MONDAY READING

Fieldwork
by Mischa Berlinski

My current book is a novel that at first I didn’t think I’d take to, but it’s grown on me and now I can’t wait to see how it all turns out. The narrator is a journalist who gets swept up into doing what is called “fieldwork” to discover why a female anthropologist who was herself doing fieldwork in an obscure Thai hill tribe has committed suicide in a Thai prison where she was sentenced for murder. His own fieldwork consists of backtracking through all the people in her life and following the trail from her birth to her death to unravel the mystery of how it all went down. Here are a couple of sentences from the page I’m on now:

After lunch, the villagers dozed. The pigs rooted in the mud and then, having dug themselves comfortable wet beds, stretched out; the dogs found quiet places under the houses and lay their flea-bitten heads on their worn paws; the chickens pecked industriously at slow-moving  bugs; lazy clouds gathered together slowly in preparation for the afternoon rainstorm; the bullocks were tethered and dozed in their traces; water slithered down the bamboo pipes and dripped into the ceramic cisterns; the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer petered out; the last woman pounding rice or grinding corn stretched her arms out, yawned, balanced her basket on her hip, and wandered home. This was Martiya’s favorite time of the day.

The author is 35, studied classics at UC Berkeley, and has been a journalist in Thailand like the narrator in this, his first, novel. I’m totally impressed with his eye for detail and character description.