They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell is a fictional pandemic tale that takes place in 1918. I know not everyone can tolerate reading a pandemic novel during a pandemic but I routinely read about emerging diseases and wasn't horribly surprised by COVID-19, so I've had no problem reading both fiction and nonfiction about pandemics throughout the last year-and-a-half. 

In They Came Like Swallows, you view the changes in daily life, the annoyances, the rising fear, and tragic personal loss caused by the spread of Spanish Flu through the eyes of the two Morison children and one of their parents.

Stylistically, They Came Like Swallows reads a lot like a Persephone book. It was published in 1937, so that should come as no surprise. Both the writing and the storyline did surprise me in many ways, though. 

Viewing a pandemic through the eyes of a young child who overhears snippets of conversations, an older child who is frustrated by school closure and the inability to play with friends, a grieving adult, and others around them made for an unusual and well-rounded view of pandemic life through the lens of a single family. 

Highly recommended - There are so many parallels to what we've gone through, recently. There's even a man who complains about church closures. It was an eye-opening lesson in how things don't change. Heartbreaking but an exceptional read and there is, fortunately, a glimmer of hope at the end. 

©2021 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Mini reviews - Mosquitoland by David Arnold, Reader's Digest War Stories, and Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

Mini review time! All of these books are from my personal library. 

Mosquitoland by David Arnold is a YA book about a teenage girl named Mim Malone. Mim's parents recently divorced and she has moved to Mississippi (the "Mosquitoland" of the title — accurate, by the way) with her father and stepmother. When she finds out her mother is sick, she decides to take a road trip to Ohio. Nobody is saying anything about her mother so she doesn't know how bad her mom's illness might be. 

Along the way, Mim meets some quirky people, has a lot of unexpected experiences, and discovers a few things about herself. 

Recommended but not a favorite - I had mixed feelings about Mosquitoland but liked it enough to recommend it. It's well plotted (a lot happens) but there were two things that kept it from being a favorite. One is that one of the things Mim sets out to do is resolved but you don't know the full details. That felt like a cop-out to me. The other is that the voice was a little weird and I am frankly tired of super smart young fictional characters. Much of what Mim had to say seemed like it was well beyond her years. She's clearly above average and that just annoyed me. So, that was just a personal issue. 

What I particularly loved was the makeshift family trope. On her journey, Mim picks up a friend here, a friend there and they all bond. I did have a little trouble with the Mississippi portion as it sure seemed like the author knew nothing at all about Mississippi beyond the fact that it's hot, humid, and buggy. But, Mississippi itself was somewhat unimportant to the storyline; I liked the fact that I never, ever knew what was going to happen next; and, I warmed up to the strangeness and humor, the farther I got into Mosquitoland. 

Reader's Digest War Stories is a collection of stories from the Reader's Digest magazine. When I bought the book, I was actually looking for a collection of "Drama in Real Life" stories because it was a "Drama in Real Life" set in London during the Blitz (which I read when I was around 10 years old) that began my interest in WWII. I couldn't find anything like that so I bought the war stories, instead. 

Beginning with stories published in 1956, the book contains personal accounts of war experiences, some historical accounts told by writers, "Humor in Uniform" funnies, and a very nice article about the Churchill War Rooms. I had three particular favorites. One was about a man who fell 18,000 feet from an airplane without a parachute, survived, and had to convince his German captors that he was telling the truth about having fallen from a plane. Another was about a woman who worked for the French Resistance in both world wars. And, the third was "This Secret Place," about the War Rooms. We've visited the Churchill War Rooms but there were two general items of interest to me in this particular article. One is that the war rooms could only be visited by appointment at the time, as there was not yet a museum. The other was the fact that you can only learn so much during a museum visit. I found the article filled out a few cracks in my knowledge and, having been there, it was easy to visualize the rooms mentioned as I'd seen them. 

Highly recommended - The paper Reader's Digest War Stories is printed on is cheap and my copy has already yellowed, even though it was just published in 2012. And, unfortunately, I didn't realize one of the pages in my secondhand copy had a big chunk missing. Wish I'd known that when I bought it so I could have complained to the seller for not being totally honest about its condition. But, I found the war stories captivating, often terrifying, and I'm very glad I came across it. 

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro is the third book I've read by Ishiguro. A set of five interconnected stories with music as one of their connecting themes, I read it as part of my challenge to read anthologies and collections of short stories in 2021. 

I don't have much to say about Nocturnes, to be honest. The first two stories were very, very odd and I thought I was going to absolutely hate the book, initially. But, I did like the last three. They just weren't brilliant or moving or wise in the way you hope a short story will be. Still, I liked the clarity of Ishiguro's writing style enough to keep going. 

Meh - I gave this one an average rating. The stories are strange and generally disappointing but I don't regret reading Nocturnes. However, it fits the pattern. The only book I've loved by Ishiguro is The Remains of the Day. There are two that I've tried to get into several times but found boring. A Pale View of Hills was confusing (I didn't get the imagery) and then upsetting because it contained a senseless killing of kittens. I will never, ever love a book that contains animal abuse of any kind. But, I love The Remains of the Day so much that I will undoubtedly keep trying to find another Ishiguro that I love. This one was just average. 

©2021 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

The Plague by Albert Camus

When leaving his surgery on the morning of April 16, Dr. Bernard Rieux felt something soft under his foot. It was a dead rat lying in the middle of the landing. On the spur of the moment he kicked it to one side and, without giving it a further thought, continued on his way downstairs. Only when he was stepping out into the street did it occur to him that a dead rat had no business to be on his landing  [...]

~p. 7


In Oran, a city on the coast of Algeria, the citizens are only mildly alarmed by the appearance of dying rats, at the beginning of The Plague. First, a trickle of rats emerging from their hidden homes is taken by Monsieur Michel, the concierge of Dr. Bernard Rieux's building, as a sign that an unhappy tenant or a hooligan is leaving them for him to clean up after. But, then the rats begin to appear throughout the town. They stagger and then die, the number of dead rats growing until they're piled in heaps and the city struggles to keep up with their disposal. Then, Michel falls ill and dies in agony and gradually, the disease spreads.

Dr. Rieux is among the first to suspect that Bubonic Plague is the culprit. But, even he has his doubts and both the city officials and the other doctors in town are hesitant to declare an emergency for fear of panicking the citizens. As the crisis grows, eventually the city officials concede to the facts and begin to organize, separating the sick from the healthy, taking over schools and apartment buildings when the hospital overflows, and finally closing the town's gates to keep the disease from spreading beyond the town's walls. While news from outside the town walls becomes difficult to come by, local reporting focuses on the number of casualties, the shortages of food and other necessities, and the need for volunteers to help with the disposal of bodies. Slowly, the disease peaks and tapers off, leaving the survivors shaken but ready to return to normal. But, their world will never be quite the same.

During the time I was reading The Plague, I didn't give a lot of thought to the theory that the story is considered by many to be an allegory for the invasion by Nazis in WWII (there's another possibility about its meaning that I don't recall). The story is so focused on the logistics of the city's efforts to combat the plague, the doctor's efforts and exhaustion, and the longing for loved ones from whom many are separated that I found it a little difficult to step back and look at the big picture until after I finished the book. Instead, I observed it from the micro view of the individual characters and how the plague impacted their lives: a doctor exhausting himself, a journalist from elsewhere who desperately wants to escape Oran and return to his wife, a man with a small life but lots of optimism who has decided to write a book but can't get beyond the first paragraph, a tenant who attempts suicide and ends up unexpectedly thriving during the plague. The characters are pretty fascinating.

And then, well after closing the book, I got it. First, a few rats appear from obscurity and nobody is particularly alarmed. [Nazis appear but everyone thinks they'll fade away.] Then, the rats' presence explodes and they become problematic, but still the officials hesitate to acknowledge the danger. The rats' disease invades the city. [The city is invaded by Nazis.] The plague hits and people begin to die. [War.] Time passes and the plague continues to kill at a relentless pace; people are exterminated by the disease. [Hitler's extermination of Jews.] A small band of stalwarts continue the fight. Some are killed off. [Perhaps the Resistance?] Eventually, the plague ends and people celebrate, but things are not the same as they were before the plague. Many have lost loved ones and friends.

That may not be the best analysis but I can see how one might view The Plague as an allegory, now, whereas I was caught up in the emotion and the logistics while I was reading the book.

Recommended - A brilliantly written but ponderous story in which you can practically feel the painfully slow passage of time as a plague stretches out for months on end, locking citizens away from the rest of the world and separating many from their loved ones. Is it an allegory for WWII? I don't know. I'm not sure what the consensus is, either, as I only briefly skimmed information about the book. But, I can see now why people view it as such. The Plague was my classic choice for the month of April and won't be my last by Camus. I'm pretty sure I have a copy of The Stranger around here, somewhere. I'll be keeping an eye out for it.

For posterity: There was an interesting philosophy in few words that I want to write down for the sake of my own memory (so I can take the flags out of the book): "Big fish eat little fish." Interesting way of expressing "liberal ideas, as his pet dictum on economic questions". I won't comment on how I feel about it; I just liked the expression.

Last thought: The book could be a bit gruesome, at times, but Camus kept the more graphic scenes to a minimum, so it's not too bad if you're faint of heart and prefer not to read about the gory details of a ghastly disease.


©2017 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.