I so loved this book, a classic, a quiet tale laden with feelings and our inability to express them. ( )

Para el niño de ocho años Bunny Morison su madre es una presencia angelical sin la cual nada parece tener vida; para su hermano mayor, Robert, su madre es alguien a quien debe proteger, especialmente desde que la gripe ha comenzado a asolar su pequeña ciudad del Medio Oeste norteamericano; para su padre, James Morison, su mujer Elizabeth es el centro de una vida que se desmoronaría sin ella.

This autobiographical novella about a family during the 1918 Influenza is narrated by three characters, two of whom made me misty. I was wow-ed by how each passage revealed so much subtext. I must read more by Maxwell. ( )

The magic of William Maxwell is his ability to get inside his characters and expose them to you, heart, soul, flesh and blood. This story opens on the Morison family as seen through the eyes of its youngest member, Bunny. A timid eight year old, Bunny is very attached to and dependent upon his mother.

In the second section, Maxwell switches point of view to Bunny’s older brother, Robert. A pre-teen who has lost his leg in an accident, and goes to great lengths to be normal, active and self-sufficient. Robert loves his mother, as Bunny does, but holds her, and his Aunt Irene, at an arm’s length, to protect his perceived manhood.

In the final section, we hear from the father, James. Also dependent upon his wife, the center of not only his universe, but the person who knows how to run the house and guide the children.

What we get is a full and complete picture of this family and of the mother they adore. The Spanish flu epidemic is in full swing, and as one family member after another succumbs to it, we know this is about to be a story of loss, desperation, and sorrow, but also about love and connection and the unbreakable nature of family.

This story is largely autobiographical, which makes it all the more poignant. There was nothing sentimental about it, and yet it wrenched at the heart and caused me to fight back tears. In its short 174 pages, it exposes the depths of feeling in a host of characters as they navigate their ordinary lives.

He knew only that there was frozen ground under his feet, and that the trees he saw were real and he could by moving out of his path touch them. The snow dropping out of the sky did not turn when he turned or make any concession to his needs, but only to his existence. The snow fell on his shoulders and on the brim of his hat and it stayed there and melted. He was real. That was all he knew.

The losses in this book are very personal, but Maxwell knows, and conveys to us in his beautiful prose, that whatever we feel is never exclusively our own.

And he saw that his life was like all other lives. It had the same function. And it differed from them only in shape–as one salt-cellar is different from another. Or one knife-blade. What happened to him had happened before. And it would happen again, more than once.

This tale is soft and sharp, it is sad and joyful, and it is filled with the stuff that makes us human and helps us to understand others, as we seek to understand ourselves. William Maxwell is an under-rated writer; his name should be listed with the greats–he never disappoints me. ( )

A hilarious tale of the author when he was a young boy. This at least my second reading. ( )