2011 Book #33: O Pioneers!

I don't really have much to say about O Pioneers! I generally enjoyed it, but it's entirely forgettable. When I was in college, I reluctantly read My Antonia, also by Willa Cather, and thoroughly enjoyed it though I expected to hate it. O Pioneers! is the same type of novel - you know, pioneers and things, and I thought I'd like it more than I did.

I only finished reading it yesterday, and I've forgotten most of it. It's about a family of (what?) pioneers, the Bergsons, in the Great Plains, trying to survive and add land to their farm. The father dies and leaves his land to his two sons and one daughter, and they quibble about what happens to it. Then, there's a Steinbeck-type tragedy (a la Of Mice and Men or The Grapes of Wrath), and, as in another Steinbeck trend, Life Goes On. That's about it. It's short.

Again, I liked it well enough, but I think O Pioneers! might go into the Wait.-I-Read-That? pile with Franny and Zooey and other novels I've totally forgotten I've read. If you're trying to choose between this one and My Antonia, go with the latter. I need to read that one again.

In Cather's defense, there are lots of DeLillo-ish quotes that make me want to work on the DeLillo Project again and expand it.

The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.

A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.

We've liked the same things and we've liked them together, without anybody else knowing.

It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security.

This kind of language is what I like best about O Pioneers!

 

2011 Book #17: Crime and Punishment

So. I read Crime and Punishment and liked it, though not as much as I thought I would when I was halfway through. At one point, I thought it might trump One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it didn't. I'm not going to summarize it here because everyone is familiar with it. The funny thing is that I had no idea how it ends. I knew, going in, that Raskolnikov kills someone and then suffers because of it. I didn't know that he, in fact, kills two people, though the second person, I guess, doesn't really matter. (I felt better when neither Jacob nor Palmer knew about the second, either.)

My only problem with the novel is the end. I was disappointed that it ends relatively happily under the circumstances, that Raskolnikov sees the light, so to speak. It's hopeful. I'd braced myself for a depressing, pessimistic ending, and I was disappointed because it wasn't the life-changing end I'd expected. Crime and Punishment is, after all, considered one of the best novels ever written. My expectations, I guess, were too high.

This novel got me to thinking, though. The main reason I'd never read it is that I wasn't assigned it in college. Granted, I don't think I ever took a class that involved Russian lit of any sort, beyond a modern lit class in grad school, and even then it was Notes from Underground, which is very short. Professors don't assign long novels anymore. I've heard many times things like "I assigned such-and-such, but I'd have assigned such-and-such instead because it's better, but it's sooooo long." I think My Antonia, The Well of Loneliness, and Orlando might have been the longest novels I had to read in college, and they're all significantly shorter than Crime and Punishment. And the same professor assigned all of those novels.

I often feel shorted in my English degree, though UNO had a really good English department back in the day. And I'm not sure I'd have read a long novel if I was assigned one, though I think I read all of those three. I don't think I got all the way through Orlando, though I put in a good effort. It sucks that professors have become so cynical that they assume students won't read long assignments. Not that students help, of course. I read my share of Cliff's Notes.

As disappointed as I was in Crime and Punishment, (and, to tell the truth, I wasn't all that disappointed) I can easily recognize that it's a Great Novel and that anyone with a lit degree should have read it. I remember a professor assigning a short Dickens selection and claiming that a whole Dickens novel would be too much. I read A Tale of Two Cities right after I graduated and was angry that I hadn't read it earlier. I have too many holes in my English degree, and I think it's because professors are caving in to students' laziness. I slipped through college with mostly As and didn't do a quarter of the work I should have had to do to get them, and now I regret it. And I went to a good school. Sometimes I'm amazed that LSUS English graduates are even literate.