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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781583485095
ISBN: 1583485090
Label: New Millennium Library
Manufacturer: New Millennium Library
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 232
Publication Date: 2000-02
Publisher: New Millennium Library
Studio: New Millennium Library

It seems almost sacrilege to infringe 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 planning 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 strikes out to make good 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 great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost 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 great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.

Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost 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 general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great 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 nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "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 short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Lovely to revisit this classic on audio
Review: It has been lovely to revisit this old favorite on audio. Now I remember why I loved this book 20 years ago. The narrator is absolutely perfect. This satisfying audiobook has made the miles fly by during my hour-long commute to work. ahhhh!

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Very good audio book
Review: I listened to the MP3 format of this book and really enjoyed it. I have a fairly long commute to work and have recently been listening to several of the classics in audio book format. This is my first foray into a book by Willa Cather. The reader did a great job of making each character sound different, and his Bohemian accent for Antonia made it much easier to imagine her as a recent immigrant.

The author has a very descriptive style and it made me feel like I was in Nebraska 100 years ago. I felt like I got to know several of the characters and the book did a great job of showing what a great friendship between and man and a woman can be. I recommend this book and audio book highly.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not My Favorite; A Bit Disappointing
Review: I wasn't as engaged in My Antonia as I believe I should have been. I just thought that it was simply boring, uninteresting, and it doesn't really grab you and pull you into the pages, and it's a bit disappointing.

The plotline is about a ten-year-old boy, Jim Burden, who moves to his grandparents' house in (fictional) Black Hawk, Nebraska. Living near there, in a sod house (a house made from the earth) are the Shimerdas, a Bohemian family, with the daughter Antonia.

Jim becomes acquaintances with Antonia, and the entire story is about his life in Black Hawk, Antonia's life as a Hired Girl (someone who works for their family) with Tiny Soderball and Lena Lingard, and Antonia's love life throughout.

Personally, I really didn't like My Antonia. The writing style wasn't up to par, and was a bit scattered. The description of scenery, and the description of characters were good, but overall, I thought that the book was very disappointing.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Simply Dreadful Read
Review: In my exuberance to visit those classic works of fiction from the past that, because of a trifle like making a living, I failed to invest time and energy into reading, I picked 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 label this tired work a "Romantic Novel" and "Beautiful". He must have been hallucinating or was secretly in love with Cather.

This novel is neither romantic or beautiful in the sense that it has a plot. Friendship, yes, but romantic, definitely not! The descriptive passages of the Nebraska landscape drone on unceasingly. This short 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 author, but I personally must make an exception in this instance. I truly pity those 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.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: My Antonia
Review: My Antonia was written in the 1920's, a fine book by Willa Cather, who was a truly remarkable author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Truly a classic.

Ths book characterizes the pioneers who settled Nebraska in days before the plains had been used for farming, a vast expanse of wild grasses and harsh climate. Those farmers were hardy, determined, and motivated by a vision of how the land could be, how their homes could become, and how their children could live lives better than their elders. These men and women gave up everything of their former lives to try for a better life in unknown country, living in sod houses, suffering extremes of poverty and isolation. It was a harsh existence for those whose European lives had been cultured, and some were driven to despair.

Cather shows survival of those who toiled, their givingness and collegial relationships, helping each other and gradually moving on to a better life. Antonia, her heroine, is one of those whose dedication, strength, and motivation lead to prosperity and begrudging admiration by her neighbors and friends from the past.

Cather also shows the tragedy of life in the wrong place, defeat by the very harshness of the land, jealousy and selfishness. Not all people are charitable or kind -- she well depicts variations in character and action.

We grow to admire Antonia and a few of her peers, and also we see the littleness of many others. This novel skillfully blends history with awareness of life in its many dimensions, the quest for growth, the spirit of the United States in these tough years of the late 1800s, the conditions of the high plains long ago. The author's character clearly shows through the story, a woman of strength and commitment to her craft of writing.

This is a wonderful book that deserves to be read again at different readers' ages, and provides more each time. This is one of my favorite books!

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