Fiction, American Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects
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Overview
These vivid and compelling tales, many set in Africa and Asia, are about immigrants and others facing change and dislocation. The science is never pedantic; indeed the language of biology and natural history is used to great lyrical effect. The stories are accomplished and seasoned, remarkably so given that this is the author’s first book. Murray is adept at holding together a complex narrative and creating characters who reach out emotionally to the reader upon first meeting.
Global in scope, classical in form, evocative of place, and deeply emotional, this collection marks the beginning of what promises to be an illustrious career.
Synopsis
In this remarkably assured debut collection, doctors, scientists, explorers, and collectors face the emotional battles of love, loss, and obsession in exotic locations.
The New York Times
Like his characters, Mr. Murray, who trained as a doctor before he became a teaching-writing fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop, has a fascination with detail, with the tiny, distinguishing specifics that can reveal a person's mood, presage an illness or define a place. Many of his people in A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies focus on details as a way of achieving detachment, but in Mr. Murray's case, his orchestration of psychological and physical details results in stories that are as affecting as they are suspenseful. The best of these tales combine the narrative tension of an old-fashioned yarn with the emotional density of Alice Munro's fiction, compressing entire lives into a handful of pages while exposing the secrets and nightmares that connect one family member to another — Michiku Kakutani
Editorials
The Observer (UK)
"Iridescent"Washington Post Book World
"A terrific collection.Charlotte Observer
"Remarkable. These are intelligent, sensitive stories. Readers will do well to watch for more from this gifted writer."San Diego Tribune
"The eight stories in John Murray’s first short-story collection achieve, individually and - collectively, an extraordinary impact and depth."Daily Mail (London)
"Compelling, compassionate, and quietly inspirational, each of these modest tales is as satisfying as a novel ...exquisite."Booklist (starred)
“Stunning short story collection…writer to watch.”Boston Globe
"Teeming with...high-stakes wisdom, Murray’s stories offer a map of possibility where anything can happen."San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
Murray’s stories are what you might get if you combined Ethan Canin, Andrea Barrett and Jhumpa Lahiri with Anton Chekhov.Los Angeles Times
"This wise, compassionate and exquisite book valiantly wrestles with the eternal dichotomy of mind and body."Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"Elegant...sensitive. His writing talent has no limit."Book Forum
"Beguiling…an astute debut collection."International Herald Tribune
"Fiction that holds firmly to scientific principles and comes with a harrowing edge of reality."Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Brilliant...Murray weaves his experience...into gorgeous narratives."Buffalo News
"Remarkable...marks the debut of an extraordinary American writer."(starred) -
"Stunning short story collection…writer to watch."Ann Patchett
"Brilliant.... How lucky for all of us that he chose to write fiction."Muriel Spark
"Murray’s stories are a genuine cultural breakthrough….Adventures of the mind, rich in human feeling…departures from any other…fiction.Michiko Kakutani
"Stories that are as affecting as they are suspenseful....Mr. Murray has made an impressive and assured debut."Joyce Carol Oates
"Ambitious, varied, and strong…. To say that Murray…is a prodigious talent is something of an understatement."Jack Kemp
"You leave his stories feeling you have been in the company....of an impressive writer [and] human being."Abraham Verghese
"These stories linger with you like a delicious aftertaste."Los Angeles Times
“This wise, compassionate and exquisite book valiantly wrestles with the eternal dichotomy of mind and body.”Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Brilliant...Murray weaves his experience...into gorgeous narratives.”International Herald Tribune
“Fiction that holds firmly to scientific principles and comes with a harrowing edge of reality.”Boston Globe
“Teeming with...high-stakes wisdom, Murray’s stories offer a map of possibility where anything can happen.”Charlotte Observer
“Remarkable. These are intelligent, sensitive stories. Readers will do well to watch for more from this gifted writer.”Buffalo News
“Remarkable...marks the debut of an extraordinary American writer.”Book Forum
“Beguiling…an astute debut collection.”San Diego Tribune
“The eight stories in John Murray’s first short-story collection achieve, individually and - collectively, an extraordinary impact and depth.”Washington Post Book World
“A terrific collection.Daily Mail (London)
“Compelling, compassionate, and quietly inspirational, each of these modest tales is as satisfying as a novel ...exquisite.”San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“As gorgeous and breathtaking as the winged marvels of the title...stories such as these remind us what constitutes humanity.”Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Elegant...sensitive. His writing talent has no limit.”The Observer (UK)
“Iridescent”The New York Times
Like his characters, Mr. Murray, who trained as a doctor before he became a teaching-writing fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop, has a fascination with detail, with the tiny, distinguishing specifics that can reveal a person's mood, presage an illness or define a place. Many of his people in A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies focus on details as a way of achieving detachment, but in Mr. Murray's case, his orchestration of psychological and physical details results in stories that are as affecting as they are suspenseful. The best of these tales combine the narrative tension of an old-fashioned yarn with the emotional density of Alice Munro's fiction, compressing entire lives into a handful of pages while exposing the secrets and nightmares that connect one family member to another — Michiku KakutaniThe Washington Post
I read A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies over eight nights, one story each evening. By the third and fourth day, I found myself looking forward to the evening's task, and by the seventh and eighth day I was picking up the book in the late afternoon, assuring myself that surely it was already nighttime somewhere. — Tom MillerBeth Kephart
This debut collection of short stories is searing and mature, exacting and quietly provocative. A doctor who has worked in such developing areas as Gaza, Burundi and Ethiopia, Murray brings enormous wisdom—as well as the unexpected detail—to the fictional tales he tells about physicians, scientists and men of the sea who seek to better understand the physical and spiritual forces that have shaped them. The title story explores the emotional paralysis of an aging surgeon who tries to fathom his own tormented soul by remembering his grandfather's obsession with butterflies. "All the Rivers in the World" ties together several seemingly disparate story lines about a father, a son and the father's mistress, whose experience as a nurse working with refugees in Africa teaches her about her own limitations and enables the warring father and son to come to terms with their own. Mesmerizing, intelligent and forceful, this is a rare, memorable collection.Publishers Weekly
Spinella turns in a smart, crisp performance of these achingly personal stories that take place at the crossroads of a variety of characters' lives. The prerequisite here is a penchant for impersonation, as formal British, cockney, and, especially, Indian accents abound. Spinella, a veteran stage actor, handles them all more than passably, demonstrating a flair for the Indian characters in particular. That his reading is otherwise largely unremarkable is actually an excellent thing in this case, as the stories are so replete with vivid detail and finely etched characters that it seems a narrator's only fault could be getting in the way. Instead, Spinella eschews bombast (except in the case of a frustrated wife in the title story) and reads with a style that echoes that of the writing itself: simple, even and subtle. These are beautifully crafted, honest portrayals of people in the throes of life. And no matter how far-flung the locales-from the cholera-ridden streets of hardscrabble Bombay to a U.N. refugee camp under attack in Africa-the stories' messages are sure to hit home. Simultaneous release with the HarperCollins hardcover (Forecasts, Feb. 10). (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
In this award-winning fiction debut, Murray channels his understanding of human anatomy and disease (he is a medical doctor) into writing that bristles with emotive power. The eight stories, some of which are set in exotic locations such as India, deal with the universal theme of characters immersed in difficult situations, struggling with the choices and actions that they or other family members have made, with science and medicine as a unifying theme. In "The Hill Station," a female microbiologist who is more comfortable around bacteria than humans ruminates on her life while observing cholera and its widespread devastation in Bombay. Murray's imagery vibrates in the depiction of these exotic environments, provoking the reader's senses with a mastery of the technicalities of mortality that ineluctably elicits compassion. These "few short notes" are filled with profound, purgative human emotions leading to distinctive liberations for their characters. Highly recommended for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/02.]-Colleen Lougen, Mt. St. Mary Coll. Lib., Newburgh, NY Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
As gorgeous and breathtaking as the winged marvels of the title. Compassionate stories such as these remind us what constitutes humanity.Buffalo News
In a great tradition of writer/physicians, John Murray is an utterly remarkable new one.... Science and medicine may be both subject and method in many of these remarkable stories but so too are they formed by a profound poetry and ease of metaphor that mark an emergent writer of remarkable gifts...this book marks the debut of an extraordinary American writer.Kirkus Reviews
Murray, himself an MD, debuts with eight stories that draw their strengths from medicine and arcane subject matter. The people and situations seem real, and the splashes of science and lingering nostalgia ("He will remember the sounds of the market through the open window. But it is the unopened letter that he will remember most clearly") make for fiction that will appeal to fans of, say, Ethan Canin and The English Patient. The title story's aging surgeon's marriage to a much younger and eventually pregnant Indian doctor, Maya, serves as contrast to his grandfather's obsession with butterflies, the largest species of which he will consume human flesh to obtain. But when the grandson begins to obsess too, will the old butterfly collection come along with the curse of the grandfather's suicide and possibly interfere with the pregnancy? A young man in "All the Rivers in the World" journeys to Florida to retrieve his father, who has shacked up with a woman half his age, while "White Flour" is another wacky father-abandonment piece. "Watson and the Shark" concerns doctors in Africa tending to the knifed masses in an atrocity, and "The Carpenter who Looked Like a Boxer" finds a young cuckold hearing phantom termites in his house a year after his masochistic wife has left. The final story, "Acts of Memory, Wisdom of Man," is another powerful patriarch doctor/bug setup, though this time the whole family is Indian and the bugs are beetles. Murray often refers to great writers but rarely pulls the stops and tries actually to write like them, even when it seems within his scope. "There are a thousand interesting facts about beetles, each of which teaches us something important about the nature oflife," the final father tells us. But this begs the question of Murray's work: What happens when you take away all the fascinating factoids? Well-practiced, from a voice we'll surely hear from again. Author tourBook Details
Published
January 1, 2004
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Pages
288
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780060509293