Yesterday's Weather [Paperback]

Anne Enright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2009

Man Booker winner Anne Enright’s story collectionYesterday’s Weatheris a series of moving glimpses into the lives of ordinary men and women struggling with the bonds of love, family, and community in an increasingly disconnected world. It exhibits the arresting images and subversive wit that mark Enright as one of the most thrillingly gifted writers of our time.
Yesterday’s Weathershows us a rapidly changing Ireland, a land of family and tradition, but also, increasingly, of organic radicchio, cruise-ship vacations, and casual betrayals. An artisan farmer seethes at the patronage of a former Catholic-school classmate, now a successful restaurateur; a bride cuckolds her rich husband with an old college friend—a madman who refuses his pills, disappears for weeks on end, and plays the piano like a dream. Still more startling than loss or deception are the ways in which people respond: a wife raging at her husband’s infidelity must weigh the real stakes after his affair takes a tragic turn; confronted with a similar situation, a woman decides to cheat with, rather than against, her man. Sharp, tender, never predictable, their sum is a vibrant tapestry of people struggling to find contentment with one another—and with themselves.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this overstuffed collection from Booker Prize–winner Enright (The Gathering), the gems are overshadowed by the sheer number of stories (there are 31). Enright's talent lies in her ability to tweak an ordinary situation and create something that is at once unique and universal: two wives coming to different conclusions about their husbands' infidelities in Until the Girl Died and The Portable Virgin, an examination of elevator and pregnancy etiquette in Shaft or the permutations of sexual desire in Revenge. Other standouts such as Little Sister and Felix resonate because of their tight focus. In the former, the narrator pieces together her dead sister's life and realizes It was all just bits. I really wanted it to add up to something, but it didn't. In Felix, Enright riffs on Lolita and creates an endearing and repulsive middle-aged woman narrator who has an affair with a neighborhood boy. But too often Enright's characters—more often than not female, first-person narrators—bleed into one another until their stories become jumbled in the reader's mind, as another unhappy wife or mother laments her situation. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Irish writer Enright is a sly and scintillating examiner of the human condition, and nowhere do her rapier-like observations probe more flawlessly than in this adroit and frisky collection of short stories exploring the urgency and delicacy of contemporary relationships. Whether illicit, complacent, raucous, or joyous, love, sex, and everything in between is fair game. Enright’s themes are lush and elaborate, and fraught with more than a hint of danger. From a daughter who suspects her mother of adultery to a middle-aged widow confronting an inappropriately timed pregnancy, Enright’s heroines, especially, are a multifarious lot, full of zesty emotions and slender motives tempered with self-doubt and recriminations. Elsewhere, through precise vignettes of ordinary domesticity, conciliatory husbands and confrontational wives labor to conceal tantalizing friction in scenes that tremble with subtle energy. Through dialogue that sparkles with a savory nonchalance, Enright’s characters and their situations are made both recognizable and foreign, ensuring her readers a transformative and buoyant escapade into the heart of a sensuous society. --Carol Haggas --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 308 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; First Trade Paper Edition edition (June 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802144322
• ISBN-13: 978-0802144324
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #749,748 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Bad Sex Decade, November 22, 2008

By 

Sarang Gopalakrishnan (Urbana, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Yesterday's Weather: Stories (Hardcover)

"Yesterday's Weather" collects a couple of decades' worth of short stories, arranged in reverse chronological order. The later stories are much like the earlier ones, though on average slightly more polished. Anne Enright's talent is for short stories rather than novels, and among short stories for the extended prose poem rather than the novella; the stories in this book are infinitely more satisfying than her ill-conceived (though locally brilliant) novel "The Gathering," and many of the best -- like the first one, "Until the Girl Died" -- are just a few pages. This is emphatically not a book to read through; Enright is a great master in a single key -- domestic dissatisfaction intermitted by moments of surprising tenderness -- but her stories are not notable for their variety of subject matter. (Bad sex is for her what daffodils were for Wordsworth.)

The prose is usually excellent, and often beyond praise. There are a few lapses when Enright steps out of her comfort zone -- narrating a story in a teenage girl's voice, say; the "likes" aren't in, like, the right places -- but these are quite rare. What I find most appealing about her voice is its combination of poise with violent freshness. The descriptions are often poetry, e.g. a man "setting [his baby] down on its stomach to swim its way across the carpet." And then there's the perfect fingering: "The sex, when it happened, an aimless battering around the nub of him, which was sadly distant and, she supposed, numb with drink." (From a story titled "The Bad Sex Weekend," which as the NYT reviewer said would fit the entire book.) Apart from these stylistic virtues, I find the sensibility behind these stories fascinatingly edgy. The subject matter goes beautifully with the sensibility; it is very valuable to have the tawdry sanctities of marriage, childbirth, and mothering cut open by such a sharp and unflinching writer.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars just great reading, October 18, 2008

By 

aj "aj" (mo USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Yesterday's Weather: Stories (Hardcover)

This book of short stories was good from the first page to the last.
I would highly recommend this.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good writing, fair stories, October 23, 2008

By 

Brad Teare (Providence, Utah, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Yesterday's Weather: Stories (Hardcover)

The quality of writing in this collection is consistent but unfortunately so is the emotional effect.

Although the stories ostensibly range from the mundane to the disturbing the real narrative always hovers close to sex and a bleary animal wistfulness, similar to the vague longing of a Raymond Carver novel, but without the focus or variety.

Some people are good writers without being good story tellers. The writing took me away but I often wished it was somewhere else and in the company of more complex and interesting characters.