my antonia

my antonia is a present i was given by my aunt several years ago. her being a literary expert if there was one, i wonder why it took me almost 9 years to get to a book i was today done reading in a sitting! i had taken it with me on a flight from san francisco to bombay once, but when i started to read it, i was bored too soon. nebraskan prairies of the 1800s had not featured in my imagination before, and i was less than willing to make room for them then. i put the book aside, leaving it behind in india for better things to carry back instead. (this is where the familiar "oh gawd... was i really like that?" feeling creeps in).

the 'plot': antonia is an endearing little bohemian girl, who comes to live on a farm in nebraska with her immigrant family. here she meets jim, a lifelong friend in the form of a little boy who never falls short of adoration for her beauty and powers of endurance. the story is his, and no, it's not the kind of love story you'd imagine it to be.

while i enjoyed the life of farming, and the characters that made me wonder about years long gone, in mid-western (and perhaps other parts of) america, my heart went out to the lovely, strong antonia. i offer the very last paragraph which, for me, so quaintly encapsulates the essence of my antonia. mine indeed, for as jim says in the beginning, "It's through myself that I knew and felt her, and I've had no practice in any other form of presentation." it is through myself, and then jim, that i know and feel her...

This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can never be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.