All Set About with Fever Trees and Other Stories

by Pam Durban

The seven stories in Pam Durban's widely praised debut collection are tales of family, of love and loss, of survival and affirmation. Durban's resonant prose subtly obliges her readers to experience the rush of icy water in a stream, the taste of greens freshly snatched from an overgrown garden, the dread weight of confusion and uncertainty.In "This Heat," the opening story, a mill worker faces the long-expected loss of her teenage son when his weak heart finally gives out. In the title story, which concludes the collection, a formidably eccentric woman abruptly leaves her daughter and granddaughter to answer a "calling" to do missionary work in Africa.

Framed between these two stories is a gathering of characters made real and consequential by Durban's touch: a country singer more than a few big breaks short of stardom, a preadolescent boy lovestruck over his private swimming instructor, a father cut off from his children by haunting war memories, and others.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

211 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

from the back of the book All Set About with Fever Trees
Pam Durban grew up in South Carolina. She has worked as a journalist and teacher in New York, Kentucky, and Georgia. She was the 1984 recipient of the Rinehart Award in Fiction, and her work has appeared in a number of publications, including Tri-Quarterly, Crazyhorse, and The Georgia Review. The title story of this, her first book, appeared in The Editor's Choice anthology, Vol. II. She currently teaches at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

from amazon.com:
Pam Durban is the author of The Laughing Place, which won the 1994 Townsend Prize for Fiction. In addition, Durban is the recipient of the 1988 Whiting Writer's Award and the 1984 Rinehart Award in Fiction. Her stories, which have appeared in such publications as Tri-Quarterly, Crazyhorse, and The Georgia Review, have been widely anthologized. She teaches at Georgia State University.

Reviews

[Rhonda Browning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Durban has penned a well-written collection of moving short stories that are full of emotion--sadness, loss, heartache, hope, love and faith. “In Darkness” is a poignant and tender story of a little girl’s confusion as she watches her parents’ marriage fall apart. “ ‘Right,’ her mother said. ‘Right,’ he [her father] said. And the way they said it, right was a big engine that pulled a long black train out of a tunnel. You saw the engine and you sensed by the way it labored that it was pulling a weight, but you couldn’t see, you couldn’t, and you trembled against that seeing.” Powerful writing. “This Heat,” the collection’s opening story, is another favorite of mine. It tells the story of a mill-worker mother who raises a prodigal son with a bad heart the best way she knows how, and then must bury him too young, as “ . . . the sun beat down on the all: on the living, and into the grave, on those who had lived and died.” You’ll think about these characters and the lives they lived long after you finish their stories.
Highly recommended.

[Deedee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seven slice-of-life short stories with an occasional clever turn of the phrase. OK if you are in a waiting room and want a magazine-type short story to help pass the time.

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book of short stories is a mixed bag. For me, the best were "In Darkness," in which a 10-year-old girl watches with dark foreboding the disintegration of her parents' marriage without really understanding what is happening. "World of Women" tells of a boy who takes swimming lessons with a young woman named Sarah, and all kinds of feelings are awakened in him about women in general, about a world of them that he can't quite comprehend. The best, I thought, was the title story, "All Set About with Fever Trees" in which a young girl worships her grandmother and has warm memories of her, but expects her to reveal some gift of life, some wisdom of direction for her own life. When her grandmother doesn't quite deliver on these promises, the girl becomes disillusioned, and has to learn a lesson about life that is more mundane than she expected.

On the other hand, I didn't care at all for "This Heat," "Made to Last," and "A Long Time Coming, A Long Time Gone."

Despite the stories I didn't care for, Pam Durban's writing is sometimes exceptional, sometimes murky. A couple of lines I loved:

"She'd noticed that when people didn't want to do something, they became polite and then there was a fence around them that no one could cross." ("In Darkness")

"She took three quick sips of the whiskey. It burned all the way down and caught her up in its wild energy and spun her around. It was like celebrating with yourself about everything good that hadn't happened to you yet." ("A Long Time Coming, A Long Time Gone")

"When she sang she felt something coming she'd been waiting for for so long she could almost taste it. And she felt that if she just kept singing and keeping watch, one day this thing would come to her and it would be full, it would be rich, it would satisfy the hunger and fill up the empty spaces and make her know why she was alive on this green earth."("A Long Time Coming, A Long Time Gone")