Today I finally finished My Ántonia, which I’ve been reading via DailyLit for about a month now. I most recently used DailyLit to read Proust’s actually-not-so-intimidating-after-all first volume of In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s Way. I wouldn’t be able to read all of my books through the service, and it is probably the closest I’ll ever come to using ebooks, but it does have some usefulness. I just prefer the physicality of a book, I suppose I’m a bit old-fashioned in that way. That’s a discussion for another time.
I chose this book rather on a whim after reading a brief preview on wikipedia and a few reviews on GoodReads. I was particularly drawn to – mainly for my own stilted creative writing attempts – in the use of landscape, as a metaphor and as a character in itself. This is a book about family, friendship and filial love in Nebraska. Narrated by Jim Burden looking retrospectively at his childhood, it is told with the same dreamlike tendency we tend to give our own personal histories; at the heart of the story is his friendship with an immigrant girl, Ántonia Shimerda. They grow up together, they evolve separately. The book begins with a quote from Virgil “Optima dies … prima fugit” – that is, “The best days are the first to flee.” And fittingly, My Ántonia is told with a type of golden nostalgia.
“I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
I really loved how isolated and earthy the story feels, full of details of pioneer and farming life, it has a certain rustic authenticity about it (although I am quite aware of how problematic it is to use the term authenticity in this regard.) The description of nature and the prairie is strong and evocative. Despite being strongly rooted in the sense of the land, there is also sense of real human connection. The characters are all interesting, both the Burdens and the Shimerdas, as well as Jake and Otto at the Burden household, and the Russian fellows who fed the bride to the wolves in their homeland.
“I can see them now, exactly as they looked, working about the table in the lamplight: Jake with his heavy features, so rudely moulded that his face seemed, somehow, unfinished; Otto with his half-ear and the savage scar that made his upper lip curl so ferociously under his twisted moustache. As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenceless. These boys had no practiced manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. They had only their hard fists to batter at the world with.”
However, it gets quite dark very quickly, with Mr. Shimerda’s suicide. Ántonia disappears into the background for much of the story here, as the Shimerdas, in their darkest time, show themselves to be boastful, manipulative and liars. Ungrateful. When the Burdens move closer to town, Jim’s grandparents take a lesser role, as he grows up and moves beyond the family unit. The writing here is just as evocative:
Winter comes down savagely over a little town on the prairie. The wind that sweeps in from the open country strips away all the leafy screens that hide one yard from another in summer, and the houses seem to draw closer together. The roofs, that looked so far away across the green tree-tops, now stare you in the face, and they are so much uglier than when their angles were softened by vines and shrubs.
In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I couldn’t see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to me. The pale, cold light of the winter did not beautify — it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: ‘This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.’ It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.”
Wow. Just … this speaks so loudly, it feels alive. Cather has a knack of making long passages of descriptive prose seem so vivid and vital. Jim’s affections for Ántonia seem to be rather innocent, even as he looks back at his memories of her from middle age, it never seems bawdy or crass. Sentimental, maybe, but unaffectedly romantic. When he speaks of going back to visit Ántonia and her children, it is so beautiful and hopeful. The importance of human connection, of friendship. It is undoubtedly sweetly nostalgic, but I can’t fault it. Does Jim idolize Ántonia and put her on a pedestal, making her an unreachable object of desire? It never feels like it, although she clearly represents something to him – his youth? His past, a shared history, his link to the land?
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.
I liked this a lot more than I expected to. Sweet without being saccharine, and Cather has a wonderful, deceptively simple, grasp of poetic, lyrical language.
