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Review

Render To The Prairie To Revisit 'My Antonia'

Return To The Prairie To Revisit 'My Antonia'

My Antonia
By Willa Cather
Paperback, 272 pages
Oxford University Press

Read An Extract

How many of united states of america take been assigned a book to read for a high schoolhouse English language course by a well-intentioned teacher and come away from the experience thinking, with all the conviction of heady youth, "Thank God I'll never have to read that once again"?

With a mental moving-picture show of the wrist, we dismiss as drudges, romantics and windbags writers nosotros may later come to realize are crucial to united states of america. How like shooting fish in a barrel it is to litter our youthful path with a slew of misunderstood masters!

Willa Cather, ane of the truly great American writers of the 20th century, suffers, as I see it, from a somewhat dissimilar kind of expulsion from the lives of many adults, even those who go on to become serious readers. In detail, her all-time-known piece of work, My Antonia, a novel we often commencement encounter as immature adult literature, is a book many of u.s. really enjoyed in our youth. We feel comfy leaving it safely, fondly stored in our retentiveness banks, rickety equally they may be, where it remains a humane story virtually a mettlesome Bohemian immigrant girl forced past fate and family exigencies to grow up on the beautiful, harsh flatlands of Nebraska.

Nosotros remember Jim Burden, who recounts Antonia'due south adventures as well as those of his own rural babyhood with affection. We recall characters similar the Russian friends, Pavel and Peter, with haunted clarity. We experience enduring fondness for Lena, the dressmaker. We still despise the evil coin-lender Wick Cutter. And scenes such every bit the one where Jim heroically — at least to Antonia — bashes the caput of a rattlesnake with his spade remain with us, then startling were they when we first read them.

What'south interesting about My Antonia is how it manages to role as a perfectly inviting story for immature readers, and how an adult willing to revisit it with a more than developed critical eye can capeesh it for the subtly sophisticated narrative information technology truly is. In this regard, information technology'due south not dissimilar a wildly dissimilar book, Alice in Wonderland. Bang-up fun for kids, psychologically captivating for grownups.

Cather is our quietest Modernist. That is to say, she was innovative in her approach to her work, merely novels such as My Antonia were written in such a deceptively obviously prose style that their robust, formal originality, their delicious complexities tin hands be missed. The story is told in the male-gendered vox of Jim Burden (a decision, past the way, that Cather found herself having to defend). Through Burden, Cather uses landscape not merely as properties, simply every bit a kind of grapheme, dynamically interactive with Antonia's family unit likewise as everyone else in Blackness Militarist, the prairie town based on Carmine Cloud, Neb., where Cather grew up. Pavel's deathbed scene, for example, is remarkable for its Greek chorus of ghostly winds that "impatiently" shake the doors and windows of the business firm, howling coyotes echoing Pavel's ain moans as they "tell us that winter was coming" (winter beingness expiry itself), and stars overhead that "have their influence on what is and what is not to exist."

Bradford Morrow's latest volume is The Diviner's Tale. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2007. Michael Eastman hibernate caption

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Michael Eastman

Bradford Morrow'south latest volume is The Diviner'south Tale. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2007.

Michael Eastman

Recently, I visited Carmine Cloud to see the place where Cather grew up and about which she wrote — but too where my ain female parent was built-in and my grandparents, great-grandparents and neat-great-grandparents lived and are laid to residual in the same cemetery every bit some of Cather's family, along with the real Jim Burden, from whom Cather took her narrator'southward proper noun. And I found that fifty-fifty today, the fields, draws, skies, farms and minor-boondocks streets remain somehow captured in Cather's fiction, articulate as a only-rediscovered family album in which our ain faces and forebears are imaged.

At that place are sure books I try to reread every five years or so — Hardy's Tess, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Nabokov'due south Lolita — not because the novels have changed but because I accept. If, equally Stendhal wrote, a novel is a mirror carried along the road, then a novel might also be a reader's most crystal-clear mirror when sitting with a book in manus. My Antonia reflects not only a particular period of fourth dimension in America's boyhood, but if yous happened to relish information technology when you were young, experiencing it again, from a more seasoned perspective, might also shed light on your own journey and bring into focus the Antonias and Jim Burdens who have influenced yous along the way. And if yous haven't read this classic, I envy you your first journey through the novel Cather herself considered her finest achievement.

You Must Read This is produced and edited by Ellen Silva with product assistance from Rose Friedman and Lena Moses-Schmitt.

Excerpt: 'My Antonia'

My Antonia
By Willa Cather
Paperback, 272 pages
Oxford University Press

I offset heard of Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the dandy midland manifestly of North America. I was ten years sometime and then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I travelled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the "easily" on my father's erstwhile farm under the Blueish Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandpa. Jake's experience with the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to endeavour our fortunes in a new world.

We went all the way in twenty-four hours-coaches, becoming more gluey and grimy with each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered him: processed, oranges, brass neckband buttons, a picket-charm, and for me a "Life of Jesse James," which I remember every bit i of the most satisfactory books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the state to which nosotros were going and gave us a great deal of advice in commutation for our conviction. He seemed to the states an experienced and worldly man who had been nigh everywhere; in his chat he threw out lightly the names of distant states and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more than inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk.

One time when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car alee there was a family from "across the h2o" whose destination was the same as ours.

"They can't whatever of them speak English, except one piddling daughter, and all she tin can say is 'We become Black Hawk, Nebraska.' She'due south not much older than you, twelve or thirteen, perchance, and she'southward equally brilliant equally a new dollar. Don't you lot want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She's got the pretty brown eyes, besides!"

This terminal remark fabricated me pretty bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to "Jesse James." Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.

I practice not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything well-nigh the long twenty-four hour period's journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed and so many rivers that I was dull to them. The but thing very noticeable almost Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when nosotros reached Black Militarist. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We stumbled down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running about with lanterns. I couldn't see any town, or even afar lights; nosotros were surrounded past utter darkness. The engine was panting heavily after its long run. In the reddish glow from the burn-box, a group of people stood huddled together on the platform, encumbered past bundles and boxes. I knew this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us near. The adult female wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little tin can trunk in her arms, hugging it every bit if it were a babe. There was an one-time man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a daughter stood holding oilcloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts. Shortly a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting and exclaiming. I pricked upwards my ears, for information technology was positively the first time I had ever heard a foreign tongue.

Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: "Hello, are you Mr. Brunt's folks? If you are, it'south me you're looking for. I'm Otto Fuchs. I'm Mr. Brunt's hired man, and I'm to drive you lot out. Hullo, Jimmy, ain't you lot scared to come so far westward?"

I looked up with interest at the new confront in the lantern lite. He might take stepped out of the pages of "Jesse James." He wore a sombrero hat, with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his moustache were twisted upwards stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across 1 cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top of his left ear was gone, and his skin was dark-brown as an Indian'due south. Surely this was the confront of a desperado. Every bit he walked nearly the platform in his loftier-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led u.s. to a hitching-bar where 2 farm-wagons were tied, and I saw the strange family unit crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the harbinger in the bottom of the wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into the empty darkness, and nosotros followed them.

I tried to become to slumber, but the jolting fabricated me seize with teeth my tongue, and I soon began to anguish all over. When the straw settled downward, I had a difficult bed. Cautiously I slipped from nether the buffalo hibernate, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. At that place seemed to exist nothing to encounter; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a route, I could not arrive out in the faint starlight. In that location was naught but country: not a country at all, but the textile out of which countries are fabricated. No, in that location was nothing simply land — slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels basis against the brake as we went downward into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the earth was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never before looked upwardly at the sky when in that location was not a familiar mount ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my expressionless father and mother were watching me from up there; they would nonetheless be looking for me at the sheep-fold downward past the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The carriage jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't recall I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not thing. Betwixt that world and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did non say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

Excerpted from My Antonia by Willa Cather. Excerpted by permission of Oxford University Printing. All rights reserved.

My Antonia

by Willa Cather

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2011/05/02/133811309/return-to-the-prairie-to-revisit-my-antonia

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