While working in Thailand as a journalist, Mischa Berlinski began to write a history of the Lisu people’s conversion to Christianity when the book unexpectedly veered off into fiction to become Fieldwork (2007), his first novel. A finalist for the National Book Award, Fieldwork is set in Northern Thailand and narrated by a fictional reporter, Mischa Berlinski, who becomes obsessed with the story of a woman anthropologist who has murdered a missionary. Born in New York, Mr. Berlinski studied classics at Berkeley and Columbia. Until recently, he has lived in Italy, but is now in Haiti, where his wife is a lawyer with the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission, an experience which formed the basis for his second novel, Peacekeeping (2016).
-
FieldworkA Novel
Everyone in anthro knows it, it’s an open secret, but coming home from the field is as tough as going out. Maybe even tougher. When you go out on the road, you’re you; and when you come back, you’re not you anymore, but they’re still them.
Fieldwork:A Novel -
FieldworkA Novel
She wrote exuberantly of the beauty of Thailand: the flooded lime-green rice paddies bordered by swaying palms; coconuts, mangoes, and durian for sale by the side of the road; the ornate temples with flashing mirrored roofs; wandering Buddhist monks with shaved heads in saffron robes; the cut galangal in bushels drying in the midday sun, the humid air earthy, like a root; and the sleepy, sweating water buffalo reluctantly plowing the fields.
Fieldwork:A Novel -
FieldworkA Novel
Four children and thirty years of frontier living, hauling buckets of water, riding on muleback, nights outdoors, and long windy days had robbed her of her beauty. Her hair had turned a steel gray, and for convenience she now cut it herself with her old shears, barely even bothering with a mirror just so long as it was out of here eyes and off her neck – this, the woman who in her youth had ordered by mail from Chicago a book entitled One Hundred Hair Arrangements for the Modern Lady.
Fieldwork:A Novel
"A Russian doll of a read . . . A story that cooks like a mother." —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly [on Fieldwork]
"Airtight and intensely gripping . . . His treatment of both religious missionary and anthropological fieldwork is subtle and insightful. Impeccable research and a juicy, intricate plot play off in this perfectly executed debut." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) [on Fieldwork]
"Gripping and entertaining . . . A quirky, often brilliant debut, bounced along by limitless energy." —The New York Review of Books [on Fieldwork]
