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A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies
 
 

A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies (Paperback)

by John Murray (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Viking; Open Market Ed edition
  • ISBN-10: 0670913480
  • ISBN-13: 978-0670913480
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 2,864,840 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

John Murray trained as a doctor, and his debut collection of stories, A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies, reveals its author's background. Not all of his characters are physicians, but they tend to share a doctor's ability to concentrate on details and compartmentalise emotions. In "The Hill Station", the American-born daughter of Indian parents returns to India, where she speaks at a conference on infectious diseases. She is charged with new, ungovernable feelings when she finally meets actual patients suffering from the disease in which she is a specialist; previously, she had only known cholera under a microscope. Murray bumps his heroine into a new, looser way of living as she travels deeper into dirty, disease-ridden India.

In the title story, a doctor mourns the loss of his sister and comes to terms with his family history, all the while examining butterflies. In "Blue", a climber ascends a Himalayan peak under dire circumstances and encounters ghostly memories of his father. These stories of frustrated, intelligent achievers can recall Mark Helprin, and Murray has, too, some of Helprin's ambitious scope. These stories aren't as crystalline as Helprin's, but that's a small complaint to lodge about an elegant first collection. --Claire Dederer, Amazon.com --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning..., 10 Jul 2004
...and I don't use that word lightly. Short stories are not popular with general readers and `A Few Short Notes...' is unfortunately hampered by a bad cover and a non-fiction sounding title. Murray writes about extra-ordinary situations, and the psychology of the people who deal with them as the somehow ordinary part of their lives. But these extremes are just an extension of how we all are, and I was left with a greater understanding of people in my own life, whom I had only partially understood. These stories of beauty and horror are precisely written and may leave some readers unmoved. They are similar without becoming repetitive. Some are surprising, some just quietly linger in the mind. They are as ambigious and paradoxical as the human mind. They contain hope without being hopeful, and despair and desolation without being nihilistic. They have a power that did `stun' me and I know I will go back to them again and again.
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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Leave Lepidoptera to Nabokov., 7 Jul 2004
By A Customer
Yeah I admired the style, I admired the hurt and misery.
You can almost hear the Iowa Workshop faculty behind every measured and crafted sentence. There is much to admire here but well, if I'm honest it just didn't move me. I hate butterflies in fiction, don't you? Why doesn't anybody write about plankton?
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