Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor - Book Review - Five Stars

 

Book Review - Five Stars

Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor

This is a biographical story of Willa Cather and her tremendous literary accomplishments that have stood the test of time. My wife and I first listened to the audio book of My Ántonia years ago. We were enthralled and listened again...it was extraordinary, and then we both read the digital story on our Kindle readers. My Ántonia is a monumental and classic book worthy of more than five stars.

Before you read Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. You are in for a treat.

EXCERPTS:

No one who reads My Ántonia forgets the tale of Russian Peter and Pavel, driven from town to town and finally out of Russia after saving themselves, the last of a wedding party, by throwing the bride to a pack of wolves that have swarmed the wedding sledges: “[T]he groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the sledge and “For Ántonia and me,” says Jim, “the story of the wedding party was never at an end.

As if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party had been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to sleep, I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.” Nor does any reader forget poor traduced Ántonia delivering her own out-of-wedlock baby: “That very night, it happened. She got her cattle home, turned them into the corral, and went into the house, into her room behind the kitchen, and shut the door. There, without calling to anybody, without a groan, she lay down on the bed and bore her child.” (What a painful, peculiar pleasure the scene gives.) It is with My Ántonia, so consecrated to memory, that Cather arrives at her deepest theme. She would have understood T. S. Eliot’s remark that we live not just in the present but in the present moment of the past, past and present being the warp and weft of all experience. The lively hoard of contingent occurrences that add up to a life is infinitely to be cherished. When little Leo, one of Ántonia’s many children, plays his grandfather’s violin, Cather’s motif of the pastness of the present and presentness of the past is consummated. “In the course of twenty crowded years,” says Jim, speaking for his maker, “one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

The book’s motto—“The best days are the soonest gone”

I missed in the country. I particularly liked the old women; they understood my homesickness and were kind to me. These old women on the farms were the first people who ever gave me the real feeling of an older world across the sea. Even when they spoke very little English, the old women somehow managed to tell me a great many stories about the old country. They talked more freely to a child than to grown people. I have never found any intellectual excitement any more intense than I used to feel when I spent a morning with one of these old women at her baking or butter-making. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt as if I had got inside another person’s skin.”

Willa graduated from Red Cloud High School in June 1890. She came first in a class of three and accordingly delivered the valedictory address. Her spirited theme was “Investigation versus Superstition.” She hailed the former and damned the latter.

In one as young as Willa, here only sixteen, it is unnerving: “There is another book of God than that of scriptural revelation,” she declared to her audience, “a book written in chapters of creation upon the pages of the universe bound by mystery.”

The shocking news of the fall of France in June 1940. What she’d always regarded as a second homeland had gone under. She wrote to Zoë Akins that “the heritage of all the ages is being threatened.” She followed the war with anguish, particularly the Battle of Britain that followed. Churchill was her embodiment of Periclean heroism. It was at this time that she befriended Sigrid Undset, the famed Norwegian writer and refugee from the Nazis, also a Knopf author, whose elder son, a lieutenant in the Norwegian Army, had died in the early days of the war. She liked Undset’s work and, more important, regarded her as an embodiment of the European values Nazism was laying to waste.

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