A review by sidharthvardhan
One of Ours by Willa Cather

5.0

At one point, an army officer thinks about scolding his soldiers for mixing with French women who had been living in a territory just freed from Germans but decides not to because it would be like scolding birds. You could basically say the same about reviewing Cather. There is no defining why exactly I love her writing so much. You could say she writes about Prairies or rural life so beautifully and you could say, about this particular book, that she created a magnification character in Claude - an idealist whose wish for an idealist world was left unfulfilled in an increasingly materialist (thanks to indsutrial revolution and consumerism) world, who seems like a man born in a wrong era and yearns for good old days when there were proper social connections, a man who feels the dullness of inactivity of Utopia-like happy Society he is forever to live in .... until the world war I comes in giving him an opportunity to fight for his ideals; to show to him that there are people still willing to die for an idea (His need for a war, to be able to play the hero, the lack of purpose he would feel in peace he fights for all kind of reminds one of Captain America) ..... But saying all that is still not doing justice enough to Cather. She writes far more like poetry and the poetry is made of material of emotions that, unlike words, refuting analysis in their purest forms. In Father's case, the emotion used as material in three books by her I have read is same .... Longing.