Yesterday's Weather: Stories (Hardcover)

~ Anne Enright (Author)
Key Phrases: bed department, Sir David, Kevin Daly, Tom Delaney (more...)

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.)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com The Irish writer Anne Enright won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for The Gathering, her ruthless, gorgeous novel about the power of secrets in family life. Enright's new book, Yesterday's Weather, is a collection of short stories written over the course of 19 years. It is interesting to encounter a powerful writer going free-range and operating outside the demands of a novel. Enright's subjects are family, children, love, domestic horror. The stories are strong and hard bitten. Something in them is always snagging and catching on grief, large or small. She is a confident writer, letting stories unfold at their own speed. Her best pieces have a fluid shape that feels close to the way we actually think, choose, muse. Some pieces, like "Until the Girl Died," are about the awful parts of marriage: tales of domestic hell, the contemporary Irish variety. Others are grounded in the ordinary life that seems to appeal to few American writers these days. "Caravan," for example, about a rainy family holiday on the cheap in France, is just the sort of cutting, generous, surprising story that Raymond Carver might have written, had he been an Irishwoman. The title story, "Yesterday's Weather," has to do with babies and in-laws, "nappies" and snot. Unpromising ingredients, but the story succeeds, even achieves a state of grace. Enright is often bloody-minded, never heartless. "The Cruise" is about aged parents and the limits of kinship, and feels awkwardly surprising and exactly true. "Little Sister" is about a girl dying of anorexia, told from the point of view of an older sister. Bare, fierce, daringly whimsical, it may be the strongest story in the collection, which is saying a lot. Some pieces are less successful. In "Honey," a woman on a business trip resolutely plans her seduction by a colleague, who reveals his awfulness. Enright's writing is so clear and supple here that the reader rereads, thinking he may have missed some essential line of connective tissue, but it does not seem to be there. Usually, though, Enright mixes ingredients just right, achieving that alluring instability the short story form seems to demand. Yesterday's Weather is a powerful book from a writer who speaks plainly and knows that hardly anything is quite as it seems.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 308 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (September 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802118747
• ISBN-13: 978-0802118745
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #383,696 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

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 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	Scott Lloyd (Manhattan, NY, USA) - See all my reviews

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.

2.0 out of 5 stars Less is More, October 9, 2009

By	N. M - See all my reviews

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

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.