Customer Reviews

Yesterday's Weather

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"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.

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

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.

If you like a challenge, read these exquisite short stories. It's a promise that you haven't read prose like this before. Enright will surprise you with every story....with her words bashing against each other. I turned around and am reading the stories again. They are ever better the second time around.

It felt like all the stories were the same by the time I was half way through the book. Having read a review prior to purchase, I was disappointed it didn't live up to my expectations.

There are several themes in the numerous short stories in this book. Loss, infedelity, grief are but to name a few. To be honest, I enjoyed the writing style at first, but perhaps the number of stories overshadowed that..after a while, it felt like the book would never end.

This was my first Enright book, and maybe I shouldn't have started off with a collection of 20+ short stories. Like I said, I liked the style. I enjoyed the first couple of stories but then the rest seemed to be replicas of each other.

The only story that stands out in my memory (because the rest seem to have just blended with each other) is "My Little Sister". A young woman replays events of her little sister's life, her sister's aneroxia. Snippets of memories that were artfully constructed, but then the ending was not satisfying. All the same, this was one of the good ones, haunting and realistic.

Great writing but inconsistent stories and characters - feels more like sketches for deeper portraits rather than complete short stories.

One error that drove me crazy is that in one story, "Little Sister", a crucial plot point revolves around the absence of the sister for 91 days. This time length is emphasized and repeated, and yet the actual dates given are from July 14 to Sept 13, or just 60 days ! How could this be? How did this story get written and edited without this glitch being noticed and being corrected? It's just one example but may be an indicator of the incompleteness on display here.

Despite all this, Anne Enright shows wonderful insight and promise, as demonstrated in her magnificent "Gathering", and I look forward to reading her for years to come.

This book is comprised of 29 short stories, all of them in chapter format. Somewhere along the line, I missed understanding this, so for the first 6 chapters, I could not find the connection between the characters. DUH! I went back and read the "inside cover" to discover that I was on the wrong reading path and needed to re-start the book.

I love short stories and usually devour a book that contains them. This book, however, I had a bit more trouble with. It's almost as though a chapter, for me, is too short for a "short story." I need, for my PERSONAL TASTE, more depths to the characters and the stories. Like, in Unaccustomed Earth, the stories were rich and just the perfect length for my taste. This book, however, the stories were too short. Now, this may be just me. I realize that.

Enright does a great job in her prose and her absurdly EXCELLENT writing skills. Her ability to describe a setting and its characters is WONDERFUL. I just didn't get enough of the stories I liked... and wanted to skip the stories that held no interest for me. It's almost as if I feel guilty about my reading or review of this book... like I need to take WAY MORE TIME and approach it with a different mind-set to fully appreciate this work.

This book may be up so many other's alleys.. and, this may just be me. She, obviously, is an INCREDIBLE writer. I just couldn't connect with Yesterday's Weather, for the most part. There are some chapters, like "Until the Girl Died," that I loved. And, others that were just outside of my realm of understanding and taste. But, do not let that preclude you from reading this book if you are interested in it. This book may be your favorite! Again, I think it's just me. This writer seems to have the ability to look into the psyche's of others unlike anything I've ever seen. So, give it a chance if you like short stories and interesting takes on the "norm."

On Sher's "One Out of Ten Scale:"
Like, Being Written, I don't want to give this book a rating because it's so different from the books that I normally gravitate torwards. This author is obviously SO TALENTED and, I'm sure it's just me on this one. But, in my PERSONAL opinion, which others may plainly disagree with, I have to give this book a 5. Some chapters... a definite 8... but, overall, for me, a 5. There are just some of the short stories that left me thinking... "what?" or "what else?" I'm sorry Ms. Enright.... I really did look forward to this book and PAID FULL PRICE PLUS SHIPPING FOR IT. (Oh, the guilt over the 5).

Yesterday's Weather is a book about women and family in Ireland, i.e., realism. The focus is on domesticity: women come to terms with child-rearing and marriage. The characters tend to pull together so that the stories inspire optimism and stability. Emotion and bravery imbue the interconnections among characters. Enright draws scenarios full of guts and intimacy. The reader can empathize with the characters when they win or lose. Enright crafts language and plays with it to enlarge the characterization. I had read "The Pleasures of Eliza Lynch" written by Enright. The protagonist had come from Ireland and was sailing to South America as the paramour of the head of a country. The novel and the stories have females and family as the focus though politics or society is the background.

I had heard great things about this collection of stories, as being a great, postmodern sample of Irish life. There are some touching stories -- about an anorexic girl, or an aging woman living next to an aging, blind man who finally asks for help by banging on pipes -- and Enright at times is great at bringing out raw emotion on paper. But so (too) many stories are defined by bad sex, or an affair, or some other sexual twist, leaving the reader to think that's all there is in Ireland.