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Loading... They Came Like Swallows (Panther) (original 1937; edition 2001)by William Maxwell
Work detailsThey Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell (1937)
Words fail me when it comes to describing this exquisitely rendered little novel first published over seventy years ago. Two boys, eight and thirteen, lose a mother; a husband a wife, sisters a sister. This is perhaps the most delicately described story of pain, loss and relationships I have encountered in many years. The sense of time and place, of a small town in Illinois in 1918, the year of the horrific Spanish influenza epidemic, is so real you can lose yourself as if the ensuing seventy-plus years had never happened. Like Maxwell's other book I have reviewed here, The Folded Leaf, this book - They Came Like Swallows - is simply beautiful. A masterpiece. (  )1   TimBazzett | Jul 28, 2009 |  Rarely, if ever, have I read such an intimate and honest portrayal of a person's real self. It is normal, commonplace even, to read of people's actions and doings. It is fairly typical to read a story of a person as perceived through another persons eyes. I've often read a book that shows what a person thinks of themselves. But to hear the inner workings of ones self, the feelings and thoughts and reactions that happen without our permission or perhaps without even our conscious knowledge, and in such a matter of fact way, is moving. This is the part of a person that cries out to be loved and accepted--just as they are. This is the part of a person that is rather unexplainable. Yet William Maxwell has done it. Beautifully. (  )1 melopher | Jul 22, 2009 | The trouble with William Maxwell is that his writing ruins you for all other books. It is perfect, like a jewel. A piercing story circling around the central character of Elizabeth, the mother of a family, and how each member reacts to her death from the 1918 spanish flu. ( ) bobbieharv | Feb 5, 2009 | 3407. They Came Like Swallows, by William Maxwell (read Feb 18, 2001) This is on a list of the best 10 works of fiction of the 1930s, having been published in 1937. It is a stark, spare book I thought very moving and powerful. I believe the book is quite autobiographical. (  ) Schmerguls | Nov 24, 2007 | no reviews | add a review Is contained in
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