What do you think?
Rate this book
122 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1913
There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.
“Yes, sometimes… I think about father and mother and those who are gone; so many of our old neighbors.” Alexandra paused and looked up thoughtfully at the stars. “We can remember the graveyard when it was wild prairie, Carl, and now – ”
“And now the old story has begun to write itself over there,” Carl said softly. “Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same notes over for thousands of years…”
Alexandra rose and looked about. A golden afterglow throbbed in the west, but the country already looked empty and mournful. A dark moving mass came over the western hill, the Lee boy was bringing in the herd from the other half-section. Emil ran from the windmill to open the corral gate. From the log house, on the little rise across the draw, the smoke was curling. The cattle lowed and bellowed. In the sky the pale half-moon was slowly silvering.
“And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.”Since love does not form the center of the plot, although many readers probably wanted it to do so, it does play out in the hearts of lonely, often desperate people. It becomes a secondary, underlying force in the book.
Alexandra: "The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little while."Love becomes the third member of the marriage between humans and nature, resulting in an overcrowding of the relationship. Tears of joy and sorrow follows, as can be expected.
Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.
We grow hard and heavy here. We don't move lightly and easily as you do, and our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my cornfields, if there were not something beside this, I would n't feel that it was much worth while to work.
The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other. You feel in the atmosphere the same tonic, puissant quality that is in the tilth, the same strength and resoluteness.
To argue that most of Cather's male characters engaged in love affairs are not really male but female, as some of her readers have done, is to question the writer's ability to transcend self, gender & sexuality by adopting other selves and to assume that because Willa Cather was lesbian, she was encoding a lesbian attachment whenever writing of heterosexual love, a rigid view of her fiction.O Pioneers! represents a novel rich in detail and full of memorable characters. Among them is Alexandra Bergson's brother Emil, a college man with a fascination for scientific method and seemingly torn between two worlds. Emil serves as a considerable support for Alexandra, encouraging her entrepreneurial spirit & reflecting her view of nature. Alexandra seems a more than competent administrator of the property she manages and which had been in the care of her late father, from whom she gained an avid respect for the land. Her ability to take risks, unlike two other brothers who were bequeathed land of their own, seems fueled in equal parts by her own imagination but also by her brother Emil's exposure to new ideas while at university, even though he is less than inclined to spend a lifetime as a farmer.
We hadn't any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep & stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still.
As for me, I began to buy land. For years after that, I was always squeezing & borrowing until I was afraid to show my face at the banks. And then, all at once, men began to come to me offering to lend me money--and I didn't need it! Then I moved ahead & built this house. And now the old story has begun to write itself over there. Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.