Product Description

Willa Cather's best known novel; a narrative that recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98238 in Books
• Published on: 1990-06-16
• Released on: 1990-06-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Library Journal
Nebraska pulls out all the stops for this superb scholarly edition of Cathers 1927 novel. This edition includes a newly restored text along with several historical essays and explanatory notes by several scholars. Academic libraries supporting hardcore American literature curricula will want this volume.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Novel by Willa Cather, published in 1927. The novel is based on the lives of Bishop Jean Baptiste L'Amy and his vicar Father Joseph Machebeut and is considered emblematic of the author's moral and spiritual concerns. Death Comes for the Archbishop traces the friendship and adventures of Bishop Jean Latour and vicar Father Joseph Vaillant as they organize the new Roman Catholic diocese of New Mexico. Latour is patrician, intellectual, introverted; Vaillant, practical, outgoing, sanguine. Friends since their childhood in France, the clerics triumph over corrupt Spanish priests, natural adversity, and the indifference of the Hopi and Navajo to establish their church and build a cathedral in the wilderness. The novel, essentially a study of character, explores Latour's inner conflicts and his relationship with the land, which through the author's powerful description becomes an imposing character in its own right. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

Review
“A truly remarkable book . . . Soaked through and through with atmosphere . . . From the riches of her imagination and sympathy Miss Cather has distilled a very rare piece of literature. It stands out, from the very resistance it opposes to classification.”
—NEW YORK TIMES

“The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us.”
—Rebecca West

“[Cather’s] descriptions of the Indian mesa towns on the rock are as beautiful, as unjudging, as lucid, as her descriptions of the Bishop’s cathedral. It is an art of ‘making,’ of clear depiction—of separate objects, whose whole effect works slowly and mysteriously in the reader, and cannot be summed up . . . Cather’s composed acceptance of mystery is a major, and rare, artistic achievement.”
—from the Introduction by A. S. Byatt


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

Beauty in unpretentious simplicity
It is about the growing relationships among people with the ever changing and inspiring nature as the central character and it is written in a clear, simple yet very reflective language. Descriptions of nature in novels often tend to be too ornate and distracting, but in this book, the nature is living, breathing, conversing, and interacting with all the characters, it is very refreshing to find a book like this. Each chapter is like a short story of intriguing personalities, very delicious.

One of the best all time books
This is one of my most loved books as it gives a great insite into another church and from so long ago.

The sacred landscape
**Warning: A few plot spoilers in here.**

Will Cather's novel describing the 1851 mission of French Catholic Father Jean Marie Latour is a reverential tribute to the enchanting, indeed holy, beauty of the American desert southwest. The book is episodic in structure, each chapter a discrete, self-contained passage, only loosely connected to the others.

In her narrative, Cather cleverly turns Latour's mission purpose upside down and inside out. He has come to bring God to this wild, distant corner of the world. But although Cather depicts Latour respectfully -- as a godly, sincere, patient and resourceful man -- one is left with the feeling that this desert land brought God to him, rather than the other way around.

For example, Cather lavishes her most exalting prose, not on the church and its benevolence, but on the wonders of nature - of rock, of water, and most vividly of light - especially at the hours of the day when the shadows grow long, and the setting sun drenches the land and sky in rich, vibrant color.

The introduction takes place on the terrace of a Cardinal's home in Italy, where Cather directs the reader's attention to the light of the dying day, "both intense and soft, with a ruddiness as of much-multiplied candlelight, an aura of red in its flames. It bored into the ilex trees, illuminating their mahogany trunks and blurring their dark foliage; it warmed the bright green of the orange trees and the rose of the oleander blooms to gold." Cather very deliberately echoes this image in the first full chapter of the book, when Father Latour is received with unexpected Christian charity far out in the primitive village of Hidden Water, New Mexico. "The Bishop sat a long time by the spring, while the declining sun poured its beautifying light over those low, rose-tinted houses and bright gardens."

I was struck by the frequency with which Cather seemed to sanctify the desert landscape, even to the point where vainglorious intrusions by the European church are depicted almost as a defilement. When Father Latour climbs to the village of Acoma, high up on a giant flat rock, he is offended by the intrusive presence of the mission church there. ". . . it was more like a fortress than a place of worship. That spacious interior depressed the Bishop as no mission church had done before. . . When he blessed them and sent them away, it was with a sense of inadequacy and spiritual defeat. . . What need had there ever been for this great church at Acoma? . . . The more that Father Latour examined this church, the more he was inclined to think that Fray Ramirez. . . was not altogether innocent of worldly ambition, and that they built for their own satisfaction, rather than according to the needs of the Indians."

Contrast that with Cather's later praise of the native dwellings, which she finds beautiful precisely because they minimally disrupt the landscape: "It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. The Hopi villages that were set upon rock mesas were made to look like the rock on which they sat, were imperceptible at a distance. The Navajo hogans, among the sand and willows, were made of sand and willows. None of the pueblos would at that time admit glass windows into their dwellings. The reflection of the sun on the glazing was to them ugly and unnatural - even dangerous."

I found myself wondering throughout the book just who, more literally, was saving whom. Father Latour comes to New Mexico to save souls, but when he and Father Vaillant unwittingly stumble into the home of a murderer, their lives are saved by the silent warning of the man's Native wife, who makes a silent slashing motion across her throat and clandestinely points them to the exit. Later, too, when Latour is caught in a terrible snowstorm, his guide Jacinto saves him by leading him to a secret cave, sacred to the locals.

Early in the book, Father Latour and Father Vaillant are dining together over soup made by the Vaillant, a pleasant import of one of the creature comforts of their former lives in France. Over that dinner, Vaillant begs Latour not to take him any further out into the wild than they have already gone. But by the end of the book, Father Vaillant is fully comfortable making his home in this country, spreading the Word on horseback, and sleeping under the stars. And when it is time for father Latour himself to die, he wants to return, not to France, but to Santa Fe, where he first established his mission church and, apparently, found his heavenly purpose.

Those of you who relish the incomparable beauty of the canyons, mountains, mesas, and colors of America's desert southwest will respond intensely to Cather's vivid, painterly depictions of it. Instead of depicting, the world of nature as a harsh punishment to mankind after being cast out of the edenic garden (as traditional Christianity often did), she does quite the opposite, lending a sublime aspect to Latour's journey through the wild.

Finally, to those students here who were forced to read this book for school and found it boring, allow me this observation: it's perfectly fine for your mind to wander on occasion when reading this book. Indeed, it's not a book for white-knuckled, gripping plot development, but for meandering reflection, much like a walk through the canyon country depicted in the novel, liberated from the sensory overload of so-called civilization. Give yourself time and space to visualize the scenes, to see the light of a desert dusk, to smell the juniper bushes, and for your mind to roam around aimlessly for a bit. In this book, the earthly journey means just as much as the heavenly destination.