Customer Reviews

O Pioneers! (Dover Thrift Editions)

5 star:		(64)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Cather published her second novel, O Pioneers, in 1913 at the age of 40. Together with My Antonia it is the novel for which she is best known. Years after writing the book, Cather wrote of it " Since I wrote this book for myself, I ignored all the situations and accents that were then thought to be necessary."

The book takes place on the plains of Nebraska in the late 19th Century as the Prairie is settled be Swedish, Bohemian, and French immigrants trying to eke out a living from what appears to be a harsh, inhospitable land. The heroine of the book is Alexandra Bergson who inherits her father's farm as a young woman, raises his three sons and stays with the farm through the harsh times to become a successful landowner and farmer.

The books speaks of being wedded to the land and to place. In this sense it is an instance of the American dream of a home. It also speaks of a strong woman, not in cliched, late 20th Century terms but with a sense of ambiguity, difficulty and loss.

This is a story as well of thwarted love, of the difficult nature of sexualtiy, and of human passion. There is also the beginning of what in Cather's works will become an increased sense of religion, Catholicism in particular, as a haven and a solace for the sorrow she finds at the heart of human endeavor. Above all it is a picuure of stark life in the midwest.

There is almost as much blood-letting in this short book as in an Elizabethan tragedy. Cather's picture of American life on the plains, even in her earliest books, is not an easy or simple one. Some readers may quarrel with the seemingly happy ending of the book. I don't think any will deny that Alexandra's happiness is dearly bought or that it is bittersweet.

I tendend to shy away from this book in favor of Cather's later novels. I feared that it would be conventional and trite. The stereotyping was mine,however. This is a thoughtful, well written story of immigrant life on the plains and of the sorrow pain, and strength of the American experience.

I think that Cather could not have crafted a more beautiful book. The writing and the story are so wholey lovely, without pomp or ceremony. An immigrant father bequeaths his land to the care of his daughter on his deathbed, rather than to his sons, because he sees that her love of the land and her family runs deep and that she has the heart and spirit necessary to survive the harsh reality of the plains. So begins one of the greatest love stories of all time. I don't use the term love story loosely; this book contains love in its many intricate, shifting, and enduring forms: the love of the land, the love of a dream, love within families, love of the past, love of tradition, love of new opportunities, love between friends, the love between men and women, and the love of living. This book gets deep under your fingernails, like the very earth that it celebrates. And though, many of the events recounted are sad, it is the kind of sadness that is rich in hope

In "O Pioneers!", her classic novel first published in 1913, Willa Cather wrote, "The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman." By revealing to us the hearts of those pioneer immigrants in this book, Cather offers a moving meditation on United States culture and history.

"O Pioneers!" tells the story of a community in Nebraska farm country. Her main character, Alexandra Bergson, is a Swedish immigrant. Cather creates a marvelous portrait of the community and its rich mix of European ethnic groups: Norwegian, Swedish, French, etc. It is especially fascinating to see the multicultural, multiethnic world they created in the United States. Cather also depicts the cultural and linguistic "shift" that takes place along generational lines.

Cather's story deals with issues of economics, gender roles, and sexuality. In addition to the formidable Alexandra, she creates a cast of compelling characters. And her luminous prose style evokes all of the sensations of Alexandra's world: the smell of ripe wheat, the chirping of insects in the long grass, the golden play of light in an apple orchard.

But this is Alexandra's book. She is a great American heroine who reminds me of such beloved characters as Zora Neale Hurston's Janie (from "Their Eyes Were Watching God") or Alice Walker's Celie (from "The Color Purple"). Like those great characters, Alexandra will break your heart, deeply touch your soul, and ultimately leave you feeling richer for having known her.

Finally, as an interesting companion text to "O Pioneers!" try "Anna Christie," the 1922 play by U.S. writer Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill's life and career were contemporary with Cather's, and "Anna Christie," like "O Pioneers!", deals with a Swedish immigrant woman in the United States.

Willa Cather is fantastic and this book is absolutely classic, but this edition is missing small bits of text throughout. It's only a couple lines here and there and not really something that most would consider "essential" to the story - the text of Carl's telegram and verses that Alexandra thinks on - but it is certainly an omission.

Before I review the novel, I want to point out that most of the reviews that have given it one star seem to be coming from, perhaps, immature audiences..."it was totally uncoool!" Now, this book is not the best thing you'll ever read, but it IS very worthy of reading. Don't be discouraged by the title, as I once was. Basically, the story talks about Alexandra, a Swedish woman who has to take care of the family once her father dies at the beginning of the book. I didn't really admire her character or was interested too much in it, but that's okay because a lot of the plot involves her brother Emil and her neighbor Marie and their clandestine type of love...it's a heartwarming novel and a very entertaining read. I read the book in one night. The setting was very well depicted and had a sense of magic, evethough there's nothing of a supernatural nature in the book. The characters were very lively and realistic. I wasn't really too satisfied with the ending, but I enjoyed it greatly nonetheless. It is an excellent work ; I recommend it.

What if Cather wrote the great American Novel and no one noticed? Upon repeated reading of O Pioneers, I sometimes wonder if that isn't just what happened.

In the character of Alexandra, Cather has created, not a stereotype or carbon copy of heroines in earlier novels, but something entirely new to American Literature. Alexandra is no wispy, fainting Victorian heroine but instead strong, capable and (obviously) heroic. I don't know how other reviewers missed this obvious point. Perhaps strong female characters are common in todays writing, but not in 1913. Only Chopin's Awakening (1899) even comes close. And Alexandra seems transcendent compared to such earlier characters. Cather changed American Literature with this unconventional construct.

And then there is the prose: "When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman."

This well known quote from the book is perhaps the best example of Cather's lyric and thoughtful prose.

Finally, Cather engages the reader with the significant themes of struggle and truimph, and people v the land. Again, these may seem commonplace today but Cather is the author that brought them to our attention and branded them into our national identity nearly a century ago.

While I reccommend this book, you might also try My Antonia, The Song of the Lark, or One of Ours (for which Cather won the Pulitzer).

One of the finest examples of American writing ruined by the omission of the crucial lines of the telegram in this edition.

In the hulking box of textbooks that I hauled to my dorm on the day before classes began last semester, there was a small, out-of-place, [...] copy of O Pioneers by Willa Cather. Apparently, my English Composition instructor thought it best our class read "a good piece of English writing" before we embarked on our journal entries and research papers. I was not overly eager to read O Pioneers. It appeared to be one of those literary standards I saw while perusing Barnes and Noble, unattractive, unoriginally decorated little books with a quaint painting of older time on the cover and obligatory stamping of the publishers name followed by the word, "classic;" as if the publishers themselves were too unenthusiastic about them for any serious sales pitch. I always headed for the William S. Burroughs or Robert A. Heinlein sections, rarely paying attention to the drab dinosaurs.

Well, as the old cliché goes, don't judge a book by its cover. O Pioneers is an excellent tale of the trials and hardships of the gritty immigrants and pheasants who staked a claim and worked under a dream in the unsettled regions of this country so long ago. The realistic, headstrong, engaging characters live lives of poignant dedication, labor and loneliness as they swim around in the authoress' exquisite imagery ("The pasture was flooded with light; every clump of ironweed or snow-on-the mountain threw a long shadow and the golden light seemed to be rippling through the curly grass like the tide racing in"). Ms. Cather obviously tested every sentence for its weight, impact and flavor. The cold, dusty fields of Nebraska are vibrantly brought to life by this blatant perfectionist.

I was extremely impressed with this novel. Not impressed enough to change my usual literary diet from cult classics and science fiction masterpieces, but I certainly enjoyed it enough to save my unpretentious edition of O Pioneers from being carted back to the bookstore when they began buying books to sell used for the next semester.

The year after the Whartonesque (and unexceptional) "Alexander's Bridge," Cather published "O Pioneers!"--the book the she was in later years to call her second first novel. Although relatively brief, it unfolds like a frontier epic, and reading it now, it's hard to believe that Cather, living in Greenwich Village at the time, doubted whether anyone would be interested in the story of struggling Nebraskan farmers. As she wrote to a friend, with "this one I hit the home pasture and found that I was Yance Sorgeson [a rich farmer] and not Henry James."

"O Pioneers," for all its understated countrified charm, is not without the ingredients of a torrid drama: familial dispute, an adulterous affair, a double murder. The novel began its life as two stories, which Cather brilliantly melded into an ambitious whole. The first features Alexandra Bergson, who assumes proprietorship of her family's farm when her father dies, leaving her with three brothers. After several lean years, she nurtures the family estate, holding on to the land when many of her neighbors give up and return East. To insure the prosperity of her three siblings, Alexandra sacrifices her own comforts and passions--but never her independence. Yet the two older brothers first respect and then resent Alexandra's astute management--and they especially begrudge the favoritism she shows to their college-educated younger brother, Emil, whom she indulges with the goal of advancing him in the world beyond.

The second narrative concerns Emil and Marie Tovesky, who are childhood friends whose companionship flowers into romance after Marie marries the ornery, bitter, and somewhat mad Frank Shabata. If Alexandra's story provides the novel with its atmosphere and theme, the Emil-Marie story supplies the action and tension. Intermingled with these two storylines are depictions of rustic events and folksy characters (especially memorable is Ivar, a shaggy-haired, barefooted, back-to-nature eccentric).

Even a century later, "O Pioneers!" packs a wallop. But, more powerfully, it's an ode to the early settlers and to their struggle to survive. "The land belongs to the future," Alexandra remarks at the end. "We come and go, but the land is always there."

As the story opens, we meet 16-year-old Alexandra Bergson. She and her family had immigrated from Sweden years before, and are now settlers on the wind-swept Nebraska prairie. As her father was dying, he told the children that Alexandra, as the oldest, was to be in charge of the land. A land he wanted to keep in the family, no matter what the cost. He didn't trust the boys to do what was right, and he knew that Alexandra would.

Many people at that time were cutting and running, selling the land for so much less than it was really worth. And the boys wanted to do this as well. But Alexandra knew better. She knew that the land would be worth a lot some day, and talked the boys into mortgaging the land to buy more. She traveled to different counties and universities to find the newest farming techniques and crops -- much to the dismay of her brothers, who were always so worried their neighbors would be "laughing" at them. And yet, as time went on, the Bergson farm flourished and grew. Lou and Oscar, the two older boys, each found a wife and moved out on their own. But Emil, the youngest, was Alexandra's heart. He was sent to the university to become more than just a farmer. She wanted him to have a life beyond just the land.

And just as Alexandra is starting to really feel the lonliness of her life, an old family friend, Carl, reappears to visit. She has some decisions to make about her life, her family and her land.

This tale spans a space of 25-years in the life of Alexandra. She is an incredibly smart business woman and a wonderful strong character. She is not given to do things based on appearnces, which is an attribute that I love about her character. But she is lacking a lot of the social awareness that most women have. Especially since the character was written by a woman! But through all the hard times and the good times, Alexandra is there to hold this family of pioneers together. This is truly a fantastic book, well deserved of the title "Classic"! If you haven't read anything by Cather, I strongly urge you to read this one!!