The weather in Bausch’s world is never better than overcast, but his craftsmanship lights up something fine in the gloom.
Interesting people in various painful predicaments find ways to muddle through.
The current collection of 14 stories from Bausch (Before, During, After, 2014, etc.), considered one of our living masters of fiction, demonstrates the author’s lightning-quick ability to develop complex, unique characters and situations, and the title tells a lot about its throughline. The “weather of the world” refers to the aspects of life that are out of our control, and the stories examine how we choose to make our peace with them—a theme made explicit in a story called “Map Reading,” about two gay siblings who, through circumstance and inertia, have been of no help to one another in their travails. The brother “had always been inclined to gloomy reflections. Friends remarked on it. With several of them he had formed a casual club that never met, called the Doom Brothers Club.” When his younger half sister wonders whether everyone in the world isn’t “living in sin,” he observes, “Everyone’s living in whatever weather there is where they are.” This story, like many in the collection, finishes on a note of lingering sadness, and several stories deal with male protagonists making big mistakes in romance. The cop in the first one, “Walking Distance,” pays the price for an excess of uxoriousness, while the painter in “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire” becomes distracted from the treasure he already has by one sparkling beyond his reach. The confessed adulterer in “We Belong Together” has an unpleasant surprise in store, and the newlywed in “The Hotel Macabre” makes the error of allowing his odious sister to join him and his bride on their honeymoon. In one of the few stories from a female point of view, “Night,” the male partner is a violent abuser; other stories examine damaged men from a closer perspective, particularly “Veterans Night,” about young men who have served in Iraq, and “Still Here, Still There,” about a near-centenarian pair from World War II.
The weather in Bausch’s world is never better than overcast, but his craftsmanship lights up something fine in the gloom.Pub Date: April 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49482-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
