Reviews
To be fair, when I first started this, I had a bit of a hard time getting into it. But the allure of the desert, the details in the prose, and Cather's attentiveness to the seemingly minute brought it all together for me in the latter half of the story. Reading this felt a bit like meditating, and I soon felt full of solemn loneliness, contemplative, and engrossed by the imagery of juniper, tamarisk, and arroyo. Some of my favorite quotes: "The sky was full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,-and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world...Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!" (231-232). "He sat in the middle of his consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible. Sometimes, when Magdalena or Bernard came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other parts of the great picture of his life--some part of which they knew nothing" (288).
This is my first book by Willa Cather and I really enjoyed it. I got a good sense of the what it may have been like for the archbishop at that time as he learned the limits of working on the frontier. I've read a lot about all the awful things that happened to native Americans at the hands of Europeans. This seemed like a pretty fair account.
This was hard to rate because the overall story I found to be just fine, but the craft to be extremely excellent. The voice was very noticeable because, well, it was being narrated. Certainly seems like an author I could read/listen to about basically anything at all. Though the story and plot were not bad at all. Just not a particular stand out.
I started this book a couple times before in years past, but this time, I just found it totally engrossing. What a beautiful story of priestly friendship, the life of the Church in mission territory, and the American southwest.
unbelievably good — like McCarthy but with a sense for the joy possible in the West…
