Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski
For the past two mornings, I have had the luxury of reading in bed for 30 minutes to an hour before getting up and officially starting my day. I say it’s a luxury because I can’t remember the last time I have done that. It’s one of my favorite things to do on a weekend morning, and it’s good to know that with the new year, I am starting to reclaim my weekends for fun!
I also wanted to finish this book–as of Friday night I had fewer than 100 pages, and I was eager to get to the end so I could learn why an American anthropologist living in a hill tribe village in Thailand would shoot a missionary twice in the back!
I picked up Fieldwork back in October during a trip to Green Apple with my buddy Nathaniel. (I also grabbed another book, which I read while traveling, called Mr. White’s Confession by Robert Clark. That was a great book–a mystery set in Minnesota in 1939.) When I returned from 3 1/2 weeks traveling in the UK and Istanbul, Fieldwork was the book on my shelf that jumped out at me. And I am so glad it did. It took me longer than it should have to read it–had I not been working on grad school applications or a project, I expect I would have finished it much sooner because it is one of those books that is hard to put down.
I loved both the plot, setting, and writing style. The book was completely engrossing and beautifully written.
In Fieldwork, a youngish journalist living in Thailand learns about a woman who had committed suicide in a prison in Chaing Mai, where she was serving a sentence for murder. He sets about to uncover the mystery of who this woman was and unravel why she would have killed a missionary. In the process, he talks with people who knew her (both in the US and in Thailand) including her best friend, her former lovers, and the man who had been her guide and friend in the village where she lived and conducted her fieldwork. He also meets on numerous occasions with the family of the victim—a missionary family whose roots in Asia go back generations. The chapters about the missionary family are completely fascinating. Even though I have a problem with missionary work, I was so interested in the history of this family and the travails they faced living in a foreign country, aiming to convert entire villages to Christianity. I have only read one other novel that depicted missionary life— the Poisonwood Bible—a book I loved tremendously but certainly reinforced any bias I have against missionaries. One of the things I really liked about the portrayal of the missionaries in Fieldwork is that I didn’t get the sense that Mischa (the character and author’s name) judged them. I appreciated the impartiality, allowing me to make my own decisions about them, which in some cases was more favorable than I would expect to have of a missionary.
The writing style was really top-knotch. The language was sophisticated yet subtle and unpretentious, never interfering with the story. Passages are peppered with just enough detail and the choicest of words to give you a sense of place without bogging you down with extraneous adjectives that make you think the author is really trying too hard. And I think the tone was absolutely perfect for this story.
In the midst of recounting the histories of these other people’s lives, Mischa is dealing with his own issues, which don’t take up too much space but just enough to remind us he’s a real person. He lives with his girlfriend, who teaches English to Thai children, but she’s not sure she wants to stay there when the school year finishes. She’s in her late twenties and is thinking about settling down and starting a family. Thailand doesn’t seem like the place she wants to do that…Mischa, on the other hand, is content in Thailand and isn’t sure he is ready to leave.
As I was reading the account of the anthropologist living the village, I thought a lot about what it must be like to be an outsider in a village, feeling isolated yet always surrounded by people (and thus robbed of any real privacy). Even though I had never thought of being an anthropologist and doing fieldwork, I have thought often of living in remote places, and I have indeed experienced my own feelings of isolation as an outsider. Although I was only in Mongolia for two months, and I was hardly the only Westerner there, there were certainly many times I was on my own and lonesome. The women I worked with made tremendous efforts to include me in activities when they had the chance, but of course there were times when they were too busy with their lives, and I was left to my own devices. And since I hardly understood any Mongolian (except the ubiquitous word “za”), I often found myself amidst conversations and discussions that eluded me. At least I had the cable TV with the BBC and some terrible American movie channel to keep me company.
This novel also sparked a new question for me: how different are missionaries from cultural anthropologists? One group wants to convert/change a group of people to be more like them and the other wants to record them as they are. However, doesn’t the intrusion on part of the anthropologist necessarily affect the people they are studying? I am sure this is a frequent debate.
Another thing I really found fascinating was the concept of a person wanting to understand something and becoming obsessed with it. This happens both with Mischa as he tries to understand what happened with the anthropologist (and what drove her to murder) and the anthropologist herself as she tries to understand a specific phenomenon unique to the culture she is studying. She becomes so obsessed in fact, that she’ll do anything to protect it. I guess in some ways I, too, have known to become obsessed with things…well, maybe fascination or infatuation would be a better word than obsession. My fascination with Mongolia and China led me to those countries. But so obsessed as the anthropologist is in this story…I don’t think so.
To conclude, I loved this book—I am so glad I found it at Green Apple. I recommend it to anyone. Literally, anyone.
Uncategorized | Comments (16)The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
On the bus to the grocery store to pick up items for tomorrow’s Tibetan-themed Iron Rainbow* dinner, I read the last page of what has become one of my favorite books of all time. Yes, as you may have guessed by the title of this post, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The reasons I loved this book are manifold; and it is the inspiration for starting a literary blog, a venue for my thoughts and reflections on the books I read.
I have wanted to read this book since its publication two years ago, and with Pollan’s recent (by recent I mean January 2008) publication of In Defense of Food, which I also very much want to read, I thought I better get on with it. And I am so glad I did. Over the past 10 days, every chance I got—on the 38L Geary, BART back and forth to the East Bay, Virgin America to JFK, New York subway, Long Island Rail Road, and even Jeep across New York state, I devoured the pages of this nonfiction work of what I would like to call GENIUS. And as I was transporting Pollan wherever I went, I felt the reciprocation; after all, he brought me (and countless other readers, of course) along with him as he went from farm to feedlot to forest, sharing adventures, knowledge, and emotions.
Subtitled “A Natural History of Four Meals”, The Omnivore’s Dilemma explores the production, marketing, and consumption of food in this country, and seeks to figure out what is up with what and how we eat. The book is divided into three parts: Industrial, Pastoral, and Personal. Part I is all about corn and its ubiquity in the industrial production of food (for humans, animals, and cars). Perhaps the most disturbing chapter is titled “The Feedlot: Making Meat”, which gives a very vivid account of what goes down with industrial meat production. Gross. Really, really gross. Part II is all about grass and focuses on what Pollan calls “the pastoral food chain.” Much of this section is set on a farm that raises a variety of animals and crops, where Pollan spent a week working and learning all about how the food is produced in a way that the farmer calls “beyond organic.” In Part III, he sets out to forage for food (meat, plants, and fungus) to make what he calls in the last chapter, the “Perfect Meal.”
What I love most about The Omnivore’s Dilemma is how much it made me think. But I also loved the writing. I had read a couple of articles written by Pollan, and I could tell that I dug his style and mad journalistic skills. But in this book, especially, I savored the beautifully crafted sentences, a seemingly effortless concoction of the choicest words. Yet for all this mastery of language, never once is the writing flowery, stuffy, or pompous.
Throughout, I sensed that Pollan has just the kind of personality that I really enjoy; he seems real and down-to-earth, smart and funny. While he gives us a lot of information, it is written in an accessible and interesting way. It doesn’t sound like he’s pontificating or lecturing; he’s just done the legwork and researched this stuff and is letting us know what’s what. And at the heart of the story is his personal journey, which I found engaging and thought provoking.
Since every issue raised in the book gave me pause for thought and reflection, I’ll just summarize a couple of my major conclusions:
1) Eating foods labeled “organic” is not enough. At least not for me. In a chapter called “Big Organic” Pollan describes the history of organic food movement and the rise of industrial organic food production. While I think organic food is still better than conventional, I will seek produce, eggs, and dairy from smaller, more local farms that go beyond adhering to the USDA organic standards (which aren’t necessarily as strict as they could be.)
2) Industrial meat production and processing is disgusting and abhorrent. I think what disturbs me most is the treatment of animals destined to be someone’s meal here in America. But the environmental impacts of the meat industry are not to be overlooked, either, and another reason I feel happy to be a vegetarian. One thing I really appreciated in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is Pollan’s consideration of the ethics of eating meat (there is a chapter of called “The Ethics of Eating Animals”), especially in light of how it is produced in large scale in this country. As an omnivore, he eats meat and I bet this works to his advantage in conveying the issues related to the production and consumption of meat to a much broader audience than if he were a vegetarian. But I also appreciate how he questions if it’s okay to eat animals and shares with us his process of working this out for himself.
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