Book #8

Willa Cather. "My Antonia." Literary perfection. Had she added or omitted a single word, it would have been a shame.

I fell in love with this book in high school in 11th grade honors English (Ashley what was our teacher's name? I cannot remember for the life of me. Short little woman with short dark hair. Help!). I have always counted it a favorite. That preference has been totally reinforced. Any author who can make you WANT to live in Nebraska because of her incredible descriptions of the prairie is a damn good author. You can actually feel the pure prairie dirt sifting through your fingers with each turn of the page.

I have always been weak for nostalgia. It can be so painfully sweet to get tangled up in your own good memories, and sometimes I get myself so trapped in that labyrinthine mess of reminiscence that it is hard to find my way out and back to the here, the now. That is this book - the narrator looking back, yet moving forward. And all the time experiencing the pain and deliciousness that that entails.

The other HUGE bonus of re-reading this book was my discovery that the narrator's prairie grandmother, the strong farmer's wife who kills snakes without a blink and is the epitome of kindness to her neighbors, her name is Emmaline! This is the first time I have ever encountered my niece's name out in the world. I can't wait for Emmaline to read this book one day.

Some of my favorite passages:

After the narrator first moves to Nebraska from the east as a little boy to live with his grandparents after his parents' death:
"Between that earth and that sky, I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be."

Of the two rugged farmhands: "What good fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had kept faith with!"

The narrator, reflecting on how long it had been since he last saw his childhood friend Antonia: "My business took me West several times every year, and it was always in the back of my mind that I would stop in Nebraska some day and go to see Antonia. But I kept putting it off until the next trip. I did not want to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it. In the course of twenty crowded years, one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again."

Closing paragraph, after Jim has finally visited Antonia and met her husband and 8 children on their farm: "This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. 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 for 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."