Last summer I was trying to get in shape. The gym I attended was like a glass box out in the Sun, getting hot even at 7 AM, when I was usually there. But the real heat I was exposed to came from the description of rural Nebraska in the summer, when I was listening to the audio version of Willa Cather‘s My Antonia. I recall being hot for four different reasons: because of my workout, the Sun, putting myself into the scorching world Jim Burden, the narrator of the book and the sexual themes.
No, this book doesn’t have any even remotely sex scenes. But the central dilemma is whether, with whom and how to consummate physical love. On the surface it contains the recollections of a mostly happy childhood by an old man. When you listen to the story, like I did, you notice how many times it says “ I remember”. Patrick Lawlor, who read the book’s CD version, pronounced this with such a deep feeling of nostalgia, that I felt longing for his childhood.
Only the first of the five sections of the book, the longest, deal with Jim’s childhood and his friendship in the small village with Antonia, a girl whose family just moved from Bohemia. The other four follows their diverging path through the stages of living in the nearby town (where Antonia works and Jim goes to school), Jim’s university years (when he gets involved with Lena, another childhood friend), a visit few years later to the Harlings (where Antonia worked) and finally a reconnection of the two decades later.
My workout routing also included that summer working out the connections of the book. As it is told through short anecdotes and reminiscences as opposed to straightforward, chronological storyline I had to extrapolate between stories to fill out what might have happened. I did and enjoyed the process of doing so. I also liked to hear of strong women (and some men) as they were an inspiration to become stronger. The juxtaposition of the old world, where Antonia came from with the fledgling new world, with its different social strata and multicultural confluences also worked for me as I was going to the gym during in Hungary, during my four month away from the US, my new home. The book put me back mentally 90 years and thousands of miles and helped me face the dilemma of being attached to two places. Just like Antonia.
Many scholars analyzed the text of this book, which proves that it is a rich text. I will not get into the analysis as it is hard for me to organize my thoughts based on text only heard. I could only do textual analysis based on written words. This reminds me of a idea I encountered in an interview about “The end of Braille”
“…theorist Walter Ong writes that the act of seeing our own words and then tweaking them and rewriting them, and in that process, rethinking, really creates a new kind of cognitive style.
So they said that the students who didn’t learn Braille, it was as if they had shaken up their ideas in a container and then thrown them out on a piece of paper, and that there was really no clear organization, and it lacked the kind of complexity that they saw in the students who had learned Braille.
[If you] don’t know Braille can’t really take notes, can’t edit your own writing, and you can’t edit your own thoughts, and that’s a really significant part of the way that people learn to think.”
Thus I won’t un-shake my related ideas and will just remember this book for the warm feelings it generated in me, for the interesting story, emotions and characters and exposing me to an unknown era and area. When my child will be old enough to read it I will read it again with her. It’s that good.