Historical Fiction Cather, Willa: Death Comes for the Archbishop. V 1, 13 Nov 2008

[crutledge]

The primary character is Bishop Jean Marie Latour, who travels alone from Cincinnati to New Mexico to take charge of the newly established diocese of New Mexico, which has only just become a territory of the United States. He is later assisted by his childhood friend Father Joseph Vaillant. The names given to the main proponents reflect their characters. Vaillant, valiant, is fearless in his promulgation of the faith, whereas Latour, the tower is more intellectual and reserved than his comrade.

At the time of his departure, Cincinnati is the end of the railway line west, so Latour must travel by riverboat to the Gulf of Mexico, and thence overland to New Mexico, a journey which takes an entire year. He spends the rest of his life establishing the Roman Catholic church in New Mexico, where he dies in old age.

The novel is notable for its portrayal of two well-meaning and devout French priests who encounter a well-entrenched Spanish-Mexican clergy they are sent to supplant when the United States acquired New Mexico and the Vatican, in turn, remapped its dioceses.

Several of these entrenched priests are depicted in classic manner as examples of greed, avarice and gluttony, while others live simple, abstemious lives among the Indians. Cather portrays the Hopi and Navajo sympathetically, and her characters express the near futility of overlaying their religion on a millennia-old native culture. Cather's vivid landscape descriptions are also memorable. A scene where a priest and his Indian guide take cover in an ancient cave during a blizzard is especially memorable for its superb portrayal of the combined forces of nature and culture.

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[cgray4]

Thanks for this book. I just finished it and quite enjoyed it.

I noticed a couple of problems in the formatting that you might want to correct if you have the time. First, on my device (the Cybook), the letters with accents came out as Cyrillic letters. I am pretty sure I have seen the Cybook do accents properly before, so I imagine there must have been some localization thing that went wrong. Also, there were some paragraph breaks that should not have been there. It was most evident in quotations where people would be speaking and a new paragraph would start without a quote mark before it. Finally, I found the dashes a bit strange, especially in places where there would be a comma followed by a dash... That just doesn't look right.

Anyway, I thank you again for the great book. I hope this comment doesn't come across as too critical -- it was certainly possible to get past these slight flaws in the presentation.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by cgray4

Finally, I found the dashes a bit strange, especially in places where there would be a comma followed by a dash... That just doesn't look right.

I've seen that in several printed books (scans). I think that was usual many years ago (19th century, early 20th), but the punctuation seems to change in more recent editions of the same books.