Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes Book

A collection of 10 brutal, violent, gross and darkly comical political parables from the author of The Talented Mr Ripley in which nobody comes out unscathed, reader included.

First published in the late 1980s, a few of these socially critical/ political pieces have not aged well. Their targets either no longer exist or are currently so very far out of the public mentality as to be cutely historic. But that hardly matters.

For example: does anybody remember the surrogate mother hullaballoo? Probably not, but the Religious Right is still going strong and self-righteous people with fuzzy logic abound, so even if the ladies from the "Rent-a-Womb"group don't ring any bells, their opponents from "The Mighty Right" will. Those bits are enough to enjoy the work of what is very clearly an author with several beefs she felt compelled to express but which didn't fit into novel format. No crime in that!

I read this collection in Italian translation as a reading exercise. Most of the stories were on my level but a few were written more complexly, or abstractly, so I'm not sure I understood absolutely everything.
When you read in a language you aren't *so* well versed in, you're forced to read slowly and carefully, taking in every comma. This leads to a far more intense reading experience than reading in your own language where you can zip along to get the overarching idea.

For that reason, I found some of these stories difficult to finish, especially "Moby Dick II", about a horrifically abused whale. That doesn't mean I thought the stories were bad; they were just painful to dwell on that intensely for that long.

Much like Highsmith must have felt while writing them, I imagine.

My favourites in the collection were:
The Mysterious Cemetery (beef: irresponsible science. Careful what you throw away!)
Operation Balsam (beef: PR people and their evil taskmasters. Got nuke waste? We've got the storage facility for you!)
Trouble At The Jade Towers (beef: buyer beware! All that glitters isn't gold. It might be killer cockroaches.)

As other reviewers have mentioned, the quality and bite of the stories diminish gradually throughout the collection. The strongest are at the front.