[HN Gopher] The Quest for Cather
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The Quest for Cather
Author : lermontov
Score : 14 points
Date : 2023-12-16 17:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theamericanscholar.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (theamericanscholar.org)
| rsync wrote:
| I recently read _One of Ours_ for the first time and I recommend
| it.
|
| I'm struck by how authentic her writing of male characters - even
| their interiority - is.
|
| It stands as a stark counter to the notion that one cannot write
| - or "appropriate" - the experience of others that are different
| from one's self.
| kwindla wrote:
| The first Willa Cather I read was O Pioneers. Long after college.
| I thought I was reasonably well read. I knew the name, Willa
| Cather, of course, but assumed that since I hadn't read any
| Cather (hadn't been induced to read any Cather as part of my many
| years of formal education) that her work must not have quite
| stood the test of time, somehow. I bought the book in the Gateway
| Arch gift shop in St Louis and read it on the airplane home. I
| think I must have expected a certain amount of schmaltz. Simple
| stories from the prairie simply told, perhaps.
|
| You could have knocked me over with a feather. So, so, so, so
| good; unrelentingly, from the opening paragraph to the last page.
| Easy to see, in just that one slim book, why her contemporaries
| ranked her with James, Yeats, Faulkner, Joyce, and Hemingway.
|
| Katherine Ann Porter wrote a short, lovely, trenchant essay,
| Reflections on Willa Cather, which is largely about looking (or
| not) for connections between an author's life and her work. Or
| perhaps it's mostly about Katherine Ann Porter.
|
| > This is masterly and water-clear and autobiography enough for
| me: my mind goes with tenderness to the lonely slow-moving girl
| who happened to be an artist coming back from reading Latin and
| Greek with the old storekeeper, helping with the housework, then
| sitting by the fireplace to talk down an assertive brood of
| brothers and sisters, practicing her art on them, refusing to be
| lost among them -- the longest-winged one who would fly free at
| last.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I just finished _Death Comes for the Archbishop_ and enjoyed it
| quite a bit, particularly for all the detail that came from
| extensive research.
| bikenaga wrote:
| "Death Comes for the Archibishop" reached the public domain in
| January of this year. It is excellent.
|
| Cather grew up in Nebraska, and two of the "plains novels" ("O
| Pioneers" and "My Antonia") are set there. I like the first a
| little bit better than the second, but both are pretty good. The
| third plains novel ("The Song of the Lark") starts out in eastern
| Colorado, but the character moves around quite a bit. It is the
| longest of the three, and Cather has more room to develop the
| main character. I'm about 2/3 of the way through "Lark", and I
| think I like it the best of the three. The main character Thea
| Kronborg is interesting and complex, and many of us can
| understand the fits and starts you go through to figure out what
| you need to be doing in life.
|
| In all of the books above, Cather has a gift for _place_. Her
| descriptions of the scenery of the west or of someone 's kitchen
| are vivid and memorable.
|
| In a Western Writers of America poll (https://web.archive.org/web
| /20111030021251/http://www.wester...), Cather comes in second in
| the list of best western authors. Elmer Kelton is first (the
| compiler noted he got twice as many votes as Cather and the
| third-place author [A. B. Guthrie]). I've read a couple of books
| by Kelton and by Guthrie, and they're both excellent as well.
| Westerns have turned out not to be simply the formulaic stuff I
| expected (though some of the formulaic stuff is fun to read!).
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