My Antonia by Willa Cather

A month or so ago, in an attempt to build topics for meaningful conversation, my husband and I decided to choose a classic novel and read it at the same time. After pouring over a long list and weeding out the ones we had already read, we managed to settle rather randomly on My Antonia by Willa Cather. Cather was born in the late 1800’s and published many books during her lifetime, including One of Ours, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. She is famous for her depictions of pioneer and plains life, but her work also includes a biography of Mary Baker Eddy.

From the first page of the first chapter, it was abundantly clear that Willa Cather was not your typical writer and My Antonia was not going to be a book easily forgotten. Now you may not care much about small towns or the lives of the pioneers who broke the ground that became the breadbasket of America, but you will care about these pioneers and this small town. You won’t care because Cather reveals some hidden truth about their daily lives that will shock and amaze, but rather it is because Cather’s writing is so sublime, so masterful, that it transcends the subject matter altogether. Through her eyes, I felt at times that I was seeing the insides of life, the quiet essence that lives in the dirt and the sunshine. Her ability to capture a feeling in a short paragraph what most of us can’t seem to explain with all the words in the world is simply magic. The little things that make life in a place knowable, memorable when you’ve left them behind, are woven so artfully into the story. How easily I began to feel at home in a place I have never been, to feel the intimate detail and the raw symbolism as though she pulled them from the shadows of my own memory.

I am by no means an expert on American literature, but I am a reader just the same. And this book may very well be the best writing I have ever read. The plot is simple. Nothing really happens. Still there are characters and an admittance to sensations of the body and the soul that fill this novel so completely that any complication in the plot would be excess.

I am so grateful to have stumbled on what so many have recognized before me. I am eager for the day when I can share it with my daughters, who, unless school curriculums have changed, will wonder that there were any great women writers in America at all. How we are handed Poe and Hawthorne before we are handed Cather is a mystery to me. My Antonia is a beautifully crafted coming of age story that is bound to be enjoyed by both boys and girls alike. It is a gorgeous history lesson, and a thrilling example of what writing can be. Please, enjoy!

A passage: “When I closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing—the Danish laundry girls and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for the first time. This revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.”