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Death Comes for the Archbishop

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Death Comes for the Archbishop

By: Willa Cather
Narrated by: David Ackroyd
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About this listen

 From one of the most highly acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century: a truly remarkable book" (The New York Times), an epic story of a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. With a new introduction by Claire Messud.

In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended. Classics Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Mexico Latin American

Critic reviews

“A truly remarkable book . . . Soaked through and through with atmosphere . . . From the riches of her imagination and sympathy Miss Cather has distilled a very rare piece of literature. It stands out, from the very resistance it opposes to classification.” --The New York Times

"The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world as solidly as our five senses build the uiverse around us.” —Rebecca West

“[Cather’s] descriptions of the Indian mesa towns on the rock are as beautiful, as unjudging, as lucid, as her descriptions of the Bishop’s cathedral. It is an art of ‘making,’ of clear depiction—of separate objects, whose whole effect works slowly and mysteriously in the reader, and cannot be summed up. . . . Cather’s composed acceptance of mystery is a major, and rare, artistic achievement.” —from the Introduction to the Everyman's Library edition by A. S. Byatt
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there wasn't much of a plot to this, it's more or less a biographical novel.
I liked: an insight into the history and life of the time in Mexico

I didn't like : rather pedestrian plot, if you can call it a plot. that the reader couldn't pronounce the French at all.

overall it just about held my attention. I think it's rather after the style of 'Bonanza' and westerns , probably more relevant to an American audience

more relevant to the Americas

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Great book. A lot of modern resonances with environment and attitude to colonialism. Beautifully written eulogy on friendship.

Strongly recommend this short but effecting book

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