A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies: Stories [Paperback]

John Murray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 4, 2003

In this remarkably assured and satisfying debut collection, John Murray seamlessly meshes fact with fiction, taking his inspiration from the worlds of science, medicine, and nature. The stories are set in intriguing locations across the globe -- a cholera tent in the slums of Bombay, a United Nations refugee camp in the mountains of Africa, a Key West hideaway -- where his characters, among them doctors, nurses, research scientists, explorers, and collectors, can be found reading The Manual of Clinical Microbiology or Gray's Anatomy or the Complete Textbook of Psychiatry.

And yet, despite the pull of the outer world, these stories are all about the internal world of emotions -- love, loss, obsession, and conflict -- and about families and how they survive. They unfold to tell of moments when people catch glimpses of their real selves, their pasts, and have flashes of understanding about their lives. In "The Hill Station," an American-born scientist is drawn to Bombay, the homeland of her parents, where she breaks free from the confines of her well-ordered life. The title story tells of an aging surgeon who uses his grandfather's collection of butterflies to try and make sense of his past. In "Blue" a young man -- still haunted by the tragic death of his father years earlier -- traverses the Himalayan mountain that would have been his father's last climb. In "Acts of Memory, Wisdom of Man," the son of Indian immigrants relives the summer of 1968, and the events that determined his brother's fate.

Vivid and alive, these stories reveal whole lives -- characters caught between the past and the present, between different cultures, and between their intellects and emotions. Global in scope, classical in form, evocative of place, this rich collection marks an exciting and original debut.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 compartmentalize 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 with the disease she specializes in; heretofore, 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 against an elegant first collection. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

The characters in this vibrant debut story collection-doctors, scientists and others drawn to precise order and logic-go to political and geographical extremes in search of a sense of purpose. A young American trauma surgeon in "Watson and the Shark" works for the Red Cross in a central African country. His craving for "life-or-death, all-or-nothing situations" is cruelly satisfied when he's shot by an armed rebel and his colleagues are forced to barter for their lives and abandon the people they went to the jungle to help. "The Hill Station" depicts a scientist in her immigrant parents' native Bombay seeking out the "real life" manifestation of the cholera bacteria she has spent her career studying in cool Atlanta laboratories. Overwhelmed by the horrors of the disease and the realization that an affair with a married colleague back home has left her pregnant, she flees the city and, on a bus headed to the tourist outpost of Mahabaleshwar, meets the man who will be a father to her unborn child. "The Carpenter Who Looked like a Boxer" is a beautifully restrained, vivid story about a gifted artisan trying to piece his life back together around the "great open wound" left by his wife's departure. Unlike many of Murray's characters, he doesn't try to run from his problems, but loses himself in his work and his two children instead. The only sign of strain is the strange, phantom burrowing sound that he hears in the walls of his house, a house he built for his wife. Murray's prose is strong and agile, rising to the drama of his scenarios without being overblown. His symbolism is occasionally too obvious, but this is a minor flaw; the affecting portraits make this collection emotionally resonant and enormously gratifying.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (March 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060509287
• ISBN-13: 978-0060509286
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,201,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Passion to Write Well, July 9, 2003

By 

Evelyn N. Bramhall (Newark, De USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies: Stories (Paperback)

I've met so many doctors over the years who have incredible talent in other areas. Some manage to balance a full career and still pursue their painting or their love of the cello until they retire to live amazingly long lives, fueled by their passion on which they can now totally focus.
I don't know what Dr. Murray's agenda will be, but I hope he can manage the balance between writing and a medical career. Murray understands the human heart. He has a great understanding of that one large or small situation or life event that hurls a person into choices they might never have made.
Add to this his knowledge of the exotic world and its suffering about which most of us are totally in the dark, his facinating data, probably collected over a lifetime, regarding entymology, and finally his amazing ability with language, and you've got a tremendous reading experience.
I envy anyone who has yet to read this debut of short stories. I grabbed it from the library after reading two Sunday newspaper reviews. I was so struck by his writing that I immediately sought out a signed edition. I can open it to any page and start reading prose that is closer to poetry.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than the sum of its parts, April 17, 2003

By 

penny altman (Prospect Harbor Maine) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies: Stories (Paperback)

John Murray is an Australian physician with a distinguished career in public health. He has traveled widely and worked in extraordinary, challenging situations that provide him with a wealth of material for these remarkable stories. He is a master of stunning, exquisite detail.

To the delight of this reader, he has used his experience and knowledge, not to dazzle us with exotic tales, nor to create clever insider stories, but to reflect on the human condition. On those occasions that he recounts the horrific experience (and there are some) of a well-intentioned and perhaps heroic professional in a foreign land, it becomes a source of reflection on how we perceive ourselves and how we manage our lives, wherever we live. It made me think.

Displacement is a theme in many of the stories. In an interview ...when asked why he was so interested in the immigrant experience, Murray responded that it was partly because he, himself, is an immigrant. His experience working with the displaced of the world has obviously also influenced his thinking. He posits that "the century we're living in is the century of displacement." But his vision is larger, I think. This is a century of displacement, not just for refugees, or emigres, but for all of us. Most of us are "on our own" these days, free from traditional constraints of the past. And we can identify our own dilemmas in those of his characters. They struggle with place, cultural inheritance, inclinations, their vision of themselves and who they insist they are. Is that familiar?

The stories are layered, moving in time and place across years and continents - there are stories within stories, all of which contribute to the density and realization of the central figure of each. And the delicacy of the writer's hand, the wonderful and specific details that are incorporated in the stories serve, not (just) to awe us with the wealth of his knowledge, but to construct beautiful, translucent containers that illuminate their contents - the characters he has created.

These are wonderful stories. The strength of the writing, the poetry, the surprising and often lovely images, the breadth and seriousness and the author's sensitivity make this collection a truly notable first offering. I am looking forward eagerly, to more.

Penny Altman ...

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thematically Focused and Written in a Lean Style, June 6, 2003

By 

FictionAddiction.NET - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies: Stories (Paperback)

From the first sentence, these stories have a simple, direct tone that is reminiscent of Hemingway. "On the first morning of the training in Bombay, just minutes before she collapsed, Elizabeth Dinakar stood in front of two hundred people in the conference hall, pointed up at the cholera bacteria magnified on the wall in front of her, and said, 'this is your enemy.'"

Every event feels urgent and full of vitality. Though the characters may have feelings that are often ambiguous, the style has a clarity that pulls the reader into the story.

Often in a collection of stories, there is little to indicate how or why these particular stories fit together. Such is not the case here. Thematically, the stories in A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies overlap quite a bit. The first story, "The Hill Station," crosses cultural boundaries, expresses an intimate familiarity with medical professions and explores the emotional isolation of a career professional. Variations on these themes are treated throughout the stories in this collection.

In exploring these themes, the protagonists are frequently introspective. They think and remember and think some more before taking the one decisive action that is pivotal to their lives and the climax of the story. These intensely analytical characters express their emotions through their obsessions. They are beetle collectors, mountain climbers and third world volunteer doctors.

As focused as the themes are between the stories, the settings are diverse. From the top of the Himalayas to the American Midwest, the author captures the essence of these locales and many more besides.

Each location has its own distinct personality that is conveyed by the vegetation and the weather, the sounds and smells, even the very feel of the wind and sun. All this adds richness and depth to this fine collection of stories.

The stories in this collection capture the poignant solitude that everyone faces in their lives from time to time. This is the bright start for Murray's writing career.

Overall, this collection of poignant stories is a treat. They show growth occurring through painful realizations of inadequacy.