A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies : Stories

Rating:
Summary: A gorgeous first work of fiction!
Review: It might be possible to read through this book quickly, just as it might be possible to chug down a bottle of vintage wine, but I wouldn't recommend it. Murray's stories - full of subtleties and set on several continents - deserve to be savored. In particular, I loved "The Carpenter Who Looked Like A Boxer," the story of a man who has built a life for himself and his children after being abandoned by his wife. Most impressive is that, while most of the stories deal with themes of loss, abandonment and difficult decisions about life, their impact is one of beauty and hope - and I hope we'll see more from this writer!

Rating:
Summary: Frightening depths balanced by heights of beauty
Review: John Murray, the author of this debut collection of eight short stories, trained as a doctor and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a teaching-writing fellow. He currently lives in Iowa.

The title story, "A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies," was selected by Joyce Carol Oates for the Best New American Voices 2002 fiction anthology.

Striking the keynote theme and mood of the collection as a whole, a lepidopterist in this story says, "The average life span of an adult monarch butterfly is four weeks. Four weeks to be a momentary burst of color and to reproduce. There is a painful transience to it all. They are nothing but a drop of color in the ocean. A fleeting moment that dazzles and blinds, and then is gone forever. There is something about the transience and the beauty of these insects that gets into your blood. Butterflies are a metaphor for life. Beautiful, fleeting, fragile, incomprehensible."

In "The Hill Station," Elizabeth Dinakar, the American-born daughter of Indian parents, travels from Atlanta to the filthy, pestilential slums of Bombay, India, and to the hospital tents in the Jogeshwari slums, where she witnesses the ravaging effects of cholera.

In "All the Rivers in the World," Vitek Kerolak, a man who is afraid not so much of the sea itself but of the concept of the sea, travels to Key West, Florida, to reestablish contact with his estranged father.

In "White Flour" we meet a woman who does not believe in sparing her children. "Give it to them straight," she says. "Let them understand that life is a cruel mistress, nothing pretty about it."

In "Watson and the Shark," a young American trauma surgeon is counseled to develop a philosophy of disaster. Wounded by insurgent rebels in the jungles of central Africa, he bribes his attackers and forsakes those whom he came to save.

In "The Carpenter Who Looked Like a Boxer," Danny Dalton didn't like the idea of dark things living in his walls. Abandoned by his wife, solid, reliable, dependable Danny must care for their two children. Stress begins to take its toll, as Danny begins hearing noises in the wall of the house he built as a wedding gift.

In "Blue" a mountain climber traverses the ice-blue world of a Himalayan peak. The ghostly memories he has of his deceased father soon turn into a nightmare.

In "Acts of Memory, Wisdom of Man," an elderly man recalls the turbulent summer of 1968, the Vietnam protest marches, and the chain of events that shaped his brother's tragic fate.

John Murray takes us to exotic places: the jungles of Amazonia, New Guinea, and central Africa; Sri Lanka and the slums of Bombay and Calcutta; Kathmandu and the Himalayan chain.

His stories deal with pride and fear; impotence, infidelity, and miscarriage; plague and disease; refugee camps and displaced people; lost dreams and failed ambitions; murder and suicide; senility and madness; death and devastation.

Murrary doesn't believe in sparing his readers. Give it to them straight, he says, let them understand that life is a cruel mistress, nothing pretty about it. His characters doggedly and desperately seek order amidst chaos, discipline to overcome anarchy, the light of logic and reason to counter the darkness of superstition, and the fine precision of the scientific method as a shield against ignorance.

But this is not the whole story. Murray skillfully tempers science with art. Writing in a beautiful, poetic prose that brushes against one's cheeks like Angels' breath, he tempers brutal realism with dreamlike romanticism. He counterbalances Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection with musings on the transcendental, inscrutable mystery of life.

Such a juxtaposition may at first seem strange, but an artistic symmetry emerges in Murray's stories between the determinism of the outer world and the freedom of the inner world. I prefer to call this literary phenomenon "visionary existentialism."

In Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau writes: "When I had mapped the pond, I laid a rule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth."

A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies illustrates a similar congruence of art and science. Blending rational intelligence with romantic passion, Murray writes with an astonishing maturity. There are frightening depths here and heights of beauty.

Roy E. Perry of Nolensville is an amateur philosopher and Civil War buff. He is an advertising copywriter at a Nashville Publishing House.

Rating:
Summary: I had butterflies in my stomach!
Review: Wow, my gut wretched at the stench of the medical tent in the slums of India. I could feel the warm, moist South Florida air early in the morning. I could smell and almost taste the exotic scents and flavors from around the world as this facinating(and promising) new author treated my senses and emotions to many thrills. Feeling the pain of a fathers' duty and final escape from it. Sharing the fear of a son that he had been made in the same image and needed to rescue the father, only to find his own salvation. Insightful to say the least. This book has intelligence, insight and intrige (the three "I's" of successful short story writing).

The characters were a grand collection of individuals who focused their lives around order and science, yet experienced (or yearned to experience) great adventure, love and emotion.

Brav-O I say to John. And Brav-O to Valerie, whomever she is!