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Title details for Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski - Available

Fieldwork

A Novel

by Mischa Berlinski
William Dufris
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    March 6, 2007

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400123643
      • File size: 347751 KB
      • Duration: 12:04:28

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      William Dufris delivers a sterling performance of this novel of anthropologists and missionaries who are competing with each other for influence over the hill tribes of northern Thailand. It begins with a fictional version of the author, also named Mischa, stumbling across the story of Martiya, a Berkeley-trained anthropologist who committed suicide in a Thai prison, where she was serving a fifty-year sentence for murdering a missionary. Then things get complicated. Dufris manages a host of regional American accents and, even more remarkably, offers believable Thais speaking English. With pacing and changes of tone, his sensitive reading brings the listener inside the three radically different cultures of Thai hill tribes, evangelical Christian Americans, and academic anthropologists. R.E.K. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 11, 2006
      A fictional version of the author serves as the narrator of
      \t\t Berlinski's uneven first novel, a thriller set in Thailand. Mischa Berlinski, a
      \t\t reporter who's moved to northern Thailand to be with his schoolteacher
      \t\t girlfriend, Rachel, hears from his friend Josh about the suicide of Martiya van
      \t\t der Leun, an American anthropologist, in a Thai jail, where she was serving 50
      \t\t years for murder. As Mischa begins to investigate Martiya's life and supposed
      \t\t crimes, he becomes increasingly obsessed with the woman. The complications that
      \t\t arise have the potential to be riveting, but the chatty narrative voice takes
      \t\t too many irrelevant detours to build much suspense. Still, Berlinski, who has
      \t\t been a journalist in Thailand, vividly portrays the exotic setting and brings
      \t\t depth and nuance to his depictions of the Thais. Buried within the excess
      \t\t verbiage is a lean, interesting tale about, among many other things, the
      \t\t differences between modern and tribal cultures.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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