Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this book. My Antonia captures the characters so perfectly that you feel as if you know them, that indeed you grew up with them, too. It is a nostalgic book, one about big themes like growing up, losing loved ones, making the big mistakes, the way that place shapes us, the ties that bind us so strongly to those who grew up the same way and in the same places.
Most of all, though it is a book written for a place in time, a love song to Nebraska and those who settled her, and an elegy for the innocence of childhood. This book was right up my alley. Highly recommended and an easy read.
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