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A Novel
by Mischa Berlinski
Book Reviewed by:A daring, spellbinding tale of anthropologists, missionaries, demon possession, sexual taboos, murder, and an obsessed young reporter named Mischa Berlinski.
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 obsession 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 page-turningly plotted, Fieldwork is a novel about fascination and taboo—scientific, religious, and sexual. It announces an assured and captivating new voice in American fiction.
Chapter One
“GOOD GOD, NO”
WHEN HE WAS A YEAR out of Brown, my friend Josh O’Connor won a Thai beach
vacation in a lottery in a bar. He spent two weeks on Ko Samui, decided that
Thailand was home, and never left. That was at least ten years ago, and since
then, Josh has done just about every sort of odd job a foreigner in Thailand can
do: He taught English for a while, and was part owner of a nightclub in Phuket.
He was a stringer for one of the wire agencies, and he took a few photos now and
again for Agence France-Presse. Josh played the trumpet in the marching band in
high school, and he parlayed the experience into a few years as the frontman for
a Thai ska band called the King’s Men. He founded a dating agency. He worked for
a time for an environmental group attempting to stop construction of a large dam
across the Mekong, and when the effort failed, he wrote publicity materials for
a cement exporter. He hinted that many years ago, in ...
What are you reading this week? (8/21/2025)
I am enjoying the "Ask an Author" feature on BookBrowse! I wasn't familiar with Mischa Berlinski and decided to pick up his earlier work - Fieldwork . I also just finished the second book in Alka Joshi's Jaipur Trilogy - The Secret Keeper of Jaipur . I'm now reading Man's Search for Meaning by Vi...
-Diane_Jones
BookBrowsers ask Mischa Berlinski
Were you already living in Thailand when you decided to write a novel, or did you move to Thailand with the intent of writing there? And what was it like learning Fieldwork had been nominated for the National Book Award?
-kim.kovacs
Berlinsky's excellent first novel is notable on a number of counts, not only does it provide a wealth of highly readable information about the hilltribes that are spread across the area known as the "Golden Triangle", that overlaps the mountains of four countries (Burma/Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand) but it also provides a study of two other cultural groups that are a mystery to most of us - missionaries and anthropologists!..continued
Full Review
(831 words)
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
John Wray, author of CANAAN'S TONGUE
Mischa Berlinski brings a wealth of vivid detail to his narrative, and writes with real authority. FIELDWORK is as fascinating as an ethnographer's private journal, as entertaining as a finely plotted thriller.- Nigel Barley, author of The Innocent Anthropologist
The West has long equated exotic peoples with the dark and the wild. It is the strength of Mischa Berlinski's novel to chart those elements in the heart of the anthropology that seeks to explore them. He turns received ideas on their heads, for he makes us unsure about the things we thought we knew while showing us truths that we like to hide from ourselves.A unified Thai kingdom was established in the mid-14th century. Known as Siam until 1939, Thailand (map) is the only Southeast Asian country never to have been taken over by a European power. A bloodless revolution in 1932 led to a constitutional monarchy. Thailand allied itself with Japan during WWII but has been an ally of the US since.
It is a land of many contrasts;endless beaches in the south attract tourists in droves. The capital city of Bangkok boasts state of the art transportation such as the elevated mass transit system known as theSkytrain and massive stretches of elevated roads that whisk traffic in and out of the city (I recollect that we traveled on one such continuously elevated road for more than 40 miles!); while down ...
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