I’ve driven by the sod house near Sanborn, walked along the banks of Plum Creek, looked at photos of the old women in my family’s history — Graphic Novel their pioneer hair pulled back, their faces gaunt, probably a woolen skirt hooped around their hips.
Doing that stuff gives you an idea, kind of, of what pioneer life on the prairie was like.
But I get an even better idea when I flip through the pages of Willa Cather’s classic novel, “My Antonia.” It’s set in 19th century Nebraska, when newcomers struggled to endure the winter or open the earth, when immigrants were looked at as odd, and when poverty hit almost everyone.
We can touch the earth and slide a piece of prairie grass through our fingers, but literature — especially well-done — can help us understand things almost as well as being there ourselves.
That’s got me pumped about what is to come in April, when “My Antonia,” is given a month’s worth of public treatment. Not only is the book getting highlighted, but it will be used in a positive and stimulating way to unite us Graphic Novel — modern residents of the prairie — around some common ground.
I’m talking, of course, about the Big Read, a nationally-backed book-club sort of program sponsored locally by the Marshall-Lyon County Library. It will feature public discussions of the book at various branches of the library, a presentation by an actress/Cather scholar, and three days of readers’ theater — a public reading of the book at the end of the month.
Implied in all of this, of course, is an invitation to the area to read along, and share our thoughts on the book at the discussions and other events.
Community-wide book-reading projects have been popularized lately, but largely in bigger cities. It’s wonderful to see one happen right here, Novel Summary and to see it centered on a book largely about life in the Midwest.
“My Antonia” is generally considered a classic novel, written by one of the masters of pioneer-life writing. Cather grew up in Red Cloud, Neb., in the late 19th century, but lived much of her adult life on the East Coast. However, much of her work — certainly her best stuff — is about the prairie in which she was raised. It was what she knew best, and what she could write about the truest.
She writes about the hard-bitten life of the pioneers, and does it sometimes in a hard-bitten way. Like this passage from “My Antonia:” “One morning, Antonia and her mother rode over on one of their shaggy old horses to pay us a visit. It was the first time Mrs. Shimerda had been to our house … In the kitchen she caught up an iron pot that stood on the back of the stove and said: ‘You got many, Shimerdas no got.’ I thought it was weak-minded of grandmother to give the pot to her Novel Summary.”
Immigrants, unbroken fields, people themselves so struggling for existence that an act of charity appears “weak-minded,” homes that barely stood through the Nebraska winters. The narrator is a boy named Jim Burden, who becomes smitten with Antonia Shimerda, but in the end goes 20 years without seeing her again.
Critics call the book a masterpiece and a “poignant” portrait of frontier life. And that is so. The poignancy doesn’t build with a lot of sobbing or lingering over death, but through the accumulation of changes in Cather’s characters, the scenes, and the impression they give you of how determined those pioneers had to be to build a life.
She wraps up the novel by showing her characters’ emergence from prairie life, sometimes surprisingly for a book published in 1918: Most of the major women characters end up in positions of power, or happy with their lives. Most of the men end up failures.
That’s my take on it, anyway. You may find it different when you tear into it.
Either way, the Big Read ties together so many things.
Advocates of improving our society tout reading as an effective form of early childhood development, a proven way to yield better students and workers. The whole immigrant issue — eastern Europeans in “My Antonia” — Online Novel is fitting for current times, and indeed fits with a couple of ongoing community programs geared at new immigrants.
And I just like the idea of the area — where everyone rushes from one thing to another or is consumed by work — slowing down to talk about and absorb a book. Literacy gives us so much in terms of enriching our lives.
And it’s a book about the region we call home: The Midwest prairie. Some of our best local writers, from Bill Holm to Joe Amato to David Pichaske, often write important non-fiction essays about local and family history that help us understand this area better.
A piece of fiction, like “My Antonia,” gives Cather a little more license to get into the minds of those who settled here, and help us “feel” life, if you will. The sensation of a day’s sweat clearing a field, the cold inside a clapboard home, or to convey the frustration of poverty in just a sentence Classic Novel.
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