![]() ![]() ![]() That is the power of place in literature, and the closest that prose comes to a magic trick: The best writers can transport you to an utterly different time and location and convince you that you can see it. I’ve never been to New Mexico, but I’m half-convinced I have by the clarity of these mental images. In the novel’s opening pages, a man winds his way through an endless landscape of conical red hills, so alike that “he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare.” Later, the bishop rides through the country and notices that the world is like a giant mirror: “Every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it.” But what remain indelible are two oddly mathematical vistas. I have a sense that it involves a young priest rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church as New Mexico is flooded by settlers, and I also know that-spoiler alert!-he dies at the end. ![]() Much of the plot of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop is lost to me, though I consider it one of my favorite books. ![]()
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