Of 聲tonia, the passionate and majestic central character in Willa Cather’s greatest novel, the narrator, Jim Burden, says that she left “images in the mind that did not fade–that grew stronger with time.” The same is true of the book in which Cather enshrines her heroine. On one level, My 聲tonia is a straight forward narrative, written in limpid prose of uncanny descriptive accuracy, about the struggles endured by a family of immigrant pioneers and the small community that surrounds them on the unsettled Nebraska plains. On another, it is a novel that represents a perfect marriage of form and feeling.
In its magnificent tableaux of human beings caught in the toils of an abundant and overpowering natural world, and in the quiet, understated sympathy it displays for life of every sort, My 聲tonia is a novel that effortlessly encompasses history and wilderness and the destiny of the individual–even as it lovingly and unsentimentally portrays a woman whose robust spirit and enduring warmth make her emblematic of what Cather most admired in the American people.
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聲tonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.
As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My 聲tonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Hardcover. Of Antonia, the passionate and majestic central character in Willa Cathers greatest novel, the narrator, Jim Burden, says that she left images in the mind that did not fadethat grew stronger with time. The same is true of the book in which Cather enshrines her heroine. On one level, My Antonia is a straight forward narrative, written in limpid prose of uncanny descriptive accuracy, about the struggles endured by a family of immigrant pioneers and the small community that surrounds them on the unsettled Nebraska plains. On another, it is a novel that represents a perfect marriage of form and feeling.In its magnificent tableaux of human beings caught in the toils of an abundant and overpowering natural world, and in the quiet, understated sympathy it displays for life of every sort, My Antonia is a novel that effortlessly encompasses history and wilderness and the destiny of the individualeven as it lovingly and unsentimentally portrays a woman whose robust spirit and enduring warmth make her emblematic of what Cather most admired in the American people. The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Antonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation of the immigrant. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780679447276
Book Description hardcover. Condition: new. Illustrated. Of ntonia the passionate and majestic central character in Willa Cathers greatest novel the narrator Jim Burden says that she left images in the mind that did not fadethat grew stronger with time The same is true of the book in which Cather enshrines her heroineOn one level My ntonia is a straight forward narrative written in limpid prose of uncanny descriptive accuracy about the struggles endured by a family of immigrant pioneers and the small community that surrounds them on the unsettled Nebraska plains On another it is a novel that represents a perfect marriage of form and feelingIn its magnificent tableaux of human beings caught in the toils of an abundant and overpowering natural world and in the quiet understated sympathy it displays for life of every sort My ntonia is a novel that effortlessly encompasses history and wilderness and the destiny of the individualeven as it lovingly and unsentimentally portrays a woman whose robust spirit and enduring warmth make her emblematic of what Cather most admired in the American people. Seller Inventory # DADAX067944727X
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