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<DIV>Kari A. Ronning is assistant editor of the Cather Scholarly Edition. Charles Mignon is professor emeritus of English at the University of Nebraska. James Woodress is the author of Willa Cather: A Literary Life and the editor of Willa Cather s The Troll Garden, both available from the University of Nebraska Press.</DIV>
I read My Antonia in an attempt to catch up on important classics in American literature. After finishing it, I can see why it has deserved lasting popularity. It brings the reader close to the immigrant experience, and the pioneer experience, exploring the lives of early settlers in Nebraska, around the 1880's or so. It was published in 1918.
The best parts of this book, for me, were the lyrical descriptions of nature, the seasons, and the way that these impact human emotions. Consider this description of the seasons in a small Plains town:
"Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk." Lovely!
This is a true modernist book, in that there isn't a lot of plot. Rather, the book moves forward through episodes, much as life does.
I'm not sure that Willa Cather's decision to tell her story (which is based on her own childhood) in the voice of a man really works. I kept forgetting that the narrator was supposed to be male.
Although I was tempted to stop reading in the middle, because my modern self objected to the lack of an elegant plot, I was really glad to have finished it. I enjoyed the roundedness of the novel, and the way it described not just individual people but an entire community, and the changes that occurred over several decades on the Great Plains themselves. You get a sense of scope from the novel. And it certainly made me want to see the beauty of Nebraska for myself some day.
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This is one of the best American novels ever. It is a shame that Cather is so often overshadowed by Fitzgerald and Hemingway. This book shows how she is in many ways the most dynamic and thoughtful voice of her era in American lit.
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I found the book to be much longer than it needed to be as well as hard to follow. It did 'teach alot of lessons' but that is not why I read books. I read books because they are interesting and well written.
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