August 15 at 3:40pm
Rachel Crosby Garner: I’m still fuzzy on how to pronounce it. Every time I read it in the book I had to go back and forth between ways to pronounce it! I loved the book regardless. It was a great read for me.
August 15 at 4:45pm
Louise Crosby: I called Marilyn Arnold, who knows EVERYTHING about Willa Cather.....taught her at BYU and has written about her and her work extensively. She told me that the proper pronunciation is ANN-tuhn-EE-uh, with the heavier emphasis on the first syllable. (The phonetic spelling is mine after listening to Marilyn say it.)
For anyone near enough, Marilyn will be talking about Death Comes for the Archbishop, another of Cather’s works, at the Barnes & Noble Book Store here in St. George on Monday the 30th in the evening. We might see if we can get Grandma to go with us for a special FHE.
Natalie Crosby: I am about 250 pages into it, and I really like the vivid descriptions that the author uses. However, I am still waiting for something to happen. This book feels more like a commentary on life in the midwest then on an actual event, mystery, or adventure with a beginning, middle, and end to it. This seems like a book that I will like the more I think about it.
August 15 at 10:54pm
Natalie Crosby: I finished My Antonia that other day, and I really liked it. The edition that I got from the library has pictures of the actual people that the characters are based on, as well as the homes that the characters lived in, and some very interesting facts about Willa Cather. I am looking forward to a discussion soon.
14 hours ago
About FACEBOOK:
In case you didn't get the message, Natalie felt, and suggested, that it would be a definite plus to the book club to use facebook for on-going discussions and notifications of new posts on the blog. She set it up for me, and I'm trying to figure out how to use it properly....... I may need some tutoring on it. But I like the idea.
She also suggested, and grandma Mary concurs, that the book club would be more interesting if we opened it up to some of your favorite books as well. We have tentatively decided that we would do one of grandma's books one month, and one of yours the next. The question remains however which of you would like to lead out and when? I'm tempted to suggest Jennifer as we are due for a children's book and as an elementary school teacher she is up on the best and the newest. That would be for September, and I'll ask grandma to come up with a suggestion for October. What do you all think? Who wants to choose for November?
I would love to read a children's book of Jenn's choosing. She always knows good ones. I did love My Antonia and made Nebraska seem almost exotic to me. Although I've driven through it and thought I would go crazy before we got out of the state because it seemed so boring. The one thing that stuck in the back of my head and bothered me while reading it was from something I read in the introduction by Willa Cather, of my copy. She had said how she and her friend (who is the main character in the book) decided to piece all their memories of Antonia together and see what they came up with. Before she even started hers, he brought basically a novel to her. She says that what My Antonia is, is basically what he wrote. So I kept wondering, how much of this is straight, and how much is interpreted for creative purposes, how much did Willa actually contribute etc. And where did Willa fit in all this? Any insights?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure, but I think the introduction you are talking about was not the standard introduction we find in most books, but part of the story itself and written by Cather as Jim. Annie Pavelka was a real person and the inspiration for Antonia's character in the book. But the friend in the intro who brought the manuscript to "Jim," like Jim, was probably fictional.
ReplyDeleteYes? No?
To answer your question Rach, from what I read in the historical essay in my edition, I think that she wrote the novel entirely on her own.
ReplyDeleteThere was a part of me that kept waiting for something to happen, and to this I must quote the following; "In regards to My Antonia, Cather said that she made up the story from the little everyday happenings that for the most part make up the bulk of most people's lives. She said that she was trying to create the other side of the carpet, the pattern that is supposed not to count. There was no love affair, no courtship, no marriage, no broken heart, no struggle to succeed. She said 'I knew I'd ruin my material if I put it in the usual fictional pattern. I just used it the way I thought absolutely true."
There are so many concepts that I appreciated from this novel, but the one that I relished most was how the Bohemian families went on to prosper quickly because they hired their daughters out, which was considered scandalous by the natives. However, Jim observed that "I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service in Black Hawk during the few years I lived there, and I can remember something unusual and engaging about each of them. Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had given them a vigour which, when they got over their first shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women." As a result of the hardships they endured, it made them interesting, confident, and engaging women.
Spoiler Alert: Don't read this comment if you haven't read the book!
ReplyDeleteI liked this book. I especially like that it didn't turn out how I thought it would. I kept waiting for Jim and Antonia to get married. Fearing that this book was going to take on a Nicholas Sparks kind of predictability...was pleasantly surprised that it didn't.
Here is one quote that I enjoyed:
"Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into the country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuch's story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom."
After reading that I couldn't help noticing all the wild sunflowers growing along the freeway on our drive home from Utah to Iowa.