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(More customer reviews)Given that her earlier works dealt with the plains of Nebraska and the pioneers who struggled to make a life there, it seems strange that Willa Cather, at this point in her career, would attempt a "war novel." She had made her reputation with such works as My Antonio and O, Pioneers! and the appearance of One of Ours was a marked departure from her earlier efforts. But like many American families, hers was touched by WWI: a first cousin had been killed in the war and his story became the impetus for this book. Cather knew that she lacked the first hand knowledge of the war so began the novel with what she was familiar and hoped that by research, a trip to France, and interviews with veterans that she could fabricate enough realism to make the war section of her work believable. She was only marginaly successful.
The section of the novel that describes Claude Wheeler's pre-war life is excellent. Here, Cather is writing of a lifestyle with which she is intimately acquainted and her wonderful descriptive prose is full of life and flows nicely. This is a leisurely section, following the ebb and flow of daily life on the family farm, the change of the seasons, and the first rumblings of the war taking place in Europe. In additon to the fine descriptions, the reader is introduced to a variety of supporting characters and all are well developed, especially Mrs. Wheeler and Mahailey.
Claude is anguised by the monotony of his life and makes an effort to expand his world but is constantly thwarted. He is sent to college in Lincoln, a second rate religious institution that pales in comparison to the nearby university, but is not allowed to finish. Other disappointments follow. His marriage to the overzealous Enid Royce proves to be a disaster and his management of the family farm is far from effective. When America finally enters the war in Europe, Claude sees a way to leave the farm and his sterile existence. Cather's description of Claude's transition from civilian farmer to soldier is a little abrupt and the reader is a bit nonplused to discover that such an ineffectual person as Claude could gain a commission and make an exemplary officer.
It is with the final section, pretentiously entitled "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On", that things begin to unravel. Now Cather is on unfamiliar ground and it shows. The scenes set in France never come to life and the reader is jostled between provencial tranquility and sheer hell as the battle scenes attain a degree of ghastliness that is hyperbolic. Possibly putrefying bodies do make a sound similar to "glup, glub, glup" but this is surely a sound that Cather never heard and such descriptions just don't work. Hemingway claimed that her war scenes were faked and stolen from the battle sequences in Griffith's Birth of a Nation, and remarked, "Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere." This may be a little harsh, but points at the weakness of the novel. Ironically, Cather makes the war much more immediate and engaging when viewed fromt the plains of Nebraska. Here, German, Czech, and other European immigrants follow the war in the newspapers and battle with their own patrimony by siding with or against their new country of adoption. Cather wrote her war novel, but missed an opportunity to investigate the subject of war from this unique viewpoint, an investigation that has rarely been attempted and one that would have done much to assure the complete success of her book
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Although the land on which the Nebraska farm boy Claude Wheeler lives is settled, he himself has inherited the pioneer spirit of adventure, the frontiersman's purpose, and the settler's sense of idealism. In One of Ours, Willa Cather explores the dissonance between Claude's attitudes and his physical reality and studies how this conflict affects him. Drawing on her own family's experience of the war through her cousin G. P. Cather, who fought in World War I, Cather observes how an otherwise misdirected young man could find purpose and meaning in war and how his death would affect his family's memories of him. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, One of Ours paints Claude as a young man who seeks an escape from a conventional and unfulfilling life through the realization of "something splendid" in his military experience in Europe.
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