A little tragedy about a gay-hearted young woman in the early 20th century Great Plains. It really brought a feel for the times and the location. I liked it as a story; it kept me reading; though sometimes it risked getting a little too talky-feely. And I wish things could have gone better for Lucy.

Part of it reminded me of THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin, particularly this: "Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself - except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself."

Why she had to lie to her old beau, implying something had happened that hadn't - and really why she couldn't marry him in the first place: "She had tried to tell him the truth about a feeling; but a feeling meant nothing to him, he had to be clubbed by a situation." I love that, "clubbed by a situation." ( )

Lucy Gayheart (1935) es una de las últimas novelas de Willa Cather, inédita hasta ahora en español. En ella sus grandes temas –la oposición entre valores rústicos y urbanos, la tragedia que acecha a la inocencia, el arte como conflictiva forma de elevación– se conjugan en una depurada historia de amor escrita con el sello de la madurez. La heroína, una joven sensible e impulsiva a quien su padre ha dotado de una exquisita educación musical, tiene la oportunidad de acompañar al piano a un famoso barítono, un hombre mucho mayor que ella y algo cansado de la vida, pero con el que establecerá una intensa relación que la lleva a renunciar al joven que ha sido su pretendiente desde la infancia.

Willa Cather's "My Antonia" is one of my favorite pieces of literature by a female writer, so I occasionally pick up some of her other works. This one reminded me a lot of Edith Wharton's "Ethan Frome," with its wistful main character and doomed romance. And I sympathized with Lucy's sister Pauline when she described the "parlour cat and the kitchen cat." ( )

A moving, bittersweet story about the pain of unfulfilled love. ( )

50. Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather
published: 1935
format: 195-page Vintage Classic paperback
acquired: June
read: Sep 8 – Oct 1
time reading: 5 hr 2 min, 1.6 min/page
rating: 4½
locations: early 20th century Nebraska and Chicago
about the author born near Winchester, VA, later raised in Red Cloud, NE. December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947

I'm running out of Cathers. I was worried based the previous book, [Shadows on the Rock] and the contemporary criticism of conservativism in her later novels that she was running low at the end. Then here she immediately generates a wonderful character in Lucy Gayheart to open this novel. Lucy‘s vitality comes off the page in this prose. Her aura, her existence - it‘s beautiful and attractive. Maybe sexy. And there is a Chekhov element as we open not with Lucy exactly, but with memories and with the failure of photographs to capture her living energy, her “gentle glow”, a “bird flying home”. Cather has cast her magic.

Fate seems to play a role. Cather lays out this way:

In the darkening sky she had seen the first star come out; it brought her heart into her throat. That point of silver light spoke to her like a signal, released another kind of life and feeling which did not belong here. It overpowered her. With a mere thought she had reached that star and it had answered, recognition had flashed between. Something knew then, in the unknowing waste: something had always known, forever! That joy of saluting what is far above one was an eternal thing, not merely something that had happened to her in ignorance and her foolish heart.

The flash of understanding lasted but a moment. Then everything was confused again. Lucy shut her eyes and leaned on Harry‘s shoulder to escape from what she had gone so far to snatch. It was too bright and too sharp. It hurt, and made one feel small and lost.

The novel takes us from small town Nebraska pettiness to a mix of Chicago's anonymity and its high music culture in earlies days of the 20th century. I really enjoyed spending time with Lucy and worried about the ominous implications of fate. It's tightly knit, clean novel that offers its unique little literary spark, even if it revisits some well tread Cather themes.

2020
https://www.librarything.com/topic/322920#7285509 ( )