Yesterday's Weather

by Anne Enright

Book Overview

Winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize, Anne Enright's novel The Gathering went on to become a national best seller acclaimed for its electrifying prose and haunting emotional resonance. Now, in Yesterday's Weather , Enright presents a series of deeply moving glimpses into a rapidly changing Ireland: a land of family and tradition, but also, increasingly, of organic radicchio, cruise-ship vacations, and casual betrayals. An artisan farmer seethes at...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802118747
• ISBN13: 9780802118745
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Stories to stir the emotions.

Yesterday's Weather is a book about women and family in Ireland, i.e., realism. The focus is on domesticity: women come to terms with child-rearing and marriage. The characters tend to pull together so that the stories inspire optimism and stability. Emotion and bravery imbue the interconnections among characters. Enright draws scenarios full of guts and intimacy. The reader can empathize with the characters when they win or lose. Enright crafts language and plays with it to enlarge the characterization. I had read "The Pleasures of Eliza Lynch" written by Enright. The protagonist had come from Ireland and was sailing to South America as the paramour of the head of a country. The novel and the stories have females and family as the focus though politics or society is the background.

The Bad Sex Decade

"Yesterday's Weather" collects a couple of decades' worth of short stories, arranged in reverse chronological order. The later stories are much like the earlier ones, though on average slightly more polished. Anne Enright's talent is for short stories rather than novels, and among short stories for the extended prose poem rather than the novella; the stories in this book are infinitely more satisfying than her ill-conceived (though locally brilliant) novel "The Gathering," and many of the best -- like the first one, "Until the Girl Died" -- are just a few pages. This is emphatically not a book to read through; Enright is a great master in a single key -- domestic dissatisfaction intermitted by moments of surprising tenderness -- but her stories are not notable for their variety of subject matter. (Bad sex is for her what daffodils were for Wordsworth.) The prose is usually excellent, and often beyond praise. There are a few lapses when Enright steps out of her comfort zone -- narrating a story in a teenage girl's voice, say; the "likes" aren't in, like, the right places -- but these are quite rare. What I find most appealing about her voice is its combination of poise with violent freshness. The descriptions are often poetry, e.g. a man "setting [his baby] down on its stomach to swim its way across the carpet." And then there's the perfect fingering: "The sex, when it happened, an aimless battering around the nub of him, which was sadly distant and, she supposed, numb with drink." (From a story titled "The Bad Sex Weekend," which as the NYT reviewer said would fit the entire book.) Apart from these stylistic virtues, I find the sensibility behind these stories fascinatingly edgy. The subject matter goes beautifully with the sensibility; it is very valuable to have the tawdry sanctities of marriage, childbirth, and mothering cut open by such a sharp and unflinching writer.

just great reading

This book of short stories was good from the first page to the last. I would highly recommend this.