Murray, John. A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies: Stories. New York: Perennial, 2004.
“A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies” is a psychological tragedy. You cannot help but feel sorry for the first person protagonist as he slowly loses his grip on his once secure life. As a plastic surgeon married to a neurosurgeon twenty years his junior he has turned to the bottle to reconcile the memory of the death of his sister, his grandfather’s suicide brought about by mental illness, his wife’s miscarriage and his own handed-down obsession with butterflies.
“Watson and the Shark” is a different kind of tragedy. A doctor volunteering in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is witness to the brutal injuries a boy suffers at the hands of machete-mad soldiers. He begins to operate on the critically wounded boy when hundreds of other severely wounded men, women and children are brought into his operating tent. In the beginning of the story the narrator feels like god, controlling the lives of the mangled patients under his knife. He has the power to stitch them together and potentially give them their life back. But, as he watches the multitude of mutilated suffer and die he begins to feel a hopelessness creep in.
Favorite lines, “She has buried herself so far in her knowledge of details that she cannot properly feel what is happening in her own life” (p 73).
Reason read: June is still short story month and this is my last set of short stories.
Author fact: A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies in John Murray’s debut collection of short stories.
Book trivia: There are eight stories that make up A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies but I am only reading two of them.
BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Good Things Come in Small Packages” (p 103).
~*LunaSea*~ 