My Antonia
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Product Description
My Antonia is a classic tale of lead the way life in the American Midwest. The novel details daily life in the newly settled plains of Nebraska through the eyes of Jim Burden, who recounts memories of a childhood shared with a girl named Antonia Shimerda, the daughter of a family tree who have emigrated from Bohemia. As adults, Jim leaves the prairie for college and a career in the east, while Antonia devotes herself to her large family tree and productive farm. When he returns Jim sees that although Antonia is careworn, she remains “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races,”. Full of stirring descriptions of the prairie’s gorgeous yet terrifying landscape, and the rich ethnic mix of immigrants and native-born Americans who chose to restart their lives there, My Antonia mythologized a period of American history that was lost before its value could be understood.
This new edition provides a critically up-to-date introduction and detail notes which place the events and themes of the book in full past context. Also included are Cather’s original and revised introductions to her novel.Amazon.com Review
It seems nearly sacrilege to flout upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather’s My Ántonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family tree preparation to farm on the untamed land (“not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made”) comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents’ neighboring farm on the same night her family tree strikes out to make excellent in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: “I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the fantastic midland unadorned of North America,” and it seems nearly certain that readers of Cather’s masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of fantastic light in an otherwise everyday trip through the world.
Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman to some extent exploited by circumstance and hard work, “had not lost the fire of life,” lies at the center of nearly every human condition that Cather’s novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more all-purpose desires for like, family tree, and companionship, and the fantastic capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.
As if all this humanity weren’t enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of scenery–the high, red grass, the road that “ran about like a wild thing,” the endless wind on the plains–with strokes so plain as to make us feel in our bones that we’ve just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the tale progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying place on the East Coast in another clean encompassing of a stage in America’s development) and learns Virgil’s axiom “Optima dies … prima fugit” that Cather uses as the novel’s epigraph. “The best days are the first to flee”–this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing fleeting of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. –Melanie Rehak
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You have no thought what torture I went through to read this. I had to read this for summer reading and do a report over it. Yet another chick flick.
Don’t read it. It is to some extent appealing to a certain degree, but is nearly right down there with Sense and Sensibility. Jim Burden falls for a foreign girl, who is older than himself, named Antonia. Turns out, she gets pregnant and screws herself up really excellent. It has excellent morals, but as far as appealing goes, this is not. Avoid this.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
The novel My Antonia takes place in Nebraska at a time where there was even less in Nebraska then there is now. Willa Cather decides to place a like tale in an event where you can focus on the innocence of the main characters and the purity of them compared to their dull landscape.
This book is a like tale lacking a pleased ending; it is very dull because it never goes anywhere. Poor Jim is permanently in like with Antonia, and Antonia permanently looks to Jim as a friend while looking else where for a lover. The book although written with fantastic description leads a very dull storyline. I judge that Cather took on too fantastic of a challenge trying to place in appealing tale in an ever most dull setting and time. Minus the descriptions of some of the sunsets and simple landscapes that we take for sandstone, the reader is left with a dorky kid and a flaky teenage girl.
All in all, this tale is about exciting as a frog jumping out of a pond. You are surprised when it happens but it really isn’t that fantastic. You are left with some nice moments and gorgeous writing but both are momentously dulled out by just another dull like tale. There are no fantastic twist or turns, just simply a rough life for a couple individuals. Tales like this help reinforce the right stereotype about Nebraska, there really isn’t that much to do there. I find that this book is best for an older audience that doesn’t have much going on or simply a person who needs no excitement in their life. This book I imagine would be fantastic for a person going through a mid-life crisis trying to choose when they got ancient and lost their youth. I on the additional hand look for a tale that makes me reflect a small bit more about un-knowns of the world not just a rehashed like tale that puts me to sleep as a replacement for of leaving me begging to go on.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
In my exuberance to visit persons classic works of fiction from the past that, because of a trifle like building a living, I failed to invest time and energy into reading, I selected up Cather’s “My Antonia”. After relishing in “Les Miserables”, “Robinson Crusoe”, “The Woman in White”, “Ethan Frome”,and “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, I hit a bump in the road with “My Antonia”. H. L Mencken, one of this country’s harshest critics, had the chutzpah to mark this tired work a “Romantic Novel” and “Gorgeous”. He must have been hallucinating or was secretly in like with Cather.
This novel is neither romantic or gorgeous in the sense that it has a plot. Friendship, yes, but romantic, certainly not! The descriptive passages of the Nebraska landscape drone on unceasingly. This fleeting book could have been abbreviated by half and nothing would have been lost excepting Cather’s self-indulgent verbiage. I have seldom been so critical of an accepted work by such a renowned leader, but I personally must make an exception in this instance. I truly pity persons who wrote and stated that this book was required reading in high school or college. It must have been just as agonizing for them as it was for me.This was not a Midwestern yarn, rather a Midwestern yawn.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I was made to read this book 26 years ago, and I’m STILL mad about it. It is a long, rambling character-and-setting study. The characters and setting are, I suppose, appealing enough. But the fatal flaw is that Willa Cather rumor has it that believed that plot was an *discretionary* element of a novel. Nothing happens in this book that could be described as any kind of coherent plot. Indeed, not much happens at all.
I still want to be reimbursed for the time I wasted reading this.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
First of all, the book Is about a boy named jim and a girl named Antonia. Fleeting and simple, its off topic, barelly mentions antonia, and describes the same details over and over and over makeing it long and repetitive. If you like romance novels, you might like it, but just to let you know, the only reason i even selected up the book was for a school class.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5