A Medicine For Melancholy And Other Stories (1998) - Plot & Excerpts
Okay, now we're getting somewhere. More stories from Mars - presumably ones that didn't flow well in The Martian Chronicles, or perhaps they were written after that, as this book was published after that book. I'm trying to read them chronologically but each book is short stories published in various years so I don't think it really makes much of a difference.In a Season of Calm Weather: Starts with tourists from Ohio who run from the train through their hotel to bake by the ocean in southern France. I did the same thing when I went to a conference in Miami Beach - yes I just compared the two. I'd run out the ocean on lunch breaks, even mmid-morning breaks. Gotta soak it up!The End of the Beginning: Parents of the first astronaut worry about the liftoff. "Millions of years we fought gravity. When we were amoebas and fish we struggled to get out of the sea without gravity crushing us. Once safe onshore we fought to stay upright without gravity breaking our new invention, the spine, tried to walk without stumbling, run without falling."The Headpiece: I don't remember coming across this one. Amazing! I work with people who have brain injuries with varying degrees of success. I find neurotrauma fascinating but at the same time the work can be intensely unrewarding. This story tells about the troubles people can experience around brain injured people in a far gentler and intelligent way than I ever could. (duh because he's Ray Bradbury, I know). A young man buys a toupee to cover the hammer-induced hole in his forehead. He's healed fromt the injury but these things never heal completely. He encounters a neighbor he is in love with on their apartment house's front porch. He overshares and asks her to marry him. He gets a lukewarm reaction at best. At the end of the story, he dons the toupee and knocks on her apartment door. "Miss Naomi?" he called, smiling. The light under her door clicked out at the sound of his voice. He stared at the dark keyhole with disbelief. "Oh, Miss Naomi?" he said again, quickly. Nothing happened in the room. It was dark. After a moment he tried the knob experimentally. The knob rattled. He heard Miss Fremwell sigh. He heard her say something. Again the words were lost. Her small feet tapped to the door. The light came on. "Yes?" she said behind the panel. "Look, Miss Naomi," he entreated, "Open the door. Look." The bolt of the door snapped back. She jerked the door open about an inch. One of her eyes looked at him sharply. "Look," he announced proudly, adjusting the toupee so it very definitely covered the sunken crater. he imagined he saw himself in her bureau mirror and was pleased. "Look here, Miss Fremwell!" She opened the door a bit wider and looked. Then she slammed the door and locked it. From behind the thin paneling her voice was toneless. "I can still see the hole, Mr. Lemon,"she said.All Summer in a Day: A little girl's classmates lock her in a closet so she misses the 2 hours the sun shines on Venus every 7 years. I remember seeing this on TV as a kid.The Strawberry Window: My Sister and I have fond memories of the house we grew up in - a Victorian home from around the turn of the century - possibly the kind of house that inspired this story. "And ours was a nice house; my, it was old, eighty-ninety years or so. Used to hear the house talking at night, whispering away. All the dry wood, the banisters, the front porch, the sills. Wherever you touched, it talked to you. Every room a different way. And when you had the whole ho use talking, it was a family around you in the dark, putting you to sleep. No other house, the kind they build nowadays, can be the same. A lot of people have got to go through and live in a house to make it mellow down all over."
Here is a group of stories by one of the masters of the science fiction field.A young woman is bedridden with a baffling illness. Her family decides to bring her, and her bed, outside, on the street, to take advantage of the human tendency to give unsolicited medical advice to complete strangers. A group of male friends, of the same physical size, pool their resources to purchase an expensive white suit, which they will share. It is the sort of suit that is guaranteed to attract the ladies. A young boy is sick with what his doctor is certain is nothing more than scarlet fever. The boy fears that his sickness is much more serious.An after-the-apocalypse story is about an America where everything, and anything, from the past is to be hated and destroyed, including a famous painting that is based on a woman's smile. A group of human colonists are stuck on Mars because of a war on Earth. A colony ship is sent, five years later, after the war, and finds several hundred Martians, with no knowledge of any human colonists. Traveling across America by train, a businessman impulsively decides to get off at the next stop, whatever it is. He learns why there are some small towns where no one ever gets off the train. A couple of men who wander California beaches looking for coins or dropped jewelry find something really interesting. A real mermaid washes up on shore. Their thought is to pack it in ice, and eventually sell it, but the tide is coming in.This book shows why Bradbury was such a great author. The stories aren't just science fiction, or fantasy, or horror. They feel like the sort of stories that could happen to anyone. If a copy can be found, this is a gem of a book.
What do You think about A Medicine For Melancholy And Other Stories (1998)?
As a kid I read all the old collections of Ray Bradbury stories. Interesting to go back and re-read 35 years later. I found I remembered only a few of the stories, such as the one about the little girl getting locked in the closet at school on the one day in seven years the sun came out. Funny I had remembered it being a boy. My favorite in this collection is another story I remembered from the first time around: "In a Season of Calm Weather," about a man on a beach who watches Picasso draw a sprawling masterpiece with a stick in the sand, then goes back to his hotel and lies in bed thinking about the tide coming in. This collection would be a nice introduction to Bradbury. In his typical style, the stories are short and sentimental, each focused around just one simple idea. The stories cover much of the spectrum of topics and themes that permeated his work, from the colonization to Mars to nostalgic pining for the trappings of childhood in small town, Illinois in 1928.
—Stewart
Leer a Bradbury es como leer poesía. Su escritura tiene ese poder de llevar al lector a escenarios fantásticos. Sus historias son muchas veces conmovedoras, tiernas y fantásticas, pero nunca te dejarán indiferente. De este libro me encantaron los cuentos El dragón, El maravilloso traje de helado de crema, El aroma de la zarzaparrilla, La primera noche de cuaresma, y Tiempo de partir. Como escritora, aprendo mucho de Bradbury y siempre que lo leo me quedo con la idea de que puedes construir una buena historia siempre que tus personajes sean entrañables y "hablen" con el corazón.
—Elpidia García
A generally pleasant read, though the quality of the stories varies, as is probably inevitable in a collection like this. There are some real gems, like "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" and the grade school anthology standard "All Summer in a Day"; there's also the memorably eerie "Fever Dream" and "The Town Where No One Got Off." But there are quite a few that I found fairly uninspiring. Bradbury's prose is usually rather pretty, and there's nothing too annoying or cringe-worthy, but some of the stories get a bit close to being filler.As a small aside, I really enjoy the datedness of some of Bradbury's science fiction--for instance, the regular assumption in his stories that we'd have colonies on Mars by the 1990s. I don't think it interferes with the story in any way--it's just a remarkable reminder of how fast technological change was anticipated, and the direction that change was thought to go.There are two stories about Americans in Ireland that I thought were by miles the worst of the lot (and perhaps dated in a more profound way than the 1950s nuclear families farming on Mars). One turns on the very obviously pre-MADD assumption that drinking makes people better drivers (oh, those loveably drunk Irish!). The other asks us to find it hilariously, disturbingly weird that people can have dangerous collisions riding bicycles (not cars--oh, those loveably uncivilized Irish!). These seemed to me to strike an oddly unperceptive and clunky note for such a generally thoughtful writer. But they are exceptions.
—Jim
