"My Antonia"

I just finished reading "My Antonia" by Willa Cather for book group. Of course book group was last night and so I obviously wasn't finished reading in time, but I was able to follow the discussion pretty well, and was able to keep the book an extra day. I'm really glad I did, it was well worth it. Not an exciting or suspenseful book, but beautiful.

I really, really disliked Antonia's mother, which I think is just proof of how well the book was written that I believed in the characters that much and felt reproofed by Jim's Grandmother when he expresses dislike for Mrs. Shimerda and his Grandmother tells him something to the effect. "You never know what effect Poverty will have on a person"
It reminded me of a quote in the movie "Becoming Jane" when the her Father tells Jane. "Nothing destroys Spirit like Poverty.

Many excellent quotes although I think some of my markers fell out while I was reading. Oh well, I'll put in the ones I have and catch the rest the next time I read it.

First quote on page 14.

I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect
anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it,
like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was
entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of
something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any
rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and
great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Page 56, Christmas Morning, there is much more to this section, I must read the book again.

Grandfather came down, wearing a white shirt and his Sunday coat.
Morning
prayers were longer than usual. He read the chapters from
Saint Matthew
about the birth of Christ, and as we listened, it all seemed
like something that
had happened lately, and near at hand.

Page 72,

That afternoon Fuchs told me story after story: about the Black Tiger Mine,
and about violent deaths and casual buryings, and the queer fancies of dying
men. You never really knew a man, he said, until you saw him die.
Most men were game, and went without a grudge.

The thought of dying doesn't generally frighten me. I believe in an afterlife (most of the time) and I try to be a good person and live up to my own Moral Code. I am afraid of dying while my kids are young. Which I suppose isn't surprising since my own mother died just after I turned 9. While I was brushing my daughters hair last night after her shower and blowing it dry I realized she will be turning 8 this year and I was wondering how will I know what to teach her and how to raise her when my mother wasn't there for me? And if something what will she remember about me and who will be there for her?

Now on to something else, page 172.

Lena's face dimpled. "Some of us could tell her things, but it wouldn't do
any good. She'd always believe him. That's Antonia's failing, you
know; if she once likes people, she won't hear anything against them."

On page 173. I forgot sometimes while reading "My Antonia" that it was written by a woman because I found the male narrator so convincing.

When I closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing -- the Danish laundry
girls and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to
me. It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between
girls like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like
them in the world, there would be no poetry. I understood that clearly,
for the first time. This revelation seemed to me inestimably
precious. I clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.

Again with this quote I'm only saving the middle part to remember it by, but I love the entire section. Page 186.

"Well, it's mainly because I don't want a husband. Men are all right for
friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even
the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish,
and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I
feel like it, and be accountable to nobody."

Page 206, makes me wonder of Love isn't real after all, (not just this little paragraph, but his entire page) because how could somebody write this so beautifully if they hadn't felt it?

I told her I knew she would. "Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away,
I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world.
I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my
sister -- anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part
of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of
times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me."

Then again...these characters didn't marry eachother, so maybe thats the trick. Love is killed by marriage?