Sand, George. The Country Waif (1850). Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1977.

So little to say about this little book, so I'll cheat and paste my in-class response:

Reading this novel, I couldn’t get My Ántonia out of my head. The two novels and the approaches they take to telling their stories, are extremely similar. The waif, of course, as central figure—here in the form of Francois, there in the form of Àntonia. The pastoral setting, of course. But also the nested frames in which each narrative is told. Here, Sand qua narrator opens with the preface that stages the occasion for his telling; he is meant to recount a story that he and a friend have heard, but this time in a style suitable for “literature.” This provides an open-ended frame, “open-ended” in that we never return to these two figures. Once the narrative begins, however, it is framed by the telling of the hemp-dresser and the curé, who actually have to bow out of their job as narrators and retire for the night, before beginning again the following morning.

Similarly, My Ántonia opens with Willa Cather qua narrator writing about a recent train trip she had with an old friend named Jim, who brings up this waif from their youths: Ántonia. They decide to sit down and write all their memories of this girl, and when they meet again, Jim has produced the very novel we are about to read. He is the narrator, the ubiquitous “I” setting his gaze on his subject, the title character.

There’s a slight difference here, in that the hemp-dresser and the curé are never more than voices, really. Their presence never takes our minds as readers off the subjects whose stories they are telling. And yet they can’t help interrupting their own story, and their little bickering I thought provided some of the novel’s most compelling passages. In a very surprising way, this little novel seems to be about storytelling and narrative. I think Sand is beginning with the very simple story at the core of this novel—and how simple! how far a cry from the psycho-sexual complexities and ping-pong travel of Indiana!—and constructing all these layers of narration over it as a means of showing her reader the importance of this, this ongoing practice human beings have of sitting down with one another and listening to a person (or, in this case, two people) relate a brief story about people very much like ourselves.

The value, then, of The Country Waif doesn’t seem to lie so much in the realm of social comment. What I mean is: I don’t think this is a novel that’s trying to “say something.” The value, as I see it, is simply in its existence, its ability to sit in our hands as a sequence of events, narrated plainly by people we want to listen to. I think what Sand is saying is that this should be enough, for literature.