Customer Reviews

A medicine for melancholy

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Some of Bradbury's books have retained all their power extraordinarily well: Farenheit 451, Martian Chronicles, and Dandelion Wine are my favorites. Those novels (to use the term rather loosely) exemplefy Bradbury's imaginative charm, warmth, and meaningfulness. A Medicine for Melancholy is not nearly so sturdy as those books, but is nonetheless an enjoyable, if light, experience. Bradbury presents short stories, some of them only a few pages in length, that deal largely with people's internal struggles with lonliness, homesickness, or love.

Someone who may be familiar with Bradbury through, say, Farenheit 451 will probably want to sample some other Bradbury before taking this book. But for someone who is already an established fan, this slim volume will be a welcome addition. It has the customary Bradbury whimsy that is so striking about his books; though it fails to branch out beyond the sort of ground the Bradbury has covered numerous times before, there are worse things than repeating yourself, when you have something good to say.

This is a particularly modest collection from short story master Ray Bradbury; one that is not likely to win any new converts to his uniquely hushed, calming, understated fiction. Instead of rhetorical fireworks, Bradbury employs an almost poetic tone that tends to have a comforting, lullaby effect. Fans of Bradbury's style will certainly enjoy the delicate moods he evokes amid vast, silent landscapes, but less committed readers may be displeased to find so little in the science fiction vein with which Bradbury has been so successful. There isn't much horror in this volume, either - only "Fever Dream" achieves the level of helpless terror that makes this genre work. Nor is humor his real strength - only the two Irish tales, "The First Night of Lent" and "The Great Collision of Monday Last," make any real attempt at being amusing. Perhaps what Bradbury best provides here is sympathy. His protagonists (both male and female) are often characterized by a quiet yearning, an emptiness inside that makes their lives seem a chore rather than a joy, and the plot generally revolves around the question of how (or whether) this inner need is satisfied. Thus a middle-aged man's hunger for great art, (as in "In a Season of Calm Weather"), a young woman's need for love (in "A Medicine for Melancholy"), an immigrant family's homesickness (in "The Strawberry Window"), and an elderly man's longing for rain (in "The Day It Rained Forever"), all become important, not because they matter too much in themselves, but because Bradbury looks at them so very closely. These aren't life or death issues; they are things that occur inside the hearts of human beings and nowhere else. Yet somehow Bradbury's great sympathy for these people is evident in the very detail with which he describes his characters and the humdrum ordinariness of their lives. There's beauty in these quiet, slow motion stories, but many just seem to fade in and out with scarcely a whimper. So while Bradbury's longtime fans will surely enjoy this sample of the master's work, it's probably worth re-iterating that those readers who consider Bradbury's prose boring and tedious will find nothing here to change their minds.