Field Study: Stories

A young biologist, running tests for pollution in a border area between two countries, tries to form a relationship with a local woman and her son. A young single mother tries to cope with a difficult, hard-to-reach child. A promising architect has some kind of mental breakdown. A child has some type of mental breakdown, shattering the life of his family. An elderly beekeeper finds himself responsible for a lost child. The young woman from the first story embarks on a hopeless journey in search of the husband who abandoned her. Such are the stories making up this slender volume. And what happens? Do any of these characters learn from their experiences, turn their situations around, or achieve redemption? Sadly, no. At best, relief, or acceptance. The stories, most of which take place somewhere in Eastern Europe, after the fall of communism, are uniformly dark and brooding. They are written in a literary style with excruciating description, lots of adjectives. Author Rachel Seiffert is clearly talented, but sometimes her choice of words misses the mark, sometimes in a way that is jarring. She seems to like alliteration, and sometimes gets a bit carried away with it. The stories don't really come to a satisfying ending, they just sort of--end. Seiffert's characters are intriguing and they do draw the reader in, but, they never seem to grow or learn, they never laugh, and they never triumph. They tend to be kind, good people who want to do the right thing. As a reader I kept hoping for something good to happen to them. If you like this kind of dark, literary fiction, you might like Field Study. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber