My Ántonia
After a few weeks of approaching My Ántonia in fits and starts, I finally settled down seriously with it and read through it easily in three or four days. It's not an especially long book and it's an easy read both in terms of language and storyline. It's the third book I've gotten through on my 2005 Reading List, and it's great to be able to cross another one off (boy, do I have a lot of reading ahead of me in the next couple of months if I hope to get the rest of them read!).
Probably Willa Cather's most well-known novel, My Ántonia is a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in frontier Nebraska in the late 19th century. For me, it is somewhat reminiscent of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, though with a more "grown-up" approach. Anyone who spent her childhood years--as I did--buried in one or another of Wilder's stories will instantly recognize and feel at home in Cather's descriptions of the American Midwest in the homesteading days.
The central character in the novel is Ántonia, a young Bohemian girl who arrives in Nebraska with her family on the same night and on the same train as young Jim Burden, who narrates the story. Jim is recently orphaned and has come from Virginia to live with his grandparents. Though the Burden family are well-established farmers on the Nebraska prairie, Ántonia's family are newly arrived from eastern Europe and settling in to their adopted homeland is a series of challenges for them. My Ántonia is a character-driven novel, set against the backdrop of these challenges and of pioneer life as a whole. The reader is meant to see Ántonia as a hero, both in her own life and in a larger sense, and the narrative is in many ways a paean to her character.
My favorite parts of the book were Cather's vivid descriptions of the landscape and the pioneer town. A line that resonated especially with me comes at the very beginning, when a grown-up Jim Burden meets up with a childhood friend on a train crossing Iowa. They invariably fall to reminiscing, and the friend--who is narrator for the first several pages--remarks, "We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said." Having grown up in a little prairie town myself, I find this observation rather appealing.
My Ántonia is not a book I loved, but I'm glad to have read it if for no other reason than that it's a classic that one "ought" to have read. Don't get me wrong, it's a fine enough book, but it didn't reach out and grab me the way that my favorite books do. Give it a shot yourself, though--it may speak to you in ways that it didn't to me, and at the very least you won't regret having read it.