My Ántonia

Man, I love this book. I tried reading it once before, 10 or 15 years ago, and let the "frame" stand in the way. (To be fair, it's pretty lame—as most frames are.) So glad I gave it another shot, though, and got past that this time.

Cather's writing here is on a par with O Pioneers!. She fleshes out her characters and their relationships fully, from the inside. Realist writing is often restrained by Chekhov's insistence on "removing everything that has no relevance to the story." Cather's realism is never so minimal, and is all the more real for it. She fully incorporates anything that will help build her characters. The connections may be coarsely drawn, in the way that human relations can be. But these loose, ragged details are not, show more as Chekhov might call them, unkept promises. In the end there is a very human essence to her people and her places, that only appears from a slight angle. She could never have shown it directly. I come away from her best work with a feeling, more than an idea. Which is exactly how I came away from this one. show less

Rereading this book was a sheer pleasure. I reread my review from earlier in the year, but rereading gives more perspective, more detail, and more respect.

Don’t look to it for plot; it’s more a tone poem or prose rhapsody.

Cather takes us to the almost virgin prairies of Nebraska, seen first through the eyes of a 10 year old boy named Jim and a 14 year old immigrant girl named Antonia. Jim narrates their mutual discovery of the land, with its hardships and joys, and later the town, with its social customs and pleasures. Throughout this phase, Cather builds vivid characters in clear, seemingly effortless prose, so that you know them immediately and think of them as true individuals.

But the story is more than that. Parallelling the show more maturation of the main characters is the growth of the farms, towns and country in the early part of the 20th century. Jim comes from Virginia, gets to Nebraska, eventually gets back to the east coast for school and career. Because he travels as an adult, we learn that some of the young women in the story end up in San Francisco, Seattle, even in the Alaska gold rush. We are always anchored in Nebraska, but we get the sense of the sweep west of the country from the people we have met in Nebraska and meet again.

Not everyone is good, and bad things do happen, but this is ultimately a story of survival and joy. Highly recommended show less

The word for this novel is "exquisite". There isn't a lot of story, but there is deft characterization, and beautiful descriptive language that turns the commonplace into the iconic. Page after page I marveled at Cather's ability to show the beauty of landscape, the vitality of young children at play, the difficulties of early 20th century life on the prairies of North America...all in terms that sound both original and inevitable. And by the time I reached the last chapters, the adult Antonia was speaking in my Slovak grandmother's voice. I said somewhere else that this book feels like Little House on the Prairie for adults. That's a bit glib, perhaps, but true still. And I hate to leave this world of hers, hard as it sometimes is to show more live in it. "Brilliant" is another word for it. All five stars.
January 2014 show less

My copy of [My Antonia] is a warped paperback “Enriched Classic” picked up at the neighborhood used bookstore. In some of the later chapters words are underlined, sometimes with what I assume are annotations in Korean characters; the book was once read by a Korean immigrant reading a novel about an immigrant from what was then called Bohemia (Czech Republic?). A scan of Goodreads reviews indicated that a number of people were introduced to the book in high school & hated Willa Cather’s books ever since. I wonder what the original owner thought about the novel? (It ended up in a used bookstore, after all) As most Americans are, I’m a descendant of immigrants & the book touched my heart. Reading it over Christmas at age 74, I was show more sorry I waited so long to read it – Cather was probably considered to be too alien for youthful readers in my progressive Honolulu school. Been trying to catch up on authors I never got around to, Cather being one; got to this only after [O Pioneers] & [Death Comes for the Archbishop]; not surprised that this one was good too. At first it seems a collection of vivid character & scene sketches, but some homespun Proust in there, too – though the unexpected changes of fortune reminded me of Larry McMurtry. Reading about the characters – they seemed so real, there were times I was disappointed that the narrator didn’t always tell what happened to them: Antonia’s little sister, Jim’s grandmother & grandfather. They’re like the hired hands that go off to the West never to be heard from again, after the grandparents sell the farm & move to town. The stories of the hired girls don’t disappoint, though. And it seems lifelike that we only get the life histories of people closest to our hearts only in fragments of filtered stories. show less

I applaud the ethereal quality of the prose and Cather's talent in beautifying a seemingly vapid scene on the prairie, shrouded in a rustic mistiness which is tailored to a wistful resonance of an age long gone by, but what ruined it all was the ever-platonic and flabby narrator, stifling me with his misguided zeal. I would not have opted for Jim's schmaltzy narration, which felt unsuitable and degrading at times, and particularly presumptuous to Ántonia's character, walking around goggle-eyed as a second-hand observer with no intentions of actually living his own life. I think Antonia might have sufficed for a spirited puppy instead of a loitering loafer.

Oh, how I love this book! Willa Cather is a gifted, deft storyteller. Her characters are finely etched and unique, and her seemingly simple prose carries itself across the broad Nebraskan skies that she paints in words. Antonia is unforgettable. Tough and tender, she endures the hardships of farm life without complaint or pity.

The ending is perhaps the most pitch-perfect I've read in any book:

"The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For Antonia and me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortunes which predetermined for us all that we can show more ever be. Now I understood what the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past." show less

tle streams of dark water gurgling cheerfully into the streets out of old snow-banks. My window was open, and the earthy wind blowing through made me indolent. On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down, the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it. Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains—like the lamp engraved upon the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new heavens, and waking new desires in men."

I loved this more than I was expecting to - westerns and prairie stories are really not my thing. I have read Cather once before, and I did not get what all the praise for her writing was about. But now show more I do. It's gorgeous, and that is saying something because there is no plot. None. It's a memory shared of a specific time and place, and its characters are described so vividly I could picture them in my head. Cather's prose is the star here; it's luminous, and I loved her choice of the orphaned Jim Burden as the protagonist - we get to see Nebraska through his eyes as he moves there to live with his grandparents.

The audiobook narrated by George Guidall is full of fabulous. I gave this 4.5 stars, and that is for this narration. show less