My Antonia - Softcover

Cather, Willa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1420951742 ISBN 13: 9781420951745

Publisher: Digireads.com, 2016

Synopsis

First published in 1918, “My Antonia” is the final book of Willa Cather’s “prairie trilogy” of novels, preceded by “O Pioneers!” and “The Song of the Lark.” It is the classic story of the daughter of the immigrant Bohemian Shimerda family that sets out to farm the untamed prairie land of Nebraska in the late 19th century. The father of the family finds the demands of this new life unbearable. He did not want to leave his homeland where he had a home, a trade, and friends, but does so because his wife believes their children will have a better life in America. The burdens of this new life become too much for the father to bear and he commits suicide before the end of the first winter. Told to us from the perspective of the adoring Jim Burden, an orphan who comes to live at his grandparent’s neighboring farm, “My Antonia” is an enduring American classic rich with both the spirit that brought so many immigrants to this land in search of a better life and of the tragic circumstances that affected so many pioneers. Will Cather viewed “My Antonia” as the best book that she had ever written and countless of her fans have concurred with her opinion ever since its original publication. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.

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Review

It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My 聲tonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of 聲tonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of 聲tonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.

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

From the Publisher

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About this edition

• Publisher: Digireads.com
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1420951742
• ISBN 13: 9781420951745
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 172