Pedestrian View

My wife brought this Willa Cather classic home from the Peace Church library recently.  I’d just finished another book and it was handy, so I read it.

The only other Cather I’ve ever read was Death Comes to the Archbishop, which I’d found to be a very dramatic title for a pleasant and unmemroable little piece of pastoral prose.  I was living in New Mexico at the time, so I enjoyed the setting and the history, and it was a pleasant read, but I wouldn’t ever have called it gripping or powerful.  My Antonia is much the same.  I’ve travelled across Nebraska and lived in western North Dakota, and so the prairie descriptions made me nostalgic, but the book seemed rather rambling and purposeless much of the time.

The premise is that we’re reading the remembrances of Jim Burden about his compelling childhood friend, the immigrant Antonia.  What we really read are stories about Jim where Antonia occassionally make appearances, and frankly doesn’t stand out as all that remarkable.

Sill, I really like when Jim and Antonia wander into the prairie dog town and Jim kills a rattler with a stick.