| Death Comes for the Archbishop (Thorndike Press Large Print Perennial Bestsellers Series) |  | Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Category: Book
Buy Used: $38.95
Used (5) from $38.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  93 reviews
Sales Rank: 2575374
Format: Large Print
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 312
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.4 x 1
ISBN: 0783896344
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780783896342
ASIN: 0783896344
Publication Date: November 2001
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Condition: former library copy in very good condition strong binding; normal minor to moderate used book wear We do not ship to APO/FPO AE or Correctional Facilities Any order will canceled and refunded
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Product Description
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Introduction by A. S. Byatt
Willa Cather’s story of the missionary priest Father Jean Marie Latour and his work of faith in the wilderness of the Southwest is told with a spare but sensuous directness and profound artistry. When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, what he finds is a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. Over the next four decades, Latour works gently and tirelessly to spread his faith and to build a soaring cathedral out of the local golden rock—while contending with unforgiving terrain, derelict and sometimes rebellious priests, and his own loneliness.
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape and those who are drawn to it suggest why Cather is acknowledged without question as the most poetically exact chronicler of the American frontier.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 88 more reviews...
 The sacred landscape April 5, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
**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.
Here's the Pages I Dog-Eared January 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Others here have already done a better job than I could of describing why this book is an example of great literature. I will add that as a young Catholic who spent a semester as a missionary on the Navajo reservation, it was quite uplifting to read such a well-written account of heroic virtue in the Southwest I remember so vividly. Reading about Chimayo, Shiprock, Canyon de Chelly and Santa Fe was a reunion with old friends. Archbishop Latour is a devout man, with flaws of his own, yet striving to serve the very different cultures of the Native Americans and the Mexicans. Some of Cather's sentences were like echoes in my soul of memories from this time. Here is what I want to remember:
p. 50 "The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is ther about us always."
p. p. 203 "Once again this had been his month; his Patroness had given it to him, the season that had always meant so much in his religious life."
p. 217 My one complaint about this book is here. Cather writes for the most part with incredible insight into the Catholic faith, but here she misrepresents an important theological point. Catholics (if they are adhering to Church teaching) do NOT worship or adore Mary and do NOT view her as a female image of the Divine. We honor her for the pivotal role she played in bringing Christ to this world and for her continued intercession for us, her spiritual children. Only Christ's Heart is Sacred, Mary's Heart is referred to as the Immaculate Heart.
p. 225 "Though the Bishop had worked with Father Joseph for twenty-five years now, he could not reconcile the contradictions of his nature. He simply accepted them, and, when Josph had been away for a long while, realized that he loved them all." Our world today often does not understand spiritual friendship. The deep, fraternal love between Bishop Latour and Father Valiant is beautiful and inspiring.
p. 232 "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky."
p. 273 "Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisioned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!"
p. 279-The story of Bl. Junipero Serra's encounter with a family is awesome!
p. 263 "I am enjoying to the full that period of reflection which is the happiest conclusion to a life of action."
Let us too lead lives of action!
Stunning December 17, 2007
Death Comes for the Archbishop reminds me of a watercolor painting. At their best, watercolor is very fluid, and yet the result is often very beautiful and full of depth. This book was much the same. The story itself jumps around a lot and is more like a series of short stories, with the same main characters. It is very fluid.
However, the finished book is breathtaking in its scope and beauty. It is a book about friendship, about evangelism, about a strange and desolate country, about the way that all these elements blend to give us a picture that is humanity. Very few books are able to really carry this off successfully. Death Comes for the Archbishop is one that is successful.
A wonderful adventure through the eyes of reality December 2, 2007
A great collection of stories about two priests who leave France for the American Southwest. And in their attempt to teach the people there, they learn a lot themselves.
relish this one slowly November 10, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Relish this wonderful novel slowly, like a ride on a good mule through the beautiful desert at sundown.
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