My Ántonia by Willa Cather
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read this once before, a long time ago, and only remembered enough to remember that I had read it. But then I was given an audio version of it for my birthday last month, and have been listening to it in my truck. I really enjoyed it, thoroughly enjoyed it.
Willa Cather set the book in Black Hawk, Nebraska, a thin cover for her home town of Red Cloud. The book was published in 1918, and taking a few clues from dates in the story, the fictional story ends in about 1928, ten years out from the time of publication. My father was born in Nebraska in 1927, just up the road a piece, which gave me a small twist of pleasure.
A main character, it seems to me, is the Nebraska countryside. I was just talking about that aspect of it with my father, and he said people assume that Nebraska is flat because the highway runs through the Platte River Valley, which really is flat. My father then told me that his father once said that people think Nebraska is flat because the hills go down and up instead of up and down.
Cather had a Christian upbringing, and eventually came to a settled faith in Christ. But while she was searching, she also painted a picture of a very Christian world, doing so with real affection and sympathy.
A beautiful novel. It made me want to be a farm woman of great personal fecundity and strength as opposed to a neurotic and fragile urban flower! Whether or not she technically engaged in lesbian sex, it seems indisputable that her primary love was for women. This got me thinking about the Victorians’ easy acceptance of intense emotional (and even romantic) but nonsexual relationships among women. Did they understand something that we don’t? Or is that type of sentimental friendship intrinsically sinful even if it never leads to sexual conduct?
So you see how narration promotes further circulation & sales?
(Did Cummings narrate? — not the best choice, nay? — a bit too much Boston.)
Which is to say, please consider narrating your own stuff — you have the perfect voice.