"Hilary Mantel called Fieldwork "a quirky, often brilliant debut, bounced along by limitless energy, its wry tone not detracting from its thoughtfulness." Stephen King said it was "a story that cooks like a mother." Now Mischa Berlinski returns with his second novel, Peacekeeping, an equally enthralling story of love, politics, and death in the world's most intriguing country. When Terry White, a former deputy sheriff and a failed politician, goes broke in the 2007-2008 financial crisis, he takes a job working for the UN, helping to train the Haitian police. He's sent to the remote town of Jérémie, where there are more coffin makers than restaurants, more donkeys than cars, and the dirt roads all slope down sooner or later to the postcard sea. Terry is swept up in the town's complex politics when he befriends an earnest, reforming American-educated judge. Soon he convinces the judge to oppose the corrupt but charismatic Sénateur Maxim Bayard in an upcoming election. When Terry falls in love with the judge's wife, the electoral drama threatens to become a disaster. Tense, atmospheric, tightly plotted, and surprisingly funny, Peacekeeping confirms Berlinski's gifts as a storyteller. Like Fieldwork, it explores a part of the world that we neither understand nor control--and takes us into the depths of the human soul, where the thirst for power and the need for love can overrun judgment and morality"--
While plenty has been written, fiction and nonfiction, about Haiti's political disgraces, natural disasters, cultural enigmas and entrenched dysfunction, Mischa Berlinski's new novel stands out for doing far more than dramatizing news headlines about the beleaguered Caribbean nation.
On its surface, "Peacekeeping" is about international intervention in Haiti. It also would be tidy to sum up his debut, "Fieldwork," a finalist for the National Book Award, as a novel about anthropological studies in Thailand. Neither description really covers the ways in which Berlinski probes the failures of language when stories told by foreigners converge with stories told by locals.
Read more from my review for AP here: http://apne.ws/1QJm2iu
