Reviews for My Antonia

The average rating for My Antonia based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-02-22 00:00:00 Cynthia Shaver i read this book the same day i found out that sparkling ice had introduced two new flavors, pineapple coconut and lemonade. what does this have to do with anything, you ask?? well, sparkling ice is sort of a religion with me, and this book was wonderful, so it was kind of a great day, is all. i don't have a lot of those. why have i never read willa cather before? i'm not sure. i think i just always associated her with old ladies, and i figured i would read her on my deathbed or something. maybe it was the unavoidable cather/catheter association.i don't know. all i know is that a certain little bird here on goodreads was always going "chirp chirp - willa cather!! chirp!! cather!!!" and when someone dumped a bunch of free books by the curb in front of my house, i decided it was a sign to finally give her a chance. i liked it so much, i will pay for my next book of hers! you're welcome, cather estate! this isn't a novel as much as a loosely gathered collection of stories in which the characters progress through time, grow up, lose their illusions, and make their way in the world; finding themselves in and defining themselves against the vast nothingness of the american prairie. jim and antonia are children who arrive in black hawk, nebraska on the same train, and the book is an account of their lives both apart and together,through to their adulthood, framed as a series of recollections by jim, as he remembers antonia to a mutual friend and examines what she symbolized for him. the descriptions of the landscape are phenomenal. the way the characters try to coax a living from the land and the harshness of nature is inspiring, antonia's irrepressible spirit is triumphant, even though she does come across as a headstrong pain in the ass at times. i just loved it. it reminded me, probably unjustly, of both huck finn and this whole series of books that i loved loved loved when i was little: i mean - it's willa cather - everything that needs to be said about her has probably already been said, so all i can contribute is that this book is like the kiwi-strawberry sparkling ice. it is not quite a black raspberry, but it is damn good. come to my blog!

Review # 2 was written on 2014-09-05 00:00:00 Frederic Vigneron I would have called 'My Ántonia' an immigrant novel. But then I realized that dubious distinction is reserved only for the creations of writers of colour - Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Xiaolu Guo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sunjeev Sahota, Yiyun Li, Lee Chang Rae and so on and so forth. Especially now when the word 'immigrant', hurled at us ad nauseam from the airwaves and the domains of heated social media discussions, invokes images of gaunt, exhausted but solemnly hopeful faces of Syrians knocking on the doors of Europe and America, having voyaged across perilous waters that have already claimed many of their loved ones as price of admission. Who are immigrants anyway? Those who had the foresight and temerity to circumnavigate the globe and assert their self-declared God-given right to rule over lands inhabited by 'savages' they could easily extirpate/subjugate by dint of military might? Or those who foolishly came afterwards, much much later, balancing their starry-eyed dreams of fulfillment or often mere survival, on the crutch of that primeval instinct that humanity will vanquish the fact of man-made demarcations, only to languish in exile for a lifetime pining away for a lost home they could never regain? Let's separate the chaff from the grain. 'Immigrants' are always sallow-skinned, tan-complexioned, sun-browned, needy Asians, Africans, Arabs, Latinos glibly umbrella-termed into convenient one-word identities. And yet narrator Jim's Ántonia epitomizes the immigrant's dream. The dream of making a home out of an alien place, of finding comfort, success, a modicum of acceptance among complete strangers and perhaps, coming to own a sweep of land to settle in and spread one's roots. Yes I know this is a eulogy offered to the prairies edged in gold in the dying light of dusk, an attempt to memorialize a way of life that the ill-informed city-dweller cannot begin to imagine, the author's wistful contemplation of a time and place frozen only in the amber of her memories. Her earnest effort to capture the nuances of the hardscrabble life with the land, teeming with its secret life in visible and hidden corners, as permanent fixture in the farmer's existence. But my reasons for 5-starring this are slightly different. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow on the mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes of those fields at nightfall. As far as central themes go, the American Dream is a bête noire within the repertoire of notable American fiction. An ostensibly noxious concept deserving of indictment by authors who have found it commensurate with an obsession with the unattainable, a doctrine of mindless avarice that leads one down the path of self destruction. But Ántonia's version of the American Dream envisages a life of simple self-sufficiency, despite the hardships it may entail. It is worth protecting, worth immortalizing through the written word. The sky-rocketing desire for riches and social affluence is foreign to her Bohemian (Czech) sensibilities. In a way she is an extension of the Nebraskan wilderness itself - raw, rough and tender at the same time, inexplicably beautiful, cheerily resilient against the vicissitudes of fate and time, indomitable advocate of vitality and growth. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death-heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day. For Jim Burden, Ántonia is home, indelibly associated as she is with his boyhood days spent chasing rabbits and prairie dogs. She is a personification of those bygone days sucked into the spiral of time that can never be recovered, but the incontrovertible reality of which will remain etched on to the palate of Jim's consciousness in the brightest of letters till his dying day. Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. Coming to the negatives, the casually racist comments directed at an African-American character ("He was always a negro prodigy who played barbarously and wonderfully.") and the exaltation of Antonia's womanhood could have curtailed my enjoyment somewhat but Cather did everything else so splendidly well that I'm choosing not to nitpick. Besides nowhere else within the wide realm of literature have I encountered such a believable depiction of friendship between a man and woman, each tied to the other through the bonds of shared childhood and a form of affection so wholesome that even a separation of two decades could not mellow it, each reduced to the status of a genderless individual, a blubbering emotional mess in the other's presence. (If I have, I cannot recall any such name at the moment.) About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, the realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory. Brava, Ms Cather.