My Ántonia
By
Willa Cather
“Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.”The first few pages of a great book can feel like diving into the delicious vastness of the sea. You want the words to carry you away, and envelop you with their magic. Characters should come to life, jumping off of the pages and securely nestling themselves in your conscience, while you go deeper into their world, leaving yours behind. My Ántonia, written by Willa Cather and published in 1918, does exactly that. The book leaves you wanting to push forward and dreading the notion that the land behind you will eventually call you back.
My Ántonia was considered by the author and most others to be Cather’s finest work, firmly establishing her as an outstanding American writer. It was the third volume in her prairie trilogy which included O’ Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. The book was well received upon publication and is still being read today – a classic indeed.
There are three principal characters in this book. The story is narrated by Jim Burden over approximately thirty years of his life. At the time, it was unheard of to have a female writer, narrate through a male voice, yet Cather succeeded beautifully in voicing the young Virginian orphans experiences and observations, as he moves to Nebraska, to live with his grandparents and discovers an entirely different world. Ántonia, for whom the book is named, is a Bohemian immigrant who arrives in Nebraska, with her large family, on the same train as Jim, and whose parents homestead is next to his grandparents. She is four years older than Jim, and they soon become the best of friends, cementing their friendship through such defining moments as Ántonia’s father suicide; and their joint exploration of the new land, which is the final major character in the book. The land is as important as any of the people that are sprinkled throughout this story. The Nebraskan plains, small towns, larger cities, endless skies, and harsh seasons play a pivotal role in the telling of My Ántonia, which when all is said and done, is very much a love story – though hardly a conventional love story.
In My Ántonia Cather shares the love immigrants have for the countries they have left behind and for the new places they want to call home, the love farmers have for the land they work and the animals which they tend, as well as the love between families and neighbors, and Jim for Ántonia. There is tenderness in this story which captures what to Cather is already a fading world. When Ántonia’s mother wants to bury her husband on a corner of their property, the town’s people warn her that one day the road will go through this spot, but she is insistent; and as time passes we see that this piece of land is preserved, along with the tall red grasses which once dominated the landscape.
Jim, like Cather, leaves Nebraska and eventually lands in the East, but her writing, like his life suggest a fondness for the west which endures a lifetime; and eventually calls him back – at least for a visit or two. Cather has captured the hardship of life on the prairie for both American and immigrant pioneers; but she has also managed to share the wonder of such a life, while highlighting the strength of both the people and the land.
I most assuredly recommend this book, it is a perfect summer read that will leave you longing for more. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/242 Download this book for free!
I’d like to read this. I’ve always wanted to read Willa Cather.