Month: March 2018

Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski

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.

Amazon

Sasha Waltz & Guests: Körper

Sadler’s Wells

In Körper, Berlin-based choreographer Sasha Waltz prods at the idea of the body. She literally piles up her dancers, creating patterns or random heaps, questions how they see themselves or plunges them into surreal activity. One dancer puts on skis and a safety harness to swoop down a vertical wall; when the wall falls, it sends a gust of wind through the theatre, ruffling the audience’s hair.

Waltz crosses art/dance boundaries, working extensively in museums and with opera. Her appointment as co-director of the Berlin State Ballet, a role she takes up next year, has already proved controversial, since she’s a contemporary dance choreographer taking over a classical ballet company. Körpershows her working firmly in the dance theatre tradition of Pina Bausch, looking at her dancers’ bodies and vulnerabilities in a mix of speech, dance and physical theatre.

The show starts as the audience arrive, with dancers prowling about the stage, working through repetitive patterns. Two men lie down or inch along a wall, holding hands. Their bodies smudge the chalk figure drawn on the wall; Waltz keeps drawing marks around bodies, then erasing them. Fingers, hands and faces poke out from holes in the wall, in creepy or surreal poses.

The dancers are quick and agile, but they also have to fight against the set design, by Waltz with Thomas Schenk and Heike Schuppelius. They squeeze themselves into the narrow space behind a window, wriggling and climbing over each other. It’s a tight enough fit that any wider body parts – shoulders, noses, breasts – get squished against the glass, leaving smears. There’s plenty of nudity, but little interest in sex.

When they talk about their bodies, the dancers are both matter-of-fact and back to front. Describing how it feels to swallow coffee, a woman strokes a hand down her leg rather than her throat.  A man discusses his fears of illness, focusing on his organs while admitting he has no idea how they work. Scenes of chaos are weaker, with a lot of running and shouting.

Waltz is concerned with the day-to-day experience of inhabiting a body, in making sense of it. Yet she also makes it strange. Dressed in flowing skirts, one dancer perches on another’s back, creating a composite creature like a centaur. Measuring themselves, trying to track how their bodies work, the dancers become both literal and dreamlike.

 

Zoë Anderson in The Independent

Meike Ziervogel: Magda

History has painted Magda Goebbels as the Medea of the Third Reich, but that hasn’t dissuaded Meike Ziervogel from constructing a psychological profile that attempts to explain how a woman can murder her own children. The answer, she suggests, lies in the combination of a sadistic convent education, terrible headaches and the “parental solicitude” offered by Hitler that she felt herself to have been denied. The most troubling passages take the form of teenage journal entries by the Goebbels’s eldest child, Helga, whose experience in the bunker during the fall of Berlin reads like a grotesque obverse of Anne Frank’s diary. But there have been two recent attempts to tell Helga’s story – Chocolate Cake with Hitler by Emma Craige and The Girl in the Bunker by Tracey Rosenberg; and although Ziervogel mixes fact with fiction, she makes no reference to the explanatory letter Magda Goebbels left behind: “I took the children with me for they are too good for the life that would follow.” Maybe that’s just as well, since it sums up everything you need to know.

Alfred Hickling in the Guardian