1074 O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (read 7 Sep 1970) This is like other Cather novels, and only obliquely is about pioneers. It is laid in Nebraska and tells of Alexandra Bergson, a Swedish-born farmer, her brother Emil, Bohemians, French, etc. It certainly was not what I expected. ( )

I picked this up at a used book sale with no idea who wrote it (me: under rock) or what it was about other than it was considered a "classic". I was expecting a pleasant story for young adults on the level of Little House of the Prairie but was delightfully surprised to find serious adult literature that is easy to read. Stylistically it is American Realism with an emphasis on what it was like as a pioneer in Nebraska - this was the "boring part" at the beginning many people didn't like but I loved for the many small details of period farm life. Cather said of its realism: "I decided not to 'write' at all, - simply to give myself up to the pleasure of recapturing in memory people and places I'd forgotten". And at first this is what it feels like, a novel as an excuse to reminisce about what it used to be like in the "old days" (say, 20 or 40 years prior). Cather's positive ecological message is also refreshing in a book this old and as important as ever. The books drab humorless tone - practical to a fault - artistically conveys the Norwegian pioneer world, but I hope not all her books are about Norwegians. ( )

Willa Cather gives us a memorable set of archetypal characters who revolve around Mother Earth, Alexandra Bergson. Much of what happens tastes fairly bitterly of fate, and the characters are pushed into situations which force them to act at cross-purposes with happiness.

What lasts is the hard-won triumph of the titular characters, the visionary and inexhaustible Alexandra most of all. ( )

What a delightful tale of life and death on the American frontier. The descriptions of the land were sublime and the people within this story were all well rounded and realistic, with both strengths and weaknesses within each. My main complaint is that there wasn't enough of it. I felt there was a 400 page book hidden in this 122 page novella. The characters seemed to have so much more to tell, and we only got a glimpse of that within this book.

But maybe......just maybe, sometimes less is more.

In one line: Short tale of life and death and the beauty of a wilderness. ( )

Days on the Divide / Spring, summer, autumn, winter, . . . / O Alexandra!

As the eyes are the windows on the soul, Cather allows us to look into her eyes to see the Nebraska plains as it has touched her soul. It is a land of beautiful sunrise and sunset, clear blue skies above, reflected below in a still duck pond. It is also, at times, a harsh land of freezing cold winter and drought-stricken summer. You can love the land without it giving back enough to sustain you. But if you understand the land, it yields a material wealth almost beyond measure.

Alexandra Bergson understood the land. She knew to plant alfalfa to fix the nitrogen in the soil, to plant wheat as well as corn, to build silos against the inconstancy of the land. She sought out ideas which fostered her understanding and worked the land hard to bear out the promise of the idea. She had to: of John Bergson's children, only she had the native ability, so she received his legacy to make the land provide for the family.

Her success served to drive a wedge between herself and others, so that she was estranged from her brothers, Lou and Oscar. Moreover, her pioneer struggles left her little time to think of her personal needs and desires. At times when she was not totally exhausted, on a Sunday morning, when such thoughts might creep into her consciousness, she would strike them down with cold ablutions in her bath. This left a blind spot in her through which two of those she loved, brother Emil and his married lover, Marie, fell to their deaths.

Alexandra still had the land and all that it meant to her, but had no one to share it with, not even anyone to pass it on to. There was only her childhood friend, Carl, but he was estranged from the land and making a life for himself in far away Alaska. So she dreams of a man in a white cloak who will carry her away. Like Don Fabrizio's woman in brown and Joe Gideon's woman in white, Alexandra's man in white was her guide, her pilot to crossing the bar. Carl returned to her in time to pull her back onto the quay.

In an earlier episode, when Carl tried and failed to re-enter her life, he said of Marie and her husband, "there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before..." It may have been Shaw who delineated these (two) stories as Jack and the Beanstalk (The Quest) and Cinderella (Boy Meets Girl). Alexandra and Carl were each on their separate quests to make their own life, hers more successful but still with a tragic flaw. Together now, it is time for their story, and, as Alexandra says, "it is we who write it, with the best we have." ( )