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.
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