Autobiography willa cather my antonia book review
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Willa Cather’s My Antonia is one of those novels inom saw as having faded into a genteel but deserved obscurity. Anything that struck readers in 1918 as innovative or shocking had long since become quaint, inom believed, leaving little to command the attention of modern dock and women.
So I was delighted bygd how good I funnen My Antonia. Much of my delight came from Cather’s tyst exquisite prose. Her descriptions of the natural world are masterful, although she does a pretty good job of making her characters and situations feel real and convincing, too.
Here is a sample from the narrator’s first impression of the prairie:
As inom looked about me inom felt that the grass was the country, as the vatten is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.
My Antonia’s episodic structure – the novel fryst vatten a colla
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A nation of immigrants…
😀 😀 😀 😀
One day in the late 19th century, two children arrive separately in Nebraska on the same train. Jim Burden is a ten-year-old boy, recently orphaned and coming to the prairie land to live with his grandparents. Ántonia Shimerda is a couple of years older, immigrating to America from Bohemia with her family. Although from different backgrounds and traditions, the children become friends, learning about the land and wildlife of their new home together as they explore it with some of the other children in the farming neighbourhood. Over the years their friendship will gradually fade as Jim goes off to university and later to live in New York, but he always remembers Ántonia, and now in middle-age has set out to write down his memories of her.
When reviewing a much-studied classic it’s next to impossible to find anything new to say, so this is simply a summary of the things that most stood out to me while reading rather than an attempt at a ful
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Welcome! I’m so glad you’re here!
Hi y’all!
I hope you are enjoying your summer. We have had such a busy June with so many fun and exciting things happening. And we’ve loved celebrating birthdays and enjoying friendships.
I am excited to share my review of My Antonia by Willa Cather today. I read this as part of my latest Classics Club list.
What a beautifully written novel about pioneer life in the Midwest! I have had this book recommended several times and was glad to experience it for myself. It felt like a more mature, complex Little House on the Prairie. I felt transported back to that time in American history but with an added depth and complexity.
Book Summary: “Through Jim Burden’s endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature’s most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memori