They Came Like Swallows (1937) By William Maxwell

In 1937 William Maxwell penned a book about the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic mostly as seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy named Bunny, and his twelve-year-old brother Robert. The story was set in small town central Illinois, where Maxwell grew up. The book, They Came Like Swallows, is short at 124 pages, but captures a hugely significant story. The title is inspired by William Butler Yeats’s classic poem Coole Park because it encapsulates the boys’ mother so perfectly.

                They came like swallows and like swallows went,

                And yet a woman’s powerful character

                Could keep a swallow to its first intent,

                And half a dozen in formation there,

                That seemed to wheel upon a compass point,

                Found certainty upon the dreaming air.

I read this book several years ago, although beautifully written, I basically cast it off as “ancient history” and forgot about it. Today, it re-reads as “current events.”  The course of the Spanish Influenza ran from 1918 through 1919, killing an estimated 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 Americans, 5-times the death toll of US soldiers who died in World War I, which ran concurrently.

Today (April 24, 2020) just over a century later -- and only 3 months into the Covid-19 pandemic – 2.8 million people have been diagnosed worldwide, with 202,000 having died.  In the U.S. 52,234 people have already died.  After the first wave of infections, if history repeats, a second wave of the pandemic will occur, and absent a vaccine, will be far more deadly.

The effectiveness of Maxwell’s book is that he did not write to shock the reader with statistics, he wrote about one family, in one small Midwestern town. 

Of pointed significance in the book is that some of the actions used in 1918 to effectively slow the epidemic are being used again today, and meeting the same resistance, such as school closings.  When Bunny becomes ill, his mother’s lament is “If I’d only taken Bunny out of school when the epidemic first started.”  When Robert is told that he can’t leave the yard, his response “What good was having school closed?  What good was all the time in the world? So long as he had to stay in his own yard, what good was anything.”  The rumors spreading through town then was that the influenza was sent to the U.S. by German submarines.  Today, it is the Chinese.  And ministers, ordered not to hold public services, then like now, complaining about religion being more important that some disease, and God will protect them.

Recommendation:  Absolutely.

Seven Gothic Tales (1934) By Isak Dinesen

My definition of “gothic” leans toward horror stories, i.e. The House of Seven Gables.  But Gothic literature is much broader, characteristics of which include: “death and decay, haunted homes/castles, family curses, madness, powerful love/romance, ghosts and vampires” and all things supernatural.  In a manner, Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dineson touches on all of those, with a heavy dose of religion.

A collection of short stories, Seven Gothic Tales was the first commercially successful book written by Isak Dinesen, better known for her biographical book Out of Africa, and later in her career Babette’s Feast – both more famous today as movies, than as books. 

Isak Dinesen, was one of the pseudonyms used by Karen Blixen-Finecke (1885 – 1962).  She was born and raised in Denmark and spent 20 years of her married life in Kenya.  She was multi-lingual, and largely picked her pseudonym based on what language she was writing in/publishing for.

Included in the collection are:

The Deluge at Norderney has a meandering plot set during a severe late-season storm centered at a seaside (Baltic) resort hotel.   Guests attempt an escape via boat as the town is flooding.  In departing they come across a woman and her children standing on a barn which is rapidly being submerged by the water.  Several volunteers on the boat swap places with the family, agreeing to risk the night staying in the barn awaiting rescue in the morning.  The characters include an aristocratic woman, a Catholic Cardinal, and others.  Their secret identities and pasts are the tale.

The Old Chevalier set in 1874 Paris, tells of a young man walking home after being dumped by the married woman he’s been having a several months affair with.  Depressed and drunk he meets a young lady on the street and takes her home for a one-night stand.  After she leaves in the early morning, he realizes that he can’t live without her, he spends all of the next days searching the streets for her, with no success.  Fifteen years later, he comes across an artist’s painting of her, but is still unable to find out her identify.

The Monkey clearly fits the gothic elements of supernatural, with a heavy religious subset.  A young man has come to visit his aunt, the Virgin Prioress of Closter Seven, a Lutheran convent.  He seeks her advice on marriage, and she instantly takes charge of finding him a suitable bride.  She arranges to hook him up with a young woman who will be the heiress to a neighboring estate.  Following his aunt’s advice, the arranged date goes horribly astray (he pounced, as Sally would say in Cabaret), though not near as horrible as the confrontation they have with the aunt in the morning.

The Road Round Pisa is long-winded, convoluted, and dumb. A man has been given a small “smelling bottle” with a heart-shaped drawing of an idyllic country estate on it by his maiden aunt.  Throughout his childhood he has heard romantic stories told by his aunt with the estate being the setting.  After her death, he travels to Italy in search of the estate painted on the bottle.  A coach accident leads him to make a dying woman a promise to find her daughter before she dies.

(My favorite) The Supper at Elsinore takes place on the NE coast of Denmark (as a reader of Hamlet would be able to tell you).  There, the DeConink family has kept a large old home near the harbor for several generations. A caretaker lives in the home.  The only remaining members of the family, two unwed sisters now into middle-age, have moved to Copenhagen.  They have/had a brother who went to sea on the eve of his wedding day and is rumored to have become a pirate.  He is presumed dead.  In the story, the caretaker has seen his ghost in the old house and gone to Copenhagen to fetch the sisters back to the old house for a conversation with him.   

The Dreamers is interesting, yet another long-winded tale.  It takes place in 1863 aboard a dhow (a small craft boat) off the coast of Zanzibar.  The boat’s passengers are an escaped political prisoner and his friends who are secreting him back to Tanzania to seek revenge. To pass the time on the trip, they begin telling stories, each trying to one-up the others.  This takes us to Europe and a story about three different men, each of whom have met and fallen for a mysterious woman who then disappears on them.  Each man believes the woman has ditched him to escape a sinister “Old Jew” who is following her – described by each with the stereotypes of the time.  Spoiler alert, he ends up being the good guy.  The stories end as the sun begins to rise and the dhow is approaching shore.

The final Gothic tale is The Poet about a wealthy older man who takes a young poet under his tutelage.  In the story the older man decides to marry a poor young widow who resides in one of the homes he owns.  Unbeknownst to him or the young woman, the young poet is in love with her.  Because of this, he decides he must leave Denmark after the wedding. He visits the young woman on her wedding’s eve to tell her his intention.  The old man, who had been hunting nearby, overhears the conversation, and ends up dead.

Recommendation:  For Lit majors only, with the exception of The Supper at Elsinore.

Port William Novels & Stories (2018) By Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry is an activist, short story writer, essayist, and novelist.  He has written on environmental issues, anti-war philosophy, and is a chronicler of rural America.  He is also an author I was unaware of until his works were collected and republished by the Library of America (LOA). The Library is a nonprofit that reprints for perpetuity important writings which otherwise might be dropped by commercial publishers.  He is one of only a handful of still-living authors to be so recognized.  One of my winter reads was the LOA's collection of Berry’s Port William Novels & Stories.

The fictional river town of Port William, Kentucky, where the stories are set is “one of the most fully imagined places in American literature” said the editor of the collection.  And he is right.  Port William as a place, is not unlike Faulkner’s use of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County.  Fittingly, Berry’s novel A Place on Earth is included in the collected works.  Place is important to these stories because it helps shape the lives of each character.

The characters and stories draw heavily on the real-life environment where the author was born into a family that has been living on the land for five generations.  Berry’s literature breathes the air, land, and people of the rural community.  He writes of Port William’s residents collectively with the lost-to-time term of the “Membership” -- the Membership being generations of residents of the small town and surrounding farms who have been neighbors for so long they are considered family, related or not. They know and take care of each other through good and bad. It is a sense of community that has nearly disappeared, lost to industrialization, technology and with increasing numbers of each new generation moving away.

At 985 pages, the collected works include 27 stories, including the 326-page novel A Place on Earth. While not written in sequence, the editor has arranged the stories chronologically according to the time period covered in each.  A Place on Earth recaps and encompasses all of the shorter stories and could be read as a stand-alone book.  I’d advise reading all of it.  Yes, that will take some time.  But, the character development in the shorter stories is well worth the read – and easy to do because you can stop after any of them and return to it later. 

Recommendation: Yes. And let me repeat, I’d advise reading all of it.

Galapagos - A Novel (1985) By Kurt Vonnegut

I thought Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos would be an interesting read for my vacation in the Galapagos Islands in February.  In a way it was, but not in the naturalist or scientific genre one might think. If there were a Nobel Prize for a Morbid Sense of Humor, Vonnegut would own it.

In his novel, a new luxury cruise ship will be launched from Quayaquil (Ecuador) for an inaugural trip to the Galapagos islands. The marketing for the ship has dubbed it the “Nature Cruise of the Century” and proudly touts its initial passenger list which includes the likes of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Rudolf Nureyev, Henry Kissinger, and Mick Jagger.  The book’s narrator is the ghost of a man who died during the ship’s construction.

In the days before the ship is set to depart, a world economic meltdown begins, with countries collapsing like dominoes. Hundreds of passengers, including all of the celebrities, cancel their trips.  By the day of departure, only a handful of passengers have made their way to Quayaquil. Then, Ecuador joins the ranks of nations with collapsed economies, and Peru takes that as an opportunity to invade. As the passengers (and 3 indigenous Ecuadorian women) successfully fight their way through the city to the ship, their departure becomes an escape, not a vacation cruise. On board, they head to sea on a damaged ship with an engine but limited fuel, and a broken navigation system. Days later they will shipwreck onto a (fictional) uninhabited island in the Galapagos.

Meanwhile, a mysterious disease has broken out across the globe, disrupting human ability to reproduce, and the world’s population dies-off.  [Any similarities between this week’s Wall Street stock market meltdown and the Coronavirus pandemic are purely coincidental … one hopes.]  The narrator blames the “evolution of the human brain” as being responsible for the death of life as we know it, noting the brain had become so large and specialized that it no longer had any survival skills.

Spared from the mysterious disease, the handful of passengers on the remote deserted island -- presumably with smaller brains -- will re-populate the earth over the next millennium.

Recommendation:  Fun with bizarre, comical characters.  Not a classic.

Silent Spring (1962) By Rachel Carson

For my recent vacation I purposely packed Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. The vacation, in the Galapagos Islands, seemed the perfect setting for a re-read; and the timing couldn’t possibly be more urgent.  Carson’s book when published in 1962 ignited a firestorm which elevated environmentalism into a movement.  Within eight years the movement, with bi-partisan political support, led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA came into being because Carson scared the living daylights out of the American public by reporting on the myriad of documentation connecting the dots between chemical pesticides and environmental poisoning. Unlike the plethora of documents she referenced, Carson’s book was readable to the non-scientist public.  Collectively pesticides, such as DDT, designed to target and eliminate specific insect pests, paid no regard to whatever else they might impact. 

What they eliminated was everything they came in direct contact with, pest or not. The impact was far greater, ricocheting through the entire food chain and ecology, including humans.  The chemical industry was advertising the pesticides’ alleged effectiveness with little regard to consequences.  That the U.S. Department of Agriculture also gave little regard to consequences, ignoring the documentation they possessed, remains unforgivable. 

While the emphasis in Carson’s book is on agricultural pesticides, it does not end there. Her book also provides ample examples of environmental poisoning with industrial use chemicals, water contamination through agricultural run-off and industrial dumping, and air pollution (i.e. acid rain).  GMO’s were only theoretical when the book was written.

Although the creation of the EPA began to address these issues, they continue to this day.  Industrial farming cares greatly about this year’s profits, and little about consequences.  Refineries and steel mills on Lake Michigan still dump poisons into its tributaries, and sometimes even directly into the lake.  The Ohio River is basically open to shipping, and ill-advised for fishing.  The idea of fishing the Calumet River is enough to make one retch.  And, then there is the visible evidence of what happens when industry is given a blank check: Butte Montana, in the otherwise beautiful state.

What makes Silent Spring a classic is its continuing relevance.  What makes it an important reminder is the current federal administration’s hell-bent attempts to destroy the Environmental Protection Agency.

 

Recommendation:  Yes, read (or re-read) the book.  Then, register to vote as though your life depends on it, because it does.

The Bingo Palace (1994) By Louise Erdrich

There is much to like in Louise Erdrich’s novel The Bingo Palace.  Much of it is hidden.  What do I mean by that? 

When I read Erdrich’s book The Round House, written in 2012, I raved about it. Her writing is brilliant, and she knows no fear of controversial topics.  The Bingo Palace was written much earlier in her career however, published in 1994.  Her mastery of the prose is already developed, but the structure of the book is a tad confusing.  In her defense, let me acknowledge that I read the book on airplanes and in airports, not ideal settings for complexity.

The complexity is a multi-generational story, coupled with a narration by different characters, often in flashback, and alternating each chapter.  I don’t have any issue with this writing formula but, with so many characters it didn’t work for me, or more accurately, it made me work. 

The main character is named Lipsha, a member of the Chippewa tribe.   His story is compelling, heart-breaking at times, and frequently hilarious.  The primary plot is his competition with his Uncle Lyman (who is also his half-brother and lifelong best friend) for the love of a single mom named Shawnee Ray.  Lyman runs the Bingo Hall where Lipsha works, with plans to expand it into a “Palace” size operation.  Lyman is also the father of Shawnee Ray’s son.   

The time period covered by the book is during the initial legalization of gambling on reservations, beginning with Bingo – hence the title of the book.  Erdrich lets her characters report this issue as both a curse, and as an economic lifeline for reservations.

There are many subplots, not the least of which is Shawnee Ray’s desire to make her own life, sans both Lipsha and Lyman, and leave the reservation.

An underlying aspect of the book is its reflection of the balancing act between traditional Native values, and modern times.  Nowhere is this more apparent than when Lulu (Lipsha’s grandmother) gets the “last laugh” during her arrest near the end of the book – the chapter is priceless.

Recommendation:  Not her best book, but a good read.

The Wayard Bus (1947) By John Steinbeck

Using a “road trip” to help tell a story is vintage John Steinbeck.  The Joad family’s Route 66 trip from dustbowl Oklahoma to California contained in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is thought by many, including me, to be the classic of American literature.  The road trip allows the author to present in great detail a character study of each traveler and their interactions with each other.  Steinbeck uses that formula again in his 1947 book The Wayward Bus.

The book is largely set in the fictional nowhere town of Rebel’s Corner, somewhere “north” of Los Angeles.  There, a group of people are stuck in a restaurant waiting for a bus to be repaired so that they may continue their respective trips.  The characters in the story include Juan (the mechanic) and his wife Alice (they own the restaurant), their employees and a handful of passengers.  When the bus is finally repaired, they take off during a rainstorm severe enough to cause flooding and wash out a bridge, stranding them overnight.

Significantly, the story takes place in post-war (World War II) America, with the cast somewhat exhausted, somewhat hopefully, but all with still fresh memories of the Great Depression. The interactions between economically well-off passenger Elliott Pritchard who “was needed on the home-front” and the veterans in the group are civil, yet intense.  The desperate for love, for finding a place in life, subplots are genuine and interesting.  The characters are memorable, good and bad, particularly “Pimples,” a teen employee with an inescapable nickname.

However, that nickname has stumped me.  I don’t recall reading this book before, nor have I seen any of the movies made from it.  Yet, I recall the character Pimples, and as each chapter was read, I recalled the story, though not until near the end could I remember what would happen next.  My guess is that I did read this before, many years ago, probably when I was a teen.

1957 Movie Trailer

My frequent traveling companion and I read this aloud while on a recent vacation.  It reads aloud perfectly, particularly with (often snarky) editorial comments about each of the characters by the narrator.

Recommendation:  Yes