They Came Like Swallows - Softcover

Maxwell, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860469280 ISBN 13: 9781860469282

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2001

Synopsis

Elizabeth Morison is an ordinary woman. Yet to eight-year-old Bunny, his mother is the centre of his universe. To his older brother, Robert, she is someone he must protect against the dangers of the outside world. And to James Morison, his wife is the foundation on which his family rests and life without her is unimaginable.

William Maxwell's unique and moving family portrait confirms his reputation as one of the twentieth century's finest novelists.

About this title

Review:

In the Morison house the important goes unsaid and indirection is the operative mode--conversation stops where it should start and key terms such as fear, pain and pregnancy fail to be addressed. The younger son, an eight-year-old, passes his days deciphering adults' inaccessible discussions. "In this fashion they communicated with each other, out of knowledge and experience inaccessible to Bunny. By nods and silences. By a tired curve of his mother's mouth. By his father's measuring glance over the top of his spectacles". Bunny's older brother would rather escape to the outside world, and their father finds declaiming the day's headlines--the end of World War I and the onslaught of Spanish Influenza--far preferable to engagement. Only Elizabeth, their mother, is capable of holding the family together. The fifth main character in They Came Like Swallows is the house itself. Maxwell expresses the boys' reactions through this labile, interior landscape. Bunny finds the dining room can be "braced and ready for excitement"; later his brother realises "for the first time how still the house was, how full of waiting ... tense and expectant". Though war never makes it to Illinois, the flu changes all. First Bunny is stricken, and once he recovers Elizabeth, pregnant, dies from it. In quiet, piercing prose, William Maxwell's second novel, originally published in 1937, evokes the greatest of losses and the terrors of imagination. --Amazon.com

Review:

"There aren't many truly great writers... William Maxwell is one of them" (The Times)

"A story of such engaging warmth that it will melt many a reader to tears" (Time Magazine)

"Very delightful" (V.S. Pritchett)

"Rare...exquisite...a cameo-like perfection" (New York Herald Tribune)

"A lovely, heartbreaking book" (New York Sun)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1860469280
• ISBN 13: 9781860469282
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160