Book Review

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away."

Not quite "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," perhaps, but still, to my mind, one of the great opening lines of a novel. And all of her writing is like that; powerful, evocative, setting a strong image of time, place, and mood in just a few words. Leon Edel said of Willa Cather; "The time will come when she'll be ranked above Hemingway." I prefer Cather to Hemingway. Both are efficient in their prose. But Hemingway wrote wonderful stories about life, while Cather wrote wonderful stories teeming with life.

Like Joseph Conrad's jungle and Herman Melville's sea, Willa Cather's land is, in many ways, the main character of this book. The characters seem to rise up out of it. She gives it her most poetic language:

"Winter has settled down over the Divide again; the season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring."

But her people are no less three dimensional for their brevity of description. Touching on misogyny and racism, the novel centers around a smart, strong woman with great instincts who helps her family, and by example her community, prosper, but doesn't get bogged down with marriage and the men in her life, which I found very refreshing.

Before this I read her short story "The Enchanted Bluff" and her short novel "My Mortal Enemy" and loved those. I'll definitely be coming back for more by Willa Cather. Most highly recommended.



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