# My Antonia By Willa Cather, 1918 ★★★★☆ First read in September 2022 --- I read this one right after [[The Age Of Innocence]] and recommend reading these authors' books one after the other. It's a good experience to look into these lives happening at about the same time in the US, but still worlds apart. This one I liked better than The Age Of Innocence - it felt more close to heart. It reminded me a lot of my own childhood growing up in the country, at my Nana's, with clearly distinct and predictable seasons and our human lives built completely around them. It felt raw to me to read, the struggle of living - so transparent. The connection to that other world, the one that is not human-made, so direct. And such little pretence.  I connected with the awkwardness felt by someone who grows up in a hilly area then moves to the plains - the discomfort of the lack of any natural waviness, that up-and-down-ness of the relief around you. I felt close to that determination, that crystal clear focus and grit of first generation immigrants, never felt or quite understood by anyone who wasn’t one themselves - this total upending of one’s life. What I didn’t like was the male perspective - the story is told through the eyes of a male friend. It felt as if the characters, brilliant strong characters, were all seen through the hazy, dirty lens of inappropriate binoculars, either too small or too big, but just not right. ## Quotes I liked: “There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. ==There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”== "Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious." ** "If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing, she stopped at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then gripped her plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the furrow, making me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for me. On Sundays she helped her mother make garden or sewed all day. Grandfather was pleased with Ántonia. When we complained of her, he only smiled and said, 'She will help some fellow get ahead in the world.'" "Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how much she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I knew, too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do, and that the farm-hands around the country joked in a nasty way about it. Whenever I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust plastered, I used to think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet managed to say so much when he exclaimed, 'My Ántonia!"' "'Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!' she used to sing joyfully. 'I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man.' She would toss her head and ask me to feel the muscles swell in her brown arm." "'I won't have none of your weevily wheat, and I won't have none of your barley, But I'll take a measure of fine white flour, t o make a cake for Charley.'" ** Pg 199 "There was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school. ==Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for whom they made such sacrifices and who have had 'advantages,' never seem to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated.== The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new." 'I don't want to marry Nick, or any other man,' Lena murmured. 'I've seen a good deal of married life, and I don't care for it. I want to be so I can help my mother and the children at home, and not have to ask lief of anybody.' "She lingered at the kitchen door and begged Ántonia to come and see her often. =='I've got a room of my own at Mrs. Thomas's, with a carpet.'"== (Lena) ** This fragment captures that ugliness so well: "Winter comes down savagely over a little town on the prairie. ==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.== The pale, cold light of the winter sunset ==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." ** "He introduced me to the world of ideas; when one first enters that world everything else fades for a time, and all that went before is as if it had not been. (...)" "In those days there were many serious young men among the students who had come up to the university from the farms and the little towns scattered over the thinly settled state. Some of those boys came straight from the cornfields with only a summer's wages in their pockets, hung on through the four years, shab by and underfed, and completed the course by really heroic self-sacrifice. Our instructors were oddly as sorted; wandering pioneer school-teachers, stranded ministers of the Gospel, a few enthusiastic young men just out of graduate schools. There was an atmosphere of endeavour, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about the young college that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few years before." "Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors. There were no college dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could. I took rooms with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married off their children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of town, near the open country." The dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes, even my hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered them non-existent, ==as children eliminate incongruous objects when they are playing house.==" ** About Lena: "She was so quietly conventionalised by city clothes that I might have passed her on the street without seeing her. Her black suit fitted her figure smoothly, and a black lace hat, with pale-blue forget-me-nots, sat demurely on her yellow hair." And one of my favourite fragments here. With Antonia and Jim, now in their 40s: =="'Ever since I've had children, I don't like to kill anything. It makes me kind of faint to wring an old goose's neck. Ain't that strange, Jim?'==' I don't know. The young Queen of Italy said the same thing once, to a friend of mine. She used to be a great huntswoman, but now she feels as you do, and only shoots clay pigeons.' 'Then I'm sure she's a good mother,' Ántonia said warmly. --- "Ántonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon able to make them known." "She put a sick green insect with long antennae, a cricket?, in her hair." Funny old language: - “Bohemian” - to refer to immigrants I think, different alphabet, and slavic-souding names apart from Antonia, and brown skin - She shook grandmother’s hand energetically. “Very glad, very glad”-  she ejaculated.