I read a classic! On purpose! Without coercion! Twelve-year-old me wants a medal.
My Antonia is the story of a sort of pioneer Magical Mystery Girl, as told through the eyes of Jim, a boy who travels from Virginia to frontier Nebraska to live with his grandparents after his parents die. A “Bohemian” (Czech?) family shows up to homestead the same day he does, and he befriends their eponymous daughter.
My favorite part of this book? Hands-down the frontier porn: ooh, baby, tell me more about canning those cherries! (Thank you, Fine Lines, for assuring me that I am not alone in my love of frontier porn.)
Other than that… it was largely interesting as a historical piece. It’s valuable to force myself to suspend my modern sensibilities every so often, I think. (Read the part about the blind Negro pianist, or the dirty old man who sexually assaults his live-in “hired girls.” Yikes.) The story stops and starts and skips years in odd places, and characters wander in and out without ever sharing the end of their tales. But Jim’s and Antonia’s lives are fascinating as a slice of history.
And of course, I loved the language. Willa Cather is so lyrical about a part of the country that most of us coastal types tend think of as boring (true, much of it is covered with strip malls and big-agribusiness monoculture in a way that it wasn’t in Cather’s day):
The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft grey rivers flowing past it. …I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence — the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.
1 response so far ↓
1 Eric with a c // Oct 17, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I remember reading this in 10th grade English and that it was one of the few books I really liked in that class, and I’m pretty sure the beautiful descriptions were the main reason. There’s a paragraph towards the end of the book with the sun setting behind a plow that I recall quite fondly. I’m glad to hear it’s still a good book even at the grown-up table.
By the way, I highly recommend reading classics as an adult. I sometimes think we waste good books on people too callow to appreciate them. Because of one particular English teacher, half of everyone in my HS (the ones who had this teacher) had to read Moby Dick. It was the dreaded book of junior year, everyone hated it. I was in the other class, so I didn’t read it until I was 27, at which point I decided it was one of the best books I ever read. I’ve read it again since then, and I know I’ll read it a few more times before I die. Were all those poor HS students wrong? I doubt it. They just weren’t mature enough yet - intellectually, mostly - to appreciate it.
No classic I’ve read as a grown up has hit me as hard as Moby Dick, but I’ve enjoyed a lot of canonical works after college that I never got to in any of my schooling. Now I get why they’re classics.
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