My Ántonia (Great Plains Trilogy, #3) by Willa Cather

Feb 22, 2012 karen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: littry-fiction

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 ...more

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Sep 05, 2014 Samadrita rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-and-more, in-by-about-america, bygones-are-never-bygones, adoration, slice-of-life, by-women-who-matter, timeless-classics, human-drama, cherished, 500gbbw

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 knock 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. ...more

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Jul 07, 2008 Meredith Holley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Hemingway fans, good people

Recommended to Meredith by: nobody, and why?!

Shelves: reviewed, up-hill-both-ways-in-the-snow, classic-or-cannonical, girls-rule, favorites, audio, wise

Maybe what I love about Willa Cather is all the kinds of love and belonging she writes. Her unhappy marriages and her comfortable ones; her volatile love and her unconsummated longing; and her lone, happy people, are all so different, but so how I see the world. I think the way she writes them is wise. Unreliable narrators are delightful to read because, in the sense that the author has shown me their unreliability, she has also shown me their uniqueness and humanity. I think Jim Burden, the nar Maybe what I love about Willa Cather is all the kinds of love and belonging she writes. Her unhappy marriages and her comfortable ones; her volatile love and her unconsummated longing; and her lone, happy people, are all so different, but so how I see the world. I think the way she writes them is wise. Unreliable narrators are delightful to read because, in the sense that the author has shown me their unreliability, she has also shown me their uniqueness and humanity. I think Jim Burden, the narrator of My Antonia is a beautiful example of this and that most of the passion and mystery in this story comes from Jim’s failings as a human, within the story, and even as a character, from a critical perspective. I will explain.

Cather presents the story My Antonia as a story within a story. The narrative introducing the book comes from a friend of Jim’s, who tells us that Jim has always had a romantic disposition, but that, as of the writing of the book, Jim is in a presumably loveless marriage with an awful woman who is “temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.” Jim’s mind is consumed with memories of a Bohemian girl Jim and the author of the introduction both knew, and she represents to them both the country and the people of their childhoods. Throughout the book, Antonia Shimerda and her warmth belong to the land and the people who love her, and when someone calls her “my Antonia” it means something about that belonging.

It is impossible to truly identify with Antonia because Cather writes her in this unreliable way, and so, even though she is a painfully real character, she is told with lovely mistakes – the mistakes we make in talking about people we love who we don’t understand, who are not like us. Anyway, I don’t remember making this connection the last time I read this book, but for most of my life, people have referred to me as “my Meredith.” I think maybe it is the alliteration that brings it on, but it has always baffled me. For a long time, I found it horrifying. The phrase had some kind of unsettling expectation to it. Now, though, I feel differently. I feel like it is lovely to belong to the people I care about, and the last time someone said it, it was just comfortable and true. I’m not saying that this makes me similar to Antonia Shimerda, but it made me think about how warm and human it is to belong to people like Antonia did.

So, I’m telling you about how this book is written by a woman, but from the perspective of a boy and then a man. Writing across genders is suspicious to me, and so that unreliability piles on to the already suspect character of Jim. And, I don’t think Cather tells him fairly or realistically as a male character, or that this story is told as a man would tell it. It is told in the way a woman would tell about a man’s love, and I like that. It has the insight of a woman into the motivations of another woman, but it has the gentleness of how a woman sees the emotions of men.

Cather always writes domestic stories, but there is also something epic about the tragedies, betrayals, and glory her characters encounter. I don’t think there is one in O Pioneers, but in most of her books she includes some story within the story (in this case also within the larger story) of a far-off land, and those stories are my favorite part of the adventure of reading Willa Cather. The story of the Russian wolves in My Antonia is my favorite.

I am a very impressionable young thing, and so when someone explains to me why they love something, it often sticks and colors my interpretation of that thing in the future. I am staunchly against the prairies, and the pioneers are usually dullsville. In real life, when I am away from mountains for too long I freak out, and I have an aversion to reading about how to live in a dug out. But Cather’s wonderful descriptions of Nebraska change the whole idea for me. I know it’s just descriptions, but they are so vivid and beautiful. I love the mountains, and I maintain that they are more beautiful than the prairies, but I could never describe the essence of the places I love like Cather does her places. And her places are ick, so that makes her even more wonderful as a writer.

Anyway, I love this book. I listened to it on audio this time, and the audio is really lovely. It is difficult to say whether this is my favorite Cather or O Pioneers is or The Professor’s House is. They are all wonderful. This one has a quality I like of being driven by character, not plot, but that is not always a draw. The people here are wonderful, timeless, and real. The things they say are things people should say, and they belong to each other the way people should. It is often brutal, in the way art should be brutal, with real feeling; but, it is not cruel. It tells how we should see each other and how we should be, but also how we do see each other and how we are. It is a sort of magical world that is also real life, but I think that is how we talk about people we love – suspiciously comfortable; unreliable, but belonging.
...more

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Nov 06, 2014 Henry Avila rated it really liked it · review of another edition

James Quayle Burden loses both his parents at the tender age of ten in Virginia near the Blue Ridge Mountains, sent by relatives to his grandparents (Josiah and Emmaline Burden) by train, in the custody of a trusted employee that worked for his late father teenager Jake Marpole, reaching the farm safely in the still wild prairie state of Nebraska, newly settled by Americans, the Indians have been scattered and are no longer a threat , but the harsh frontier land remains untamed. Colorful Otto Fu James Quayle Burden loses both his parents at the tender age of ten in Virginia near the Blue Ridge Mountains, sent by relatives to his grandparents (Josiah and Emmaline Burden) by train, in the custody of a trusted employee that worked for his late father teenager Jake Marpole, reaching the farm safely in the still wild prairie state of Nebraska, newly settled by Americans, the Indians have been scattered and are no longer a threat , but the harsh frontier land remains untamed. Colorful Otto Fuchs an immigrant from Austria, former cowboy ( Wild West stories he recites, reluctantly , of his experiences there) and amiable Jake Marpole, who remains to help Jim's old relatives are very capable farm hands, that keep everything running smoothly quite needed by Jim's grandparents, he becomes their good friend ... Many of the these new settlers are from Europe, lured by the American government's promise and the law, that anyone who lives a certain amount of years on a property, it becomes theirs. But many poor Europeans arriving are from the cities, not knowing how to farm unable to build a log cabin, raise crops take care of animals that are essential to survive the unforgiving climate, hot excruciating summers and cold, snowy, freezing winters. The neighbors feels very sorry for these incompetents, get them out of their holes in the ground and make a proper home of wood; log cabins , give them animals which are vital to maintain a successful farm, show how to raise a crop, corn, even their old clothes to wear... A family from Bohemia (Czech Republic) are one of these people, not speaking a word of English the Shimerdas, living in a cave starving, no proper clothes dirt poor city folks the closest to Jim's grandparent's home. He meets pretty, lively, Antonia (Tony) Shimerda four years older, teaches her English at the urging of her unhappy father, the mother is always complaining about her lack of things ( and will never be grateful). They become pals, exploring the nearby untouched lands the endless, constantly moving red grass caused by the gentle winds and blue skies, seeing the fascinating sights , swimming in the local river's pristine water, picnics in the wilderness Jim falls in love with Antonia even trying to kiss her on the lips, she laughs at him treating the young boy like a child, puts her arms around his shoulders. They grow older, climbing a chicken house once to the roof, seeing an exhilarating electric storm in the night sky, lightning flashing close but not scared they're together, become almost adults and remain friends. The aging grandparents move to Black Hawk (Red Cloud) , a small town which Jim likes a short distance from their farm, it is rented to a widow and her brother. Jim can never stop loving My Antonia, her solid character working like a man in the fields to help her large family never quitting, treated badly by her stern brother Ambrosch, but in good humor when she comes home dead tired , soiled ragged clothes, face and body turned brown by the unceasing Sun, an optimist forever as young, clever, Burden leaves for college first in Lincoln the state capital, at the new University of Nebraska and then Harvard , becomes a rich railroad lawyer like Abraham Lincoln. He will come back and visit Antonia... A novel that tells what it was really like to live and struggle in the lonely prairie, during the nineteenth century in the American Midwest, not romantic but plenty of misery and a little happiness.... ...more

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Mar 06, 2018 Jaline rated it it was amazing

Shelves: xx2018-completed

What a spell Willa Cather weaves in this, the final book of her Great Plains Trilogy, sometimes known as the Prairie Trilogy. This novel, more than any of the two previous novels, reminded me absurdly yet so strongly of Kent Haruf’s novels. Absurdly? Yes – their time frame is separated by a few generations and their locations separated by a few States in-between. Yet, it is the atmosphere created, the way the stories are told simply yet clearly and with great feeling – these are the qualities th ...more

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Dec 26, 2015 Fabian rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This Nebraskan prairie civilization is like the dogtown that lives below it. It is a web of families & favors. And that's the way of life. Antonia, the magnetic and emblematic figure in the middle of it all--in this narrative of remembrance, of singular impressions--is a strong rock, a hardworking beacon of goodness in a world that is simultaneously vast & asphyxiating, with its rattlesnakes, sicknesses, suicides and slight silver linings. Also a sight to behold: the kindness of strangers & how ...more

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Sep 28, 2019 Ines rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I am absolutely convinced that I have fallen in love with Cather’s writing, she abducts you with the detailed descriptions of the landscapes and with the characters of her stories, creating a real addiction to your soul...
In this work we find the destiny of Bohemian and Scandinavian families struggling with the hard life and survival in the new world, precisely in Nebraska and Kansas.
Cather will make us discover the saga of the Shimeda family, of which Antonia belongs to and the Harling family, I am absolutely convinced that I have fallen in love with Cather’s writing, she abducts you with the detailed descriptions of the landscapes and with the characters of her stories, creating a real addiction to your soul...
In this work we find the destiny of Bohemian and Scandinavian families struggling with the hard life and survival in the new world, precisely in Nebraska and Kansas.
Cather will make us discover the saga of the Shimeda family, of which Antonia belongs to and the Harling family, through the narration reported by Cather's real friend,Jim Burden.
Jim will be a living witness to the joys, sorrows and hardships of these people’s lives, how they were considered and treated by the inhabitants of Black Hawk, a town close to the farms where these immigrants came to live. Everything revolves around the girls of these families, and through Jim’s life we will be accompanied to discover their destinies. I tell you, Cather writes how very few manage to do, such wealth and ability to get to the exact concept and deep meaning of events as very few authors of her time were able to donate to the readers... this work though, I found her a little pedantic and not very exciting compared to "Death come for the Archbishop".
Instead I was moved to read a whole elegy of full knowledge of classical studies through the university life of Jim, where he will face the study of Homer, Virgil and a thorough of Latin's study. Wow, my hat’s off to Cather and her deep knowledge of the classics!!
I’m so sorry, instead of getting attached to Antonia, my concern was more about figuring out what happened to the narrator, our friend Jim, the one who should had have a hidden figure in the story...

Sono assolutamente convinta di essermi innamorata della scrittura della Cather, ti rapisce e le descrizioni minuziose dei paesaggi e dei personaggi delle sue storie mi/ti creano una vera dipendenza...
In questa opera troviamo la vita di famiglie boeme e scandinave alle prese con la dura vita e la sopravvivenza nel nuovo mondo, precisamente in Nebraska e nel Kansas..
Cather ci farà scoprire la saga della famiglia Shimeda, cui Antonia appartiene e della famiglia Harling, attraverso la narrazione riportata da un suo amico Jim Burden.
Jim sarà quindi testimone vivente delle gioie, dei dolori e difficoltà della vita di queste persone... di come venivano considerati e trattati dagli abitanti di Black Hawk, cittadina vicina alle fattorie dove arrivarono a vivere questi immigrati. Il tutto gira intorno alle ragazze di queste famiglie,e traverso la vita di Jim saremo accompagnati a scoprire i loro destini..
Lo dico, la Cather scrive come pochi riescono a fare, una tale ricchezza e capacità di arrivare all'esatto concetto e significato profondo degli avvenimenti come ben pochi autori del suo periodo sono riusciti a fare... quest' opera però, l' ho trovata un pochino pedante e ben poco appassionante rispetto a "Death come for the Archbishop".
Mi sono invece commossa nel leggere tutta l' elegia di piena conoscenza degli studi classici attraverso la vita universitaria di Jim, dove affronterà lo studio di Omero, Virgilio e un approfondito studio del Latino. Caspita, tanto di cappello alla Cather e della sua profonda conoscenza dei classici!!
Mi spiace un sacco,a invece di affezionarmi ad Antonia, la mia preoccupazione era piu' sul capire cosa capitasse al narratore, il nostro amico Jim, che altro doveva avere che una figura nascosta della storia... ...more

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Aug 27, 2011 Jason Koivu rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, favorites

Here lie glorious character sketches. Be sure to pay your respects.

I dragged my feet. I came late to the party. I regret it.

This is one of those books I've known about for ages, but was ignorant and flat out mistaken about its subject matter. A friend in college wrote a poem based off of it and my impression from that experience was that My Antonia was about a man describing a woman for the length of an entire novel. That would be a gross oversimplification of the book. It's so much more than t Here lie glorious character sketches. Be sure to pay your respects.

I dragged my feet. I came late to the party. I regret it.

This is one of those books I've known about for ages, but was ignorant and flat out mistaken about its subject matter. A friend in college wrote a poem based off of it and my impression from that experience was that My Antonia was about a man describing a woman for the length of an entire novel. That would be a gross oversimplification of the book. It's so much more than that.

It's one of the stories that America is founded upon: Immigrants who've left their homeland on the promise of a better life in the new world. The "new world" America in this case meant the far midwest, those lonely plains at the foot of the Rockies. The immigrants this time around are Czechs, referred to as Bohemians in the novel. Some of them didn't start out in this country with much and lived a hardscrabble life once they arrived. Ah, what people are willing to endure for the hope of something better.

description

I cherish books like this and The Jungle or The Grapes of Wrath, where immigrants or earlier Americans gave it their all for the dream and often died trying. Whether it's victory or defeat it doesn't matter, it's the struggle that counts. Fiction this may be, but the story is a real one. My own family came to America from Finland about the same time this book is set. They farmed the land and found hard times, but they survived. Hearing those stories is a true marvel to behold.

Willa Cather tells her own, truly marvelous tales in My Antonia. Her people are born from precision craftsmanship that refrains from the ponderous "grocery list" descriptions of physical traits and habits of characters that other writers indulge in. Instead Cather cuts to the essence of the person with excellent word choice time and again, planting in the reader's mind fruitful, full-color images of exactly who she's talking about.

As alluded to at the start of this review, this novel is all about the character sketches. They move the story, much the same way as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. However, since the characters come alive and are so very lively, the lack of a hard-driven, singular plot is no hinderance to one's enjoyment of My Antonia. ...more

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Mar 20, 2020 Michael rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020, favorites

A plainspoken account of turn-of-the-century life on the Nebraskan prairie, told from the perspective of an East Coast businessman recounting his childhood in the Midwest. The coming-of-age novel centers on the lifelong friendship between the affluent narrator, Jim Burden, and his former neighbor Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant whose family struggled to assimilate into the American mainstream. The novel starts off shakily, slow moving and full of stereotypes, but turns into a thoughtful r ...more

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Nov 30, 2016 Michelle rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, classics, drop-caps

“I’d like to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister-anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind. You influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me.”

Oh, Jim! She really did a number on you! I guess it couldn’t be helped, because after knowing Antonia Shimerda, I can’t help being enamored with her myself. It is not even easy to say things so illuminating about a human b “I’d like to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister-anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind. You influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me.”

Oh, Jim! She really did a number on you! I guess it couldn’t be helped, because after knowing Antonia Shimerda, I can’t help being enamored with her myself. It is not even easy to say things so illuminating about a human being but somehow, seeing Antonia from the eyes of Jim Burden, I totally understand where he’s coming from. Antonia exudes strength, spirit and determination, and all the while remains gentle, trusting, and kind. What Jim feels for her goes beyond romantic love, though. She is the embodiment of the things he loves most: home, his childhood, and his aspirations. The way I see it, she is what makes him a better man.
Nevertheless, “My Antonia” is not a love story, it hardly focuses on that aspect at all. With Antonia’s story, we get a glimpse on the lives and concerns of early settlers, which includes European immigrants, of the American West. It shows us what these people have to contend with, and struggle for, that goes to the very heart of their lives.

Now most of the pioneer stories I have come across depict rugged and determined male characters out to tame the wilderness with know-how and grit, while their female halves are relegated to supporting or (I dare say) insignificant roles. “My Antonia” breaks from that convention and instead, focused more on the struggles of the women. It’s an invaluable reminder that life was hard for everyone on the frontier, and that the women who made a go of it were every bit as tough-minded and independent as the men were. Antonia faces hardships of scratching out a living on the prairie, while having to do so as a woman, and while dealing with the challenges of being an immigrant as well.

As with the writing, Willa Cather masterfully tells a poignant and beautiful story that is striking in its simplicity. She makes you realize anew how much art is suggestion and not transcription, and her brevity is refreshing. I know of no novel that makes the remote folk of the Western prairies more real than “My Antonia” makes them, and I know of none that makes them seem better worth knowing. Beneath the layers of Mid-Western culture, she reveals human beings embattled against fate and circumstance -- and into her picture of their dull struggles, I was able to appreciate their heroism, and find their tribulations genuinely moving. ...more

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Oct 10, 2014 Rowena rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Rowena by: Cheryl

Shelves: american-lit

"There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made."- Willa Cather, My Ántonia

For someone who grew up watching "Little House on the Prairie", this was an interesting and nostalgic look at my childhood fancies and romanticized images of frontier life. Making a new life, taming the land, and c "There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made."- Willa Cather, My Ántonia

For someone who grew up watching "Little House on the Prairie", this was an interesting and nostalgic look at my childhood fancies and romanticized images of frontier life. Making a new life, taming the land, and creating something out of very little all sounded so romantic and magical to me at the time but there was so much that I hadn't considered, couldn't have known, with my limited worldly experience. I guess that's one of the many reasons that literature is so powerful: giving a voice to experiences.

This is a story of the early settlers in Nebraska; a story of hardships, successes, community, change... The story is narrated by an orphaned boy who goes to live with his grandparents after his parents pass away. The narration was very detailed and observant.

The story focuses quite a bit on Ántonia Shimerda, and her Bohemian family.I thought the character of Ántonia was exceptionally well-written; I think she's one of those unforgettable literary characters, and that's definitely due to Cather's amazing writing and depiction of her. Cather manages to show the language development Ántonia goes through,and also the development of her character from being an ordinary little girl playing with her sister and friends, to working "like a mans" in order to support her family:

"The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Antonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new."

Having moved around a bit I really enjoyed the descriptions of the landscapes because at least to me, apart from food, that's what I miss the most about leaving a place: the familiarity in scenery, flora, and fauna. The small differences in landscape are an unavoidable sign that you are in a new place:

"There was none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only--spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind---rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted."

There was interesting discussion about the European immigrants to the USA. What shouldn't have surprised me but did anyway, was the fact that even among the European immigrants there was plenty of discrimination and also an unofficial hierarchy. What was universal though was the sense of loss from all the characters who had migrated to that area, despite their origins and loss.

I'm fully convinced of Cather's writing style. Cather brought the frontier to life for me, the Bohemians, Ántonia, everyone and everything. I loved that she brought to the fore the stories of the people of the New World, especially the women. ...more

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Jul 21, 2013 Dolors rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Those wanting to get hold of an elusive past

Shelves: dost, read-in-2014

“Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” (p.259)

More than a Wild West story about the adventurous frontier life in the Nebraska plains, I thought My Ántonia was a novel about red seas of prairie grass and hard blue skies and black ploughs outlined against crimson suns and adults chasing the casted shadows of their pasts. Prior to the comforting embrace of the Nebraskan landscape there was only the most profound homesickness. Homesickness for “Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” (p.259)

More than a Wild West story about the adventurous frontier life in the Nebraska plains, I thought My Ántonia was a novel about red seas of prairie grass and hard blue skies and black ploughs outlined against crimson suns and adults chasing the casted shadows of their pasts. Prior to the comforting embrace of the Nebraskan landscape there was only the most profound homesickness. Homesickness for an abandoned country, for lost parents, for the wistfulness of bygone childhood days, for words never uttered and love never fully declared.
Willa Cather’s evocative voice builds a new home for the reader in this strange yet welcoming land, which turns the mundane into gold, while mourning for the loss of a past that won’t ever come back.
Cather opens the novel meeting her own character Jim Burden and inviting him to recount the story of Ántonia Shimmerda, a young Czech girl who grew up with him, and surprises the reader with an unexpected male voice and an unreliable narrator. Jim, now a middle aged lawyer living in New York, retells their story casting an aura of nostalgia over the late 19thC Nebraska farming frontier, its landscape, colorful people and small towns.

Jim is barely ten years old when he loses his parents and is sent to live with his grandparents in an unfamiliar territory. Ántonia’s longing for her original home in Bohemia is made unbearably real through her awareness of her father’s misery in failing to adjust to a new hard working life in an foreign country, whose people and culture seem alien and rough to the cultivated Mr.Shimmerda. This doubled feeling of homesickness is what so powerfully fastens Jim and Ántonia together and what urges them to turn to the Nebraskan landscape in search of protection, developing an intense attachment to the natural world which captures their changing moods and eases their sense of estrangement, always in tune with the changing of the seasons.

When the Burdens move to the small town of Black Hawk and Ántonia is recruited as a “hired girl” at the Harlings, a household with good reputation in town, Jim realizes that along with the missing plains, his closeness to Ántonia also starts to dissolve. Cather’s nuanced stories and picturesque tales disguise the impending collision between the hard reality of young immigrant women at the time, who were treated as outcasts in a rigid social caste system and not only exploited but also sexually abused by their masters, and the wide range of opportunities for young men like Jim, whose main aspiration is to attend college. Life and years intervene and Jim and Ántonia’s paths diverge but their spiritual bond remains locked in the lengthening shadows of a common past embedded in the fleecy grass dancing with the gentle morning breeze that caresses the wine-stained prairies.

Cather’s writing style taught me a valuable lesson. Genuineness and diction thrive in simplicity. Never had my heartstrings been pulled this intensely until I heard Blind d’Arnault’s melancholic negro voice and his virtuous fingers running up and down the keys of his piano while rocking back and forth to the rhythm of his improvized bluesy spirit. Never had I felt the stillness of a slanting sun sinking behind the fields playing with magnified shadows as I did when I was sitting with Jim and Ántonia in perfect communion with the countryside. Never had I understood the true meaning of the kinship between hard work and fertility until I met its embodiment in a woman browned by the sun, with calloused hands and flat chest, an Earth Goddess who made a home out of a dusty land and a sheltering sky.
My Ántonia made also a home for me in the Nebraska plains of the late 1800s and then made me grieve for its loss. I might never see those plains but at least I can walk down the path of Jim’s memories of red blades of grass and his Ántonia’s electric blue sky, where their souls remain eternally married in a past that becomes the prevailing reality and their one and only Destiny, and feel that I am home. ...more

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Mar 02, 2015 Glenn Sumi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 1900-1960, classics, guardian-1000, favorites

My rating for My Ántonia? 5 stars shining brightly in the cloudless Nebraska sky, so vividly and lovingly evoked by Willa Cather in this elegiac novel about farmers and immigrant settlers making lives for themselves in the harsh, beautiful, bountiful prairies.

(Sorry about that graceless run-on incomplete sentence. Cather, with her clear, descriptive, unpretentious prose, would never commit such a sin.)

Some people and places are forever etched in our memories. Can you recall the landscapes of you ...more

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Sep 28, 2014 Ted rated it it was amazing

Shelves: reviews-most-liked, lit-american, women-s-works, americana

… more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping …

High Plains mixed-grass prairie during springtime. Near Harrison, Nebraska.
From Flickr, by https://www.flickr.com/photos/terrano...

Willa Cather

Willa Cather – born 1873 near Winchester Virginia. Her family moved to Nebraska in 1883 when she was nine, joining h ...more

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Apr 16, 2020 Zoeytron rated it really liked it

Black Hawk, Nebraska. Late 1880's or so, when the West was still wild. This particular area is amply populated with immigrants from Bohemia, Norway, and Sweden, most of them living in sod houses. All with their own prejudices, but most finding common ground with each other at some point. The threat of rattlesnakes, coyotes, and Mother Nature's atrocities does not differentiate between them, all are fair game.

Back in the early 80's, my husband and I bought a selection of 100 classics from T ...more

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Jul 09, 2017 Hugh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: mookse-madness, read-2017, classics

It is a daunting task to find anything fresh to say about a book that is justifiably regarded as a classic, so I will keep this one fairly short.

Willa Cather moved with her family from New England to rural Nebraska as a child, at a time when new farmland there was still being pioneered, so this tale of the state's development and specifically the experiences of the first generation immigrant farming families from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia that settled it, is inevitably coloured by her own ...more

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Oct 31, 2015 Himanshu rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: unforgettables, favorites, want-to-live-in, reviewed

An'-ton-ee-ah

That's how her name is pronounced, and not like An'-tow-niya which is how I always thought it was. I found this clarification, at the very start of the book, remarkable(for me) because it changed the way I read about her, till the very last page. At every mention of her name, my mind tried to pronounce it the Bohemian way, thus, never letting me forget the eccentricity and congeniality of this unforgettable character.

I have somehow spent almost a month reading this little book a ...more

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Sep 07, 2014 Cheryl rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Cheryl by: Nidhi Singh

Shelves: mesmerizing, fiction, women-and-books, fav-authors

She makes me revel in the beauty of four seasons: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky...the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. I read her and I forsake all others, for she tells me that no one can give the sensation of place through narrative, and also deliver such soul-stirring and wistful storytelling quite like she can.

She gives me quiet She makes me revel in the beauty of four seasons: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky...the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. I read her and I forsake all others, for she tells me that no one can give the sensation of place through narrative, and also deliver such soul-stirring and wistful storytelling quite like she can.

She gives me quiet country in the form of a first person narrative mode that keeps me so invested that for a week, I live in the head of Jim, a man looking back at his boyhood in a prairie town, and suddenly, there I am, next to him, in scenic reverie, I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction...This was the complete doom of heaven, all there was of it. As I read through each chapter, she gives me nostalgia for the quiet country I've had the honor of experiencing, when I lived in the belly of the Appalachian mountains (which at some point was considered a part of the American frontier that Cather writes about).

She gives me Ántonia, always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory, for through Ántonia, she gives me women's issues; unassuming, yet audacious. Through Lena, Ántonia's friend and Jim's lover, she gives me feminism; subtle and sure. Her [Cather's] thoughts on feminism are also mine:"she was more interested in asserting her right to participate in a male literary tradition than in promoting an alternative female canon." When she uses a male narrator who is a bit of a recluse because she wants to "imagine a man's feelings for Antonia," I'm exhilarated by the creative choice. And when she creates a narrative to compare the lives of these women, she gives me two of my favorite books on women: Night and Day and So Long a Letter.

When she gives me Bohemia and Scandinavia, and the portrait of an unassimilated immigrant household, she showcases cultural dubiousness, and brings back memories of my own immigrant struggles of years ago:

If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard's father was a clergyman, and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who couldn't speak English. There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Antonia's father. Yet people saw no difference between her and the three Marys; they were all Boheminans, all hired girls.

At the end, when she shows me the unpredictability of life and I am tempted to pity Ántonia, she assures me that Ántonia is not broken, but still there, in the full vigor of her personality, battered but not diminished, rather, she has found in America, what she wanted in Bohemia.

She gives me pastoral literature in its simple, subtle, and structured form, leaving me much to ponder about life and love and happiness:

I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
...more

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Dec 03, 2018 Jan-Maat added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century, usa, fiction

Well, a strange book.

The author starts off by denying that she is the author. Not my story, no sirree, I have no responsibility what so ever for what happens between those pages, nuthin' to do with me, it's these guys you see having a gossip on a railway carriage, one of them narrates the scene and the other one, well he's the one who writes the story.

Having asserted her distance from the narrative, she is free to write what ever she wants. What she wants is a bit strange. The narration is meant Well, a strange book.

The author starts off by denying that she is the author. Not my story, no sirree, I have no responsibility what so ever for what happens between those pages, nuthin' to do with me, it's these guys you see having a gossip on a railway carriage, one of them narrates the scene and the other one, well he's the one who writes the story.

Having asserted her distance from the narrative, she is free to write what ever she wants. What she wants is a bit strange. The narration is meant to be recollections about Antonia (view spoiler) a Czech girl, from an immigrant family to Nebraska, who both of the narrators knew as young people. The narrative is divided into sections and although the narrative is meant to be about Antonia, she features mostly in the last section, a little bit in the first and less in the others. In the last section Antonia emerges most strongly, not as an individual but as a type, a mother of nations, perhaps she is the shape of things to come, sun -browned, capable, hard working, undaunted, a farmer's wife, mother to many, and a Grandmother. I don't really see why or how the young antonia made such a powerful impression on the two male narrators who open the story, made that's the point, functionally she and the framing narrators feelings for her are the key that opens the tin of sardines.

With and without Antonia (and she is mostly absent or in the background) the book is a lyrical evocation of life in Nebraska towards the end of the nineteenth century, a fictionalisation of Willa Cather's own childhood, with a special focus on the women and girls. Apart from the gender bending such as Antonia slipping her silver ring on to Jim's (ie the author's) finger - an act of engagement which he rejects. This is no rural idyll, there is suicide followed by uncertainty over where the deceased can be buried, people make money through trickery, selling up to the next bunch of know-nothing new comers at inflated prices or by adding unagreed extras to dressmaking, general sharp dealing in the hotel trade, a man might sigh with longing over the chance of getting rich in Mexico by double charging poor travellers on the railway. Inbetween you try and survive the winters, trickery naturally leads to illegitimate babies too - our Antonia is the proud mother of one of these.

Those keenest to escape rural drudgery move to the coast to open boarding houses for sailors and up sticks to the Klondike with the goldrush with a view to providing support services.

A key moment I felt was narrator Jim Burden (view spoiler) reading Virgil's Georgics and as Virgil through poetry preserved his native region for posterity, so to Cather ,through Burden, makes Nebraska a realm of the muses. A place of murder- suicides, slippery gender roles, and giant snakes whose threatening phallic symbolism is easily crushed with a handy shovel (or possibly a spade)(view spoiler) . Her's is a restless America, settling is contingent, one can move on and almost everybody does, it's a land of migrants, some more recent than others - a layer cake though rather than a melting pot. Identity is difference, all honourably preserved here.

In the end Jim Burden, narrator, escapes or comes to terms with nomen ist omen : The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself. and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For Antonia and me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious , the incommunicable past( p.196) as I said, strange a communication device - the book - asserting to us that something is incommunicable, a bildungsroman constructed out of the lives of others, a cunning casket snaps shut. ...more

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Sep 13, 2017 Madeline rated it liked it

Shelves: audiobook

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Like The Great Gatsby, I somehow avoided having to read this in high school, although I remember a lot of my friends reading Cather's book for Honors English while I was suffering through Summer of My German Soldier in regular people English. (Turns out, even if you're a voracious teenage reader, they still don't let you take honors classes if you spend your entire high school career constantly being one bad quiz away from straight-up flunking whatever math class you're in at the time) I don't r ...more

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Jan 06, 2016 Margitte rated it it was amazing

Shelves: family-sagas, vintage-classics, literary-novel, american-history, american-author, reviewed, chicken-soup-for-the-soul-read, 2016-read, favorites, american-novel

Two old friends meet on a train. They grew up together in the same town, and lived in the same city, New York, although they hardly ever saw each other there. They decided to do an unusual thing. They would write down their memories of one particular girl. In a community filled with the good, the bad and the unbelievable, she unknowingly became the primary color in many people's pictures of their lives on the remote prairies of Nebraska. She simply refused to fade away in anyone's memories.

Midd ...more

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May 25, 2014 Nidhi Singh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Nidhi by: Dolors

Shelves: women, favorites, american-literature, 2014

To speak her name was to call up pictures of peoples and places, to set a quiet drama going in one’s brain.

‘My Antonia’ is a story of home and homesickness. Of the memories of a lost home that persist in the mindscape as the warm gusts of wind and the singing of the larks. The home of that golden sunshine and yellow leaves, red shaggy grass and blue skies. The images which make me think of home as the quietest, friendliest corner of a crowded and uncaring street, of that kind touch in midst
To speak her name was to call up pictures of peoples and places, to set a quiet drama going in one’s brain.

‘My Antonia’ is a story of home and homesickness. Of the memories of a lost home that persist in the mindscape as the warm gusts of wind and the singing of the larks. The home of that golden sunshine and yellow leaves, red shaggy grass and blue skies. The images which make me think of home as the quietest, friendliest corner of a crowded and uncaring street, of that kind touch in midst of the falling walls of life, of the bittersweet pain that persists in the heart as long as one lives. The place one always wants to go back to but holds over thinking how it must have changed and how we must have changed with the passing of the years. Or a look of longing evoked as the eyes meet the face of the beloved. Antonia, the beloved, who could never be yours, who you want to look at just for a moment longer, want to make her stay but have to let go. Because what she is, is everything that is earthy and beautiful, and essential and heart-felt, and primitive and pristine, and childhood and innocence, and life and love, and its harshness and tenderness, and its hard earned lessons. Everything that is lost and never recovered and never forgotten. And everything of what the home and the past is made of.

Between the earth and the sky I felt erased blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

This subsequent feeling of obliteration in the immensity of the prairies, the rustling of the red and gold autumn leaves in the high wind, the blazing force of winter wiping out the loveliness of summer, the stinging and delighting power of nature, the rejuvenation that comes with the changing seasons is a perfect ode to a transcendent vision and to everything that was put together by the pioneers for survival and persistence. It is something that is gripping as terror, which trembles the soul with its strangeness and yet makes the heart leap with ecstasy by permitting that space for humanity. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. It is the unforgiving elemental force of nature that belittles the feeling of spatial and cultural estrangement however strong that might be. Because now, everything has to be built and rebuilt, and scrounged and hunted for. The past becomes a slate of memories of beautiful drawings. Something to be looked at with adoring, piercing nostalgia, but never to be turned back to.

Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she was, oh, she was still my Antonia!

Maybe it is true that Jim is too much of a romantic. He declares his inability to lose himself among impersonal things, with his memory always crowded with people and places of his own past, strengthened and simplified like the unchanging blue of a clear summer sky. And his story is formed by rivulets of episodes, storytelling, impressions that are mostly his own and those that are gathered. His narrative is flawed, imperfect, tinged with too much emotion, inhibited with inaction, with less beginnings and greater musings over closed chapters. He never gives away everything about himself. He gives away his dreams but also his felt inability to understand them. There is so much we don’t understand of ourselves and our lives and of those we love. Of our hurts, and bitterness and disappointments with them. It is one of the things that grant authenticity to our own experiences and feelings. There is something in it that gives the same strength and pulse to loving and remembering, like the force that beckons Blind d’ Arnault to the piano. The necessity of loving and remembering. Loving them for what they are, what they have meant to us, and what we have shared together; the un-sharable and the incommunicable.

Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

...more

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Oct 11, 2011 Matt rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classic-novels

Like many kids, the first “real” books I loved were Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series. Their great and continuing popularity makes perfect sense. Kids crave security and a sense of protection; Little House on the Prairie hammered on that theme repeatedly, while only giving the reader a frisson of the actual dangers and hardships of frontier life. There was never any explicit threat in any of the books, with the exception of the near fatal cold in The Long Winter (the one ...more

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Oct 22, 2018 Monica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, popular, female-author-fic, fiction, wh_fem_fic, pub-b4_1950, classics, kindle_fiction

My Antonia was an unexpected, pleasant surprise. This is another Read Harder task: Read an assigned book you hated (or never finished). I was assigned to read this during my junior year in college. I never cracked the spine. It was a religion in literature class. Honestly, I was expecting My Antonia to be a proselytizing piece of work. What I got after finally reading it some 30+ years later was not a discussion of religion (it's there but not nearly as much as anticipated), but a discuss My Antonia was an unexpected, pleasant surprise. This is another Read Harder task: Read an assigned book you hated (or never finished). I was assigned to read this during my junior year in college. I never cracked the spine. It was a religion in literature class. Honestly, I was expecting My Antonia to be a proselytizing piece of work. What I got after finally reading it some 30+ years later was not a discussion of religion (it's there but not nearly as much as anticipated), but a discussion of immigration, of Midwestern values, feminism, racism, meritocracy, privilege, wealth disparities, even a little implied homo eroticism. In essence this was a surprisingly rich, deep, enjoyable and enlightening read.

I was getting bogged down in the beginning. I was at approximately 20% and we were still having children's adventures. Ugh! Shout out to my gr friend Zachary who encouraged me to press on. My Antonia is a coming of age story about a young boy growing up principally in Nebraska among a cast of mostly immigrant characters. Cather's portrayal of immigrants is interesting. There is a bit of a metamorphosis in the attitude of Jim Burden as he grows up. Cather shows that social evolution can be real!!(view spoiler)[

The novel starts out with a very young Jim Burden being a little beguiled by similar aged Antonia. He is curious and his grandparents preach tolerance. But the community in general distrusts these Bohemians.

"Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners."

Antonia's family is poor while trying to establish a life in America and they are forced to live under conditions that they are not used to. For example they live in a cave that they rent space at an exorbitant price. Burden observes life on the prairie in general and how these people have in trying to adjust make it interesting. There is an odd fascination with how they do mundane things like making bread. Life is difficult in the new country for the Bohemians (from Czechoslovakia). Though they came from a much more inclement region, they were from a rich culture that they loved. As the moved to Nebraska, they were asked to submerge that culture and assimilate. They found themselves victims of exploitation, bigotry, and ignorance. Antonia's father commits suicide fairly early in the novel which has a deleterious effect on her family and among the community. This is where religion has the most discussion. After her father's death, Antonia is forced to go work in the town as a "hired girl". This means she has to work to earn money for the family, which in these times is spoken of in whispers because a woman's place is in the home, not bringing home the bacon. During this time Jim Burden is also growing up and his opinions on Antonia and the other immigrant women forced to work and starts to juxtapose them with the American (see white) women and their relative life of ease. Ultimately Burden leaves for college and a life. Antonia stays behind, has a bad relationship with an American man she loves who leaves her high and dry. Presumably because she was an immigrant it's ok to mistreat her. She ends up marrying a relative, has children etc. The book ends with a a run down, worn, poor but happy Antonia and a wealthy, not necessarily happy but stable and acceptable Jim Burden. (hide spoiler)]

I see these classics as time capsules revealing mindsets, philosophies, conditions of the times, the environments, moods, temperament etc. Oftentimes I find the books revealing much more about the author than the fate of the characters on the journey. You pick up things in the turn of a phrase. The predicament of the characters and how they talk it out. Cather was an interesting woman. Like so many brilliant writers, she was both ahead of her time and a product of her time. But here's a moment of honesty; one hundred years later, Cather has done more to help me understand the Midwest mindset than the throngs of books written on the subject even within the last decade. By Midwest mindset, I mean primarily white, middle class people (primarily male) with "family" values, independent minded with one foot in the rural life and one in the urban attempting to bridge the gap without eroding their culture.

"'People who don't like this country ought to stay at home,' I said severely. 'We don't make them come here.'"

Through Jim "every man" Burden, Cather reveals the Midwest attitudes towards immigration/others. At first he has prejudged them unfavorably but more and more exposure to them allows him to understand, accept and even appreciate them and their differences. He also comes to understand the systemic privileges he has that Antonia does not. Privileged bestowed upon him as a white male and as an American born male.

"'Why aren't you always nice like this, Tony?' 'How nice?' 'Why, just like this; like yourself. Why do you all the time try to be like Ambrosch?' She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking up at the sky. 'If I live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us.'

Burden is ahead of his time in his evolution on the roles of women. He is at first disdainful of Antonia because she is too masculine,

"Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how much she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength."

but evolves to even appreciate "hired girls" as having a purpose

"Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had given them a vigour which, when they got over their first shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women."

and thus being more interesting than those American girls who do nothing all day in relative comfort waiting for their future husbands.

"Some of the high-school girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat. When one danced with them, their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing—not to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders"

In the end, Burden's view of Antonia is wistful. (view spoiler) The brilliance in this book is that they met as children, Burden with the notion that they both had unlimited potential. While growing up together he sees, her options evaporating while his only multiply and he realizes it has everything to do with her ethnic background (and gender) and not much to do with the quality or values of the person.

Cather reveals her own thoughts as she has Antonia relish in her physical strength and abilities on the farm. She also reveals that other immigrant women were able to find success away from the farms and not at the whim and mercy of their husbands. Honestly I would go so far as to say this was an early feminist novel. Though Antonia follows what would be considered an expected/conformed life path, there are many other characters that fare much better on their own without relying on men. In fact men in this novel (other than the Burden family and a handful of other characters) are not to be trusted or relied upon. In contrast almost all of the female characters are smart, reliable and the rock of the families. Only Antonia's mother gets a bad edit. (view spoiler)

But if Cather was Avant Garde about gender issues and sexuality, her racial bigotry though passive was also on display. I found this passage troubling to no end:

"As piano-playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than his other physical senses—that not only filled his dark mind, but worried his body incessantly. To hear him, to watch him, was to see a Negro enjoying himself as only a Negro can"

Bear in mind that this man is doing nothing but playing a piano. What about him conjured up an image of a dark mind? There is so much casual racism in this sentence/book it drives me nuts. Here is another passage in which Cather is trying to describe a woman who is seen as cold and unapproachable in town (view spoiler)

"She was tall, dark, severe, with something Indian-like in the rigid immobility of her face. Her manner was cold, and she talked little. Guests felt that they were receiving, not conferring, a favour"

Cather a product of her time?!? Perhaps. But in these times, no one gets a pass from me. This is racism and dismissing it with the notion of "that was the way they thought back then" is the kind of thing that gets passed along through generations and leads to ridiculous things like building a wall on one border, as seemingly reasonable. We need to see it for what it is. Acknowledge it. Don't dismiss it as "that was the era" because it still exists today and is every bit as blatant.

Off my soapbox. On the whole, this was an excellent book and it revealed so much about the times and the mindsets. This was a difficult review to write because there is so much to comment on. I've barely scratched the surface as it is. And BTW, I would not have gotten nearly as much from the novel if I had read it when it was assigned. At 20, I was very smart, but not very socially aware. I would not have liked the book. In my 50s, I see it as an eye opening, really interesting and full of knowledge and history. There is a plethora of ideas, and philosophies and attitudes to explore. This was a rich and rewarding novel in significantly more ways than I think even Cather imagined. Well worth a read and study. Frankly, I'm very happy to have read it at this age.

In conclusion My Antonia, @100 years old you don't look a day over 30.

4.5ish Stars

Read on kindle ...more

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May 25, 2007 The Book Maven rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-classics, read-literary-fiction, read-set-in-the-midwest-and-indiana

When I first arrived in Indiana in August 2004, I didn't know what I was expecting. My ancestors had first arrived in that Midwestern state in 1820, when it was still comparatively wild and unsettled. They were the true pioneers, but nonetheless, as I got out of my little Corolla to stretch my legs, I felt like I was a trailblazer, too.

We had stopped at a little gas station and truck stop just beyond the Indiana state line. I took a moment to call the relatives, let them know I was two hours aw When I first arrived in Indiana in August 2004, I didn't know what I was expecting. My ancestors had first arrived in that Midwestern state in 1820, when it was still comparatively wild and unsettled. They were the true pioneers, but nonetheless, as I got out of my little Corolla to stretch my legs, I felt like I was a trailblazer, too.

We had stopped at a little gas station and truck stop just beyond the Indiana state line. I took a moment to call the relatives, let them know I was two hours away...and then I took a good look around. On all sides, we were surrounded by late summer grass, burnt yellow by a typical lack of rain, undulating in an afternoon wind. I thought it was beautiful. Later that evening, I would sit on a porch and watch fireflies and the lightning from a late-night storm light up the night sky, and know the meaning of the words, "My cup runneth over."

Such was my first exposure to Indiana. I never stopped thinking it was beautiful, and even now, after I have lived in California for almost a year, I feel lonely and heartsick when I contemplate my Midwest, now left in the past, in so many ways.

I read My Antonia soon after moving here, when I was in denial of how homesick I was, and the words of Willa Cather destroyed all denial:

"The old pastureland was now being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing. There were wood houses where the old sod dwellings used to be, and little orchards, and big red barns; all this meant happy children, contented women, and men who saw their lives coming to a fortunate issue. The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility."

Yes, Cather's words are of the great plains of Nebraska, and my memories are of the lands of the Midwest, but both are Middle America, both are the same in my mind, in my heart, in my love of the land there.

My Antonia is a story of people, and love, and land, and love of the land, and it is a story of the pioneer stock who came to North America and formed the backbone of those whom I still call "farmer stock." It's a romance, but not in the sentimental, lovey-dovey sense; it's a romance in a sensual, timeless manner, evoking eternal beauty through lyrical narrative. ...more

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May 25, 2008 John rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: who care about American literature

Recommended to John by: read it to teach it

Shelves: avatars-gods-energy-sources, american-novels-that-matter

My latest encounter with a masterwork -- a novel I just completed in order to teach, and one that seduced me wonderfully and quite unexpectedly. Cather's Nebraska story goes over ground that's never much mattered to me, Midwestern farm country. Yet she made made the experience ache and thrill marvelously, via her poetic command of landscape and season, her exactitude when it comes to tools and foods and skin texture, and above all her penetrating sympathy for every figure, from the venal to the ...more

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Jun 23, 2014 Carol rated it liked it

***3.5 Stars*** Vignettes of the Nebraska prairie, illustrated with lyrical prose. It is written as a memoir of the narrator, Jim Burden as he reflects on his early childhood when he was an orphan living with his grandparents on a farm near Black Hawk Nebraska (around the 1880s). Above all, he reminisces about a Bohemian immigrant girl named Antonia Shimerda.

Her novel has been dissected and analyzed by far more talented reviewers and critics than I’ll ever be so there is no need for me to be rep ...more

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Jun 24, 2014 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: united-states, fiction, historical, 20th-century, literature

My Ántonia (Great Plains Trilogy #3), Willa Cather
My Ántonia is a novel published in 1918 by American writer Willa Cather, considered one of her best works. It is the final book of her "Great Plains trilogy" of novels, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. The novel tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and the elder daughter in a family of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia Shimerda, who are each brought as children to be pioneers in Nebraska towards the end of ...more

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Dec 29, 2008 Terence rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction

Perhaps an example of the danger of reading something before being intellectually or critically able to handle it. I wasn't "forced" to read this in high school but it was on a list of books an English teacher asked us to choose from and report on.

The experience was so awful that I've never cracked another Cather novel since.

Added 12/29/08: Apparently I was not the only young man "traumatized" by an early experience with Cather. In a completely serendipitous convergence I came across this paragr ...more

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Jul 02, 2015 David Gustafson rated it it was amazing

When I left American literature and sailed into the deeper waters of European letters, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner were my Holy Trinity. I felt Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" was the only worthy novel appearing after those mighty icons that might be read a century later. Fortunately, I had overlooked some previous masterpieces that I would open later like a buried treasure.

After my European literary sojourn, I left fiction completely for many years and spent my time reading history, ...more

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