Some had other interests and yes they let themselves follow these interests. Intelligent women living at a time when they were not suppose to be interested in anything other than helping their husbands, food and servants and the house. Again you are not looking from the outside at what is occurring but from the inside, from Linnaeus' head and also from the others who so well knew him.īarrett is extremely good at presenting how women see an issue. It takes place in Uppsala and Hammarby and I have walked there millions of times. It is about Carl Linnaeus, when he is very old and confused. Other stories were fabulous too - although too short! OK, I am Swedish so it is perhaps not strange that I loved the story entitled The English Pupil. You almost feel you are one of the main characters b/c the author has made them so real. These immigrants were starving and sick - here it wasn't plague but typhus! A glorius mixture of love and coldness, greed and caring and nonchalance - all emotions are there to be experienced and felt. The US had practically cut off its borders. Ship Fever is about the Irish immigrants emigrating to Canada during the potato famine. You get into the heads of the scientists and of the people living through tremendous times of suffering which history tends to be composed of. Science and history come alive in the fictional story Barrett weaves around the true facts! Here one sees the advantage of fiction over non-fiction. The last story Ship Fever was longer and that clinched it for me. If you like short stories, you would probably give it 5 stars. Thank you Joanna for really pushing and pushing for me to read this - you see I do not like short stories! Joanna didn't give up on me b/c she knew what I like in books and she knew this book just could not be missed, despite that it was short stories. As they move between interior and exterior journeys, 'science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material' ( Boston Globe). In the tradition of Alice Munro and William Trevor, these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space. And in 'The Littoral Zone,' two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it.

In 'The English Pupil,' Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. In 'Ship Fever,' the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's most tragic epidemics. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. 1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.

Ship fever andrea barrett summary