My Ántonia

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 managed to get through high school without reading Willa Cather. Someone recommended My Ántonia when I was looking for undramatic material suitable for reading before bedtime, and onto the wish list it went.

Undramatic is an interesting label to apply to this book, which witnesses a suicide, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, several amputations and a murder-suicide. The tone is what makes the story drowsy and golden-hued — romantic doesn't even begin to cover it. It was indeed pleasant to read before falling asleep.

This novel is a good counterpoint to House of Mirth because the two novels have some shared structure — you can sense Ántonia's "downfall" approaching her as soon as she moves to town, and the narrator is occasionally show more exasperatingly useless (both of which remind me of House of Mirth). Cather doesn't write straight-up tragedies, however — her characters have a remarkable amount of self-determination. What could have been a fatal flaw (e.g. Lena's warmheartedness to married men) becomes a colorful personality detail. I love that the entire farming community gossips about Ole Benson following Lena around and years later Lena casually dismisses their gossip with a description of her generosity of spirit ('There was never any harm in Ole,' she said once. 'People needn't have troubled themselves. He just liked to come over and sit on the draw-side and forget about his bad luck.' [p. 226]). show less

"I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon turned a rich copper colour and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a hawk's nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in that country, and had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious."

This classic work of show more American fiction has been on my TBR list for far, far too long. Not sure what took me so long, since I loved O Pioneers! and especially the breathtakingly lovely Death Comes for the Archbishop. What a lovely book, with rich descriptions of the midwestern prairie and the hardworking souls who make their life on it. The narrator is young Jim Burden, who describes the toil and bleakness of the early prairie farmsteads in the exuberant sweet nostalgia of a young person growing up with both wild independence and great responsibility. At the heart of the narrative is the young immigrant Antonia, whose spirit has captivated Jim his whole life; the story serves as a paean to all immigrant women making their lives on the prairie. Simply a lovely, lovely book. 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

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

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.

I've had MY ANTONIA (1918) on my shelf for some years now and finally read it this past week. Finished it during a hospital stay. Willa Cather's story of Antonia Shimerda and Jim Burden and their years-long friendship and the hardships of farming on the Nebraska frontier around the turn of the last century achieved classic status decades ago. It is probably also her best known work. I'm not surprised. Despite its advanced age, the story drew me in from page one and kept me intrigued to its somewhat surprising but very satisfying conclusion. I loved it. Very, very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER