Một Phút Với Honda Soichiro tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Daryl Brown documantalff7b — I'm glad I didn't know Kit Carson would be a character in Death Comes for the Archbishop; if I had, I might never have opened the book. Indeed, a weight of glumness descended on me as I realized the entire narrative would take place in New Mexico Territory, between the years 1851-1888. I foresaw dust, and tumbleweed clumps, unrestrainedly tumbling through bleak moonlike terrain. These things hold little allure for me; they're why I don't watch westerns. And it's true, the novel is filled with descriptions of mesas, canyons and arroyos, junipers and whitewashed pueblos, sedges and piñon trees, mules named Contento. The main subject is the missionary and diocesan work of the Catholic Church among Mexicans and Indian tribes. But the writing won me over, slowly, with sentences like Wherever the footing was treacherous, it was helped out by little hand-holds, ground into the stone like smooth mittens. Smooth mittens. And a Spaniard speaking English in a "thick felty voice." There's a purity and simplicity to Cather's writing, yet it's not exactly lean and spare. It's full of adjectives and similes but it's never overdone. Cather will pause amid a fairly prosaic recounting of what some people are doing somewhere to spend 200 words on a grove of cottonwood trees, and every word belongs there. Every once in awhile the elegance will shock you: Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. Travelling with Eusabio [a Navajo:] was like travelling with the landscape made human. The novel advances slowly and steadily, which is how it should be read. (I think it would be an enjoyable audiobook; not all books are.) It's a novel of accretions, fittingly like the geological formations in the landscape Cather repeatedly describes. The accretions are vignettes in the missionary life of Bishop Jean Marie Latour. Nothing astonishing or jolting happens, really, from a narrative standpoint. It's not until the end of the novel that we realize the depth of friendship between the handsome introvert Bishop Latour and the homely extrovert Father Vaillant (no, it's not what you think). Ultimately this is such a pure novel - pure of heart, pure of intent, pure of sentence - that it's impossible to imagine it being written today - or if it were, being taken seriously by reviewers.