Some people must have a new gadget the minute their brother-in-law has it. I have never envied other people's electronics, but I have my own egotistical weaknesses. When someone quotes a writer I have never read, I feel a little smaller and must go out and find his or her book to make that feeling go away.
Other competitors are more glib. For instance, you're discussing Dickens and you talk of the double-narrator device in Bleak House . The other person (who hasn't read Bleak House ) then shoots back, “But have you read The Mystery of Edwin Drood ?” No, you admit. “Well, you should read Drood , because that's where Dickens really gets clever with the narrative perspective.” As the more diffident competitor, you then rush out to find Drood , whereas the other chap's purposes have already been served. And he hasn't read Drood either. No one has.
But ideally the spirit of competition launches you into an entirely new mind-space. That's how I discovered Garrison Keillor. My brother quoted a line from Keillor when announcing the name of his baby boy. I instantly wrote back to ask about that author, and he told me that some of my emails about village life reminded him of Keillor's style. I have since become a Keillor devotee, howling over his essays in Lake Wobegon Days and Leaving Home , and his radio monologue The News from Lake Wobegon, which I listen to on CD.
Keillor is the literary descendant of Mark Twain, drawing rural American life with a cosmopolitan but affectionate eye. He always starts his monologue the same way, in his radiogenic baritone: “It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.” It is the voice of a large man with, as he would say, eyebrows the size of mice. His sentences “trail off into the raspberry bushes.” He animates the people in his town so richly that we will never know whether they are real or fiction. Clint Bunsen, who takes 24 Lutheran ministers sightseeing in a 26-foot-long boat, Florian Krebsbach, who absent-mindedly leaves his wife behind at a gas station, and his son Carl, who transports a fully loaded septic tank into the path of a parade — surely they all live somewhere and we can meet them?
In my mad scramble to read everything, I had leaped into Keillor's meandering universe, and that universe turned out to be mine. Epic sneezes. Chickens on the loose. And real neighbours, not just people who live next door.
But there's no time to lose. An athletic reader has endless ground to cover. My friend in Warsaw sent me, in an email, an enigmatic line about what tigers like. When I asked him about it, he said it was from Kubus Puchatek, or what we call Winnie the Pooh. A fragment of childhood that I have apparently missed. As of this writing, I am still in the dark about what tigers like, and I will not rest till I have hunted out Pooh.
anantharaman.bookwise@gmail.com
