Marina Warner
An astonishing power to touch an elegiac note right on the nerve without sentimentality.”
Guardian (London)
The thing about Willa Cather’s landscape and figures is that not only were they born alive but remain so after six decades.”
From the Publisher
"Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together."
"Women ought to be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the act of belief. To him the story of "Paradise Lost" was as mythical as the "Odyssey"; yet when his mother read it aloud to him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic and commonplace, like a man."
"Every morning the sun came up a red ball, quickly drank the dew, and started a quivering excitement in all living things."
"The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took it's due from all animal energy. When it flung wide it's cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world."
― Willa Cather, One of Ours
SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile
Although there are WWI battle scenes in Willa Cather’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the most important action is all in the mind of its main character. Claude Wheeler seeks a place in the world that is independent of the expectations of his family and the world of rural Nebraska. Narrator Joel Richards focuses on the interiority of the story without minimizing Claude’s complex and difficult connections with the world outside his head. The people around him come to life despite Claude’s difficulties in understanding his true relationships with them. (He may be on the autism spectrum.) Despite the character’s confusion and indecision, Richards remains interesting and sympathetic in portraying him. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
