Product Description

Each of these eight stories places readers at the treacherous intersection where chaos meets order. In "The Hill Station," a young microbiologist gains a fuller understanding of death, disease, and her own life when she witnesses the ravaged lives and despairing faces of those for whom cholera is more than germs swimming under a microscope. A collection that challenges readers to place themselves in the lives of characters whose predicaments and choices lead us inexorably toward our own.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1004031 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-27
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
John Murray trained as a doctor, and his debut collection of stories, A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies, reveals its author's background. Not all of his characters are physicians, but they tend to share a doctor's ability to concentrate on details and compartmentalise emotions. In "The Hill Station", the American-born daughter of Indian parents returns to India, where she speaks at a conference on infectious diseases. She is charged with new, ungovernable feelings when she finally meets actual patients suffering from the disease in which she is a specialist; previously, she had only known cholera under a microscope. Murray bumps his heroine into a new, looser way of living as she travels deeper into dirty, disease-ridden India.

In the title story, a doctor mourns the loss of his sister and comes to terms with his family history, all the while examining butterflies. In "Blue", a climber ascends a Himalayan peak under dire circumstances and encounters ghostly memories of his father. These stories of frustrated, intelligent achievers can recall Mark Helprin, and Murray has, too, some of Helprin's ambitious scope. These stories aren't as crystalline as Helprin's, but that's a small complaint to lodge about an elegant first collection. --Claire Dederer, Amazon.com

Customer Reviews

Stunning...
...and I don't use that word lightly. Short stories are not popular with general readers and `A Few Short Notes...' is unfortunately hampered by a bad cover and a non-fiction sounding title. Murray writes about extra-ordinary situations, and the psychology of the people who deal with them as the somehow ordinary part of their lives. But these extremes are just an extension of how we all are, and I was left with a greater understanding of people in my own life, whom I had only partially understood. These stories of beauty and horror are precisely written and may leave some readers unmoved. They are similar without becoming repetitive. Some are surprising, some just quietly linger in the mind. They are as ambigious and paradoxical as the human mind. They contain hope without being hopeful, and despair and desolation without being nihilistic. They have a power that did `stun' me and I know I will go back to them again and again.

Leave Lepidoptera to Nabokov.
Yeah I admired the style, I admired the hurt and misery.
You can almost hear the Iowa Workshop faculty behind every measured and crafted sentence. There is much to admire here but well, if I'm honest it just didn't move me. I hate butterflies in fiction, don't you? Why doesn't anybody write about plankton?