"My Antonia" by Willa Cather

Above: "My Antonia" by Willa Cather - 175 pages. I completed reading this book today.

Willa Cather's "My Antonia" is a wonderful tutorial for anyone wanting, in the face of struggle, to develop a positive mental attitude. The book also offers deep insight into how immigrant trials and tribulations have helped shape the United States as a nation of achievers... at least until recently.

I completed reading this book today.

The novel relates the lives of Jim Burden, an orphaned boy from Virgina, and Antonia Shimerda, the oldest daughter of a family of Bohemian immigrants, who are Nebraska pioneers at the end of the 19th century. The novel is considered a Cather masterpiece. "My Antonia" has been praised for bringing the American West to life in a personal way.

My quick and dirty takeaways:

I will not forget the riveting account of the immigrant Russian brothers' fateful sleighride outside of their village in Russia where the multi sleigh wedding party, returning in the dark cold night to town, was attacked by a one hundred plus pack of wolves. Only the brothers survived out of some fifty people. The village banned the brothers who were forced to leave, hence their flight to Nebraska to start a new life.

Antonia, through narrator Jim Burden's lens, was a light to all around her. She was destined for great things but was waylaid by a bad marriage choice. As a single Mom, taboo in those days, she put on a happy face. With her hard working, but somewhat boring, hard scrabble farmer second husband, she raised eleven children, who shared her infectious optimism and radiated her positive attitude toward life.

TIMDT and Mwah (sic) listened to this book while riding in the Sprinter. We discussed "as we read" whether we knew any "Antonias" today. We concluded that today people seem more self-absorbed... more dependent on others than on themselves in times of struggle or duress. Antonia seemed unusual to us for her ability to turn lemons into lemonade despite being short of resources available even to today's "poor."

TIMDT and Mwah (sic) marvel, as we did with Cather's "Death Comes for the Archbishop," which we read a few months ago, at Cather's use of language, which depicts, like a master painter does for a landscape, a textured, nuanced, description of real scenes lived by hard working, often struggling, pioneers.

Cather is true to her times. Black people in Antonia's turn of the century Nebraska world were few and far between, except, perhaps as musicians in the local saloon. Cather doesn't treat black people as inferior. But they were different... outside of the community life of rural Nebraska. Highschool reading programs that nix such uplifting literature as "My Antonia" because historic situations may not conform to modern expectations of race relations, are doing kids a disservice, particularly when such programs substitute for great literature the study of Marvel comic books (true, I'm told by a student on the scene).

Willa Cather's "My Antonia" is a wonderful tutorial for anyone wanting, in the face of struggle, to develop a positive mental attitude. The book also offers deep insight into how immigrant trials and tribulations have helped shape the United States as a nation of achievers... at least until recently.