My Ántonia – First Edition 1918
Six
of us met to read from this classic novel of American Literature.
H.L. Mencken, the acerbic critic from Baltimore, said: “I know of
no novel that makes the remote folk of the western prairies more real
. . . and I know of none that makes them seem better worth knowing.”
He added, “No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or
woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.”
Priya, Shoba, Talitha
Nevertheless
two of the readers struggled to find a coherent plot until one
realised there was not meant to be a plot at all, just a series of
sketches by Jim, the adult city-living lawyer, of his early childhood
on the prairie in Nebraska. It is a novel of nostalgic remembrance
into which enters the enigmatic Ántonia, a girl a few years older,
in whom Jim invests all his romantic longing.
Priya
KumKum
who chose the novel for reading was loyal in defence of its merits,
and could answer all the objections others raised. She had studied
this novel in one of her lit courses in West Virginia University. A
matter unnoticed by other readers was the pervasive class
distinctions that separated the children, and was imposed by their
parents, or in Jim's case, by his grandparents. There goes
egalitarian America!
KumKum listens to Zakia reading
There
are astonishing descriptions of the prairie in this novel and many of
its best passages are about nature. Of sex there is nothing, zilch
(Ántonia has no Oomph! was Priya's verdict). But there is plenty of
nostalgia to justify the epigraph of the poem taken from Virgil's
Georgics, Book III: Optima dies … prima fugit (the best days are the
first to flee).
KumKum, Joe, Priya
Here
we are, with the new grandmother, seated in the centre:
back: Joe, Zakia, Priya sitting: KumKum, Talitha, Shoba
