were also explained. The plot was revealed in little pieces probably a lot like the bits and pieces of anthropological discoveries. It took much perseverance for Mischa to solve the mystery, but when it all came together it was satisfying.
      I'm impressed with this author. This was quite an amazing first book.
    • 5/5
      In an afterword to this novel, the author notes that at first he was going to write a nonfiction book about Christian missionary work among a Thai native tribe, but then changed his mind. I'm so glad he did.

      Fieldwork is one of those rare novels that comes along in which the quality of writing is simply exquisite. The story is good, well plotted and holds throughout the novel, and the thread of continuity never gets lost among the details. It's also obvious that the author did a great deal of research. His characterizations are vividly real and the story is utterly believable, and his sense of place is well established to the point where you can hear the birds and feel the oppressive heat of the jungle. Every so often, I had to keep reminding myself that this book was fiction.

      Expat American, young journalist Mischa Berlinski (yes, he uses his own name for the main character here), has come to Thailand with his girlfriend, a schoolteacher. A local character, another expat, comes to Mischa with a story about a woman named Martiya van der Leun, who came to Thailand some years back to study a hill tribe known as the Dyalo for her PhD work in Anthropology. It turns out that Martiya had been sentenced to fifty years in Chiang Mai prison for the murder of a Christian missionary, but Martiya had committed suicide while serving her term. Berlinski wants to know how this woman went from such a promising life and career to rotting in a Thai prison, and sets out to get her story. In the course of his own research, he delves into the lives of the missionaries, the Dyalo, Martiya's family, her friends & lovers, and her co-workers to try to understand what really happened.

      The book has been criticized by readers for many reasons -- the biggest one being that there's too much detail about the missionaries or about the Dyalo, and that the story gets bogged down, but I have to disagree. Just as Martiya felt she had to know things from the natives' point of view to really understand these people, the reader in this case won't really get the whole story without understanding the various factors that led up to the fateful moment that put Martiya behind the walls of Chiang Mai prison.

      I loved this book and I would recommend it to anyone who wants an extremely well-written and highly intelligent novel. Books like this one are rare, so you should grab the opportunity.
    • 4/5
      While I was taken by the dichotomy of two worlds colliding--evangelical-missionaries & cultural anthropology--I was disappointed that the author did not seem to come to any conclusions. It was a a definite winner in terms of learning about Thailand and the indigenous (albeit made up) tribe that is the focal point of the book.
    • 4/5
      Very disturbing story of Martiya, an anthropologist who does her fieldwork for her doctoral thesis in a small village in northern Thailand. She becomes so charmed with this way of life that she returns to Thailand to live in her hut with the Dyalos. She ends up killing herself in a Thai prison where she is sent for murdering David Walker, missionary who converted her Dyalo lover and, therefore, changed his religion and her way of life. A reporter hears about her, visits her in prison and uncovers her story through other sources. Excellent gripping story.
    • 3/5
      This highly-praised book I think receives its plaudits because of the youth of its author and because it's his first foray. Its descriptions and characterizations pass basic muster, I suppose, but it relies on sexual taboo to force the narrative forward. There just wasn't enough energy in that aspect of the plot, for me.

      An anthropologist falls in love with a native Thai man and their sex relates to the rice-planting cycle. A Christian missionary comes along and converts the native man, (killjoy!) who in turn turns his back on the anthropologist. Of course, the anthropologist completes the cycle by killing the missionary.

      This is not a bad read, but it is one of those inexplicably praised pieces that I just shake my head over. It's an average narrative that takes a Christian missionary to task for spreading the fetid faith. Perhaps that's why all the hubbub. Anyway, for my two cents, you're better off elsewhere.
    • 4/5
      Art mirrors life in this novel of Thailand. The author's experiences in SE Asia lend rich colour to this fictional juxtaposition of a tribe of American missionaries and an independent Dutch anthropologist who clash over the future of a remote hilltribe. Beautifully written, vibrant, and entertaining, with a cast of colourful characters who keep the multi-stranded storyline tripping along.
    • 4/5
      In this novel, freelance writer Mischa Berlinski (yes, the protagonist has the same name as the author) is living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. One day an acquaintance tells him about a woman he had recently met in a Thai prison. Martiya van der Leun, an anthropologist, had been in the women's prison for more than a decade after being convicted of the murder of American missionary David Walker. Martiya recently killed herself in the prison. Mischa's friend suggested that Mischa might be able to sell the story to a newspaper. No one seems to know anything about Martiya or why she committed this crime. Mischa spends the next year investigating the story, seeking people who knew the victim and/or his murderer. The book is largely a character study of Martiya van der Leun, and, to a lesser extent, David Walker and his missionary family.

      Martiya's character seemed more realistic to me than did David's and his family's. I am very familiar with both academics and missionaries. Martiya's academic career was believable. On the other hand, the missionaries seemed much more like the stereotypical religious zealots portrayed on television than like any of the many missionaries I know. The author carefully revealed layer after layer of Martiya's personality, and the motive for this seemingly unbelievable crime made sense. However, David Walker and the Walker family are almost as much of a mystery at the end of the book as they are at the beginning.
    • 2/5
      I enjoyed this book but wasn't completely wowed by it. Berlinski's arguments in comparing a missionary and an anthropolgist's lives in rural Thailand were cogent without being didactic. The sense of place is beautifully constructed and the histories Berlinski weaves are engaging and authentic; details like David being disenfrachised with his father becase he watched Star Wars are nice. This is a strong novel and worth reading but I think the author gives too much emphasis to the "mystery" of why the murder happened when the motives are fairly obvious from the beginning. I was also a little disappointed that a chief motivation was because Martiya felt romantically jilted. All and all I think this novel succeeds as a literary meditation on travel, colonialism, and religion but fails as a mystery.
    • 2/5
      This novel begins its tale with an anthropologist who is serving a life sentence in Thailand for murdering a missionary, and the rest of the book details the investigations of a curious freelance writer who seeks to discover exactly what happened.

      The book provides a fascinating look at how evangelical missionaries and secular anthropologists differ in their understanding of and approach to pagan tribal peoples.

      I enjoyed reading this page-turner.
    • 5/5
      The clash between traditional culture and western culture results in a murder in the northern jungles of Thailand. This story is written from the POV of a journalist who stumbles upon the story and tries to figure out what happened several years before. Loved this!
    • 5/5
      When I started reading this book, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. It states that it's a novel on the cover, but both the author and main character are named Mischa. Mischa the character is a journalist living in Thailand, and Mischa the author has worked as a journalist in Thailand. Add to that the first-person perspective, and this book feels very much like a true story. Nevertheless, it is fiction. It's a story about the country and the people of Thailand, about anthropology, about expatriate life in Asia, about missionary work, and about a mysterious murder and the elusive woman who committed it. The writing in this story has an immediacy to it that made me feel like all these people truly existed, and that if I got on a plane tomorrow I could visit Thailand and find Berlinski's imagined society of the Dyalo. I was compelled to keep reading in the hopes that I would discover the truth behind a passionate anthropologist's murder of a well-loved missionary. It made me interested to learn more about, and maybe visit, Thailand, an area of the world that has never appealed to me before. For me, Fieldwork was a unique reading experience. I felt like I was reading a great literary novel, an interesting piece of travel writing, a true crime narrative, and a history, all at the same time. I was taken off guard by how much I enjoyed the book, and would heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoys the categories I listed above.
    • 3/5
      I found this book very intriguing – right up until the ending. The story is narrated by a character named Mischa Berlinski, which adds an almost off-putting note of odd realism to the story which involves the imprisonment of the anthropologist Martiya van der Leun for the murder of missionary David Walker, and Martiya’s eventual suicide. That sounds all very somber but the story is wildly inventive, roaming from Sulawesi to Chang Mai to traipsing around America with a band of Deadheads. The story is contemplative and humorous, mysterious and enlightening. The narrator comes upon the story of Martiya and the van der Leun family by chance, as he’s wiling away his time in northern Thailand while his wife teaches elementary school there. But as he researches their twisted histories he becomes so immersed in their lives, beliefs, and fates that their story soon consumes him. The settings are exotic and beautifully rendered and the daily life of the missionaries living for several generations among the natives is told with overlaying tones that are jaded, passionate, quirky, and very human. I was only disappointed in the final outcome – Martiya’s ultimate motivation, which, after all the realism and depth of the story seemed false and shallow to me.
    • 3/5
      Fieldwork begins when its protagonist -also called Mischa Berlinski - learns about the suicide of an American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun in a Thai prison. Berlinksi, also an American, is living in Thailand with his girlfriend and writing to earn money. He begins to investigate the story of Martiya and becomes consumed with it. The book then moves into a fairly extensive history of a family of American missionaries living in Thailand for several generations. Then we learn the story of Martiya's young life, education, and how she came to be doing fieldwork among the Dyalo people in Thailand. There are extremely detailed accounts of doing anthropological research and of the Dyalo. Mischa continues his research finally discovering how these stories come together and how Martiya came to be incarcerated.

      It took me a a very long time to read this book. I enjoyed the writing, it was very conversational and there is a sort-of quirky humor in the book. The book felt very long and there are many characters. For example, I thought the story about the missionaries was going to be an aside, instead there were over 100 pages about their family history. The fieldwork section was similarly long. I have had a great interest in anthropology since taking some college classes on the subject which increased my appreciation of this part of the story. I don't feel that Amazon's description of this novel as a 'thriller' is terribly accurate. The mystery part of the story seems more like a vehicle for Berlinski to write about what he is interested in and knowledgeable about which happens to be missionaries and anthropology. It is obviously very well researched and Berlinski is a gifted writer. There was much that I liked about this book but I never felt very involved or invested in it.
    • 5/5
      A geniously crafted novel that I could not put down. Berlinski develops the characters with great care so that every detail adds to the mystery surrounding the transformed and intertwined lives. I loved the often-humorous depiction of the missionaries. And as someone who has been on tour with the Dead, I gobbled up the part when David follows them -- the lingo and details were spot on. Brought back some good memories.
    • 4/5
      This book was utterly fascinating, about Thai hill tribes (even though this one was fictional, there was some research base to it I am sure) and missionaries in the furthest reaches. It opened my eyes about those two things. The story was pretty good too, the plot interesting. I felt it lagged a bit when it detailed the lives of the missionaries and the generations preceding the present characters. I like that there remained mystery, unsolved, as life can be.
    • 4/5
      I never thought that I would enjoy a book that pretends to be a memoir but is really a novel; an indepth anthropological study; and, a fair and unbiased view of evangelical Protestant missionaries. But that's what reading does for you. This novel has good character development and an interesting plot. The author really puts you into the back country of Thailand.
    • 4/5
      In Mischa Berlinski's first novel, Fieldwork, a young American expatriate (named Mischa Berlinski) living in Thailand gradually uncovers the intertwined stories of an American anthropologist who was studying the Dyalo people, and a missionary family who was trying to convert them. At the heart of Fieldwork is a mystery surrounding a murder committed by the anthropologist.

      Berlinski creates a believable, textured world in his novel, with a strong anthropological sense of the Dyalo (a fictional group, but apparently based on several real Thai groups). The lonely life of a field anthropologist was well realized. Berlinski's biggest achievement, for this reader, was his sympathetic take on the realistic, flawed missionary family.

      The narrator teases out the anthropologist's story slowly and painstakingly, and my one disappointment is the narrative voice Berlinski finally used to wrap up the mystery. Some of the book felt quirky for quirkiness sake (why did the narrator have to have the same name as the actual author?), but the clarity of the writing made up for this. All in all, a strong first effort by a writer I'll be keeping an eye on.