Author’s Note: After the first entry, I’ve decided on a few refining tweeks that I hope can make Dead Language much less about my quarter-life crisis, more structured, and thus more enjoyable and enlightening.  Enjoy!

      “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years”

       First published in 1913, O Pioneers was written by Willa Cather at the end of the age of the American frontier.  More significantly, she wrote it right smack near the end of the American Industrial Revolution.  In my review, I can identify two major conflicts occurring in this novel that give its plot and characters meaning. 

First and foremost, O Pioneers decribes the process of hard work in an unforgiving terrain by immigrants from across Europe, but especially the Swedes and French.  The main character, Alexandra, is of the former stock, and the book revolves around her struggle to modernize her families farm and fortunes.  She is confronted by immediate challenges in the form of backward leading neighbors, terrible natural calamities, and issues of family loyalty and vitality.  She overcomes these challenges, but at a heavy cost to her own freedom and happiness.

The second major conflict is not laid out clearly for the reader.  Cather herself grew up on the frontier, in Nebraska.  O Pioneers is a novel about changing times.  Great attention is payed to how the older, first generation immigrants are gradually forced to adapt to new innovations born in American, like the modern bath tub.  In such a trivial example as the bathtub is, Cather injects practical wisdom and cutting ridicule into what is essentially a critique of modern society.  In the novel, the now elderly original pioneers are being forced to live at home with their Americanized children and forced to give up their simple methods of living.  One women fakes to use the bath to satisfy her betters, but uses her old bath in secret.  Cather is trying to remind her readers that, in a rush to advance as a people we may be sacrificing meaningful distinctions and traditions.  We become a hollow society in which independent thinking and individual choice are decried and merely patronized; modern technology will replace outdated and backward cultural anachronisms. 

The heroine of this novel achieved the dream of her late father through hard work and intelligence.  I feel a tremendous sense of sadness when thinking about this book; it makes ME feel like the anachronism.  Between the images of windswept plains, hard work, and a sense of community in O Pioneers!, I have started asking myself “Where did it go?”

       “The story of a man who said he would stop the motor of the world-and did”

Atlas Shrugged is a fantastic, epic account of America’s cataclysmic fall from grace into a lawless anarchy of strongmen, thugs, and the helpless.  I’ll be up front about this book; I loved almost every minute of it.  I started it after I finished The Fountainhead in January and found the time to attack it piecemeal throughout the Spring 11 semester.  (at over 1100 pages in insanely small font this is no insignificant achievement)

       I had a whole entry written but decided to scrap it from this point onward.  What I really want to talk about is how much I feel I already live in a world where need drives governance.  It just…made me wonder if anything I’m ever going to work for will ever pay off in the end.  Rand is able to create characters that seem so real, I feel like I just bought gas from them, or went through their checkout.  Mostly, I kept relating the characters to real people in the real world today, and not in a good way either. 

      The plot of the book is pretty linear, and only at a few points did I get a little bored reading at length about Rand’s philosophy, “Objectivism”.  What happens to America in Atlas Shrugged builds slowly but explodes in a final, spasmodic collapse that cleanses the system of the “second-handers” that grow fat off the labor of men and women like you and me.  Let me say this; the end of the book is fantastic.  What happens feels right. 

      Anyways, that’s all I want to share about Atlas Shrugged today.  Funny fact: This blog post took me almost a week to write.  I had tremendous writer’s block, plus I finished another two books in the meantime.  Next on the list is “O Pioneers!” by Willa Cather

     P.S. sorry about the crude quality of this entry.  After all, its only my first one and I’m only human!

Ok folks, so the blog is up and i have several books to review and post.  Unfortunately its a federal holiday, and if the mailman doesnt have to drop a letter in my box, i shouldn’t have to sweat out a few paragraphs on such a nice day.  So in short, i’ll be getting a few beers on in my ancestral homeland of Deposit tonight and delving into Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand on Tuesday.  Happy memorial day!!

                                            P.S.  everyone thank a veteran today.  I know one in particular and everytime I think of the Wars we’ve been forced to take on, I always think of what he sacrificed in the name of the U.S. and his fellow soldiers.