Death Comes for the Archbishop
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.
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Community Reviews
I only barely liked this book. I don't mind the idea of character-focused, setting-focused books. I don't mind the idea of using episodes to sketch character and environment. I also don't mind long sentences, though I do prefer variety to mix it up a bit. But Cather spends so much time describing detail that isn't really that meaningful and each of her episodes are really lacking in a proper sense of drama or of symbolism. You can do without one or the other, but not both. Several episodes seem to suggest the same thing. The other characters in the book aside from the 2 main ones are barely sketches. There isn't much dialogue. It felt like reading a slightly narrative history book - the point was more "this is what this guy was like" rather than "here are some eternal truths or lessons we can learn from this person's example". It never crossed into poetry for me, which is what I want out of my literary reading choices. I'll say that being an atheist probably doesn't help. Having just read Gilead, Graham Greene, and Cormac McCarthy doesn't help either. Overall, on its own, though, it was just fine. Has its moments, but not enough to be worth it - and definitely not enough to earn it spots in the "100 best novels in English" etc lists it appears on.
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