Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor
1986; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1986.0110
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)Archaeology and Natural History
Resumo242 Western American Literature laconic westerner, they make a few words count, offering a wealth of sugges tions for further reading. Mary Austin’s poetically moving “The Walking Woman,” Ann Ahlswede’s realistic and yet hopeful “The Promise of the Fruit,” and Muller’s wry “Sweet Cactus Wine” are worth the book’s price. Certainly this is an excellent overview of women’s fictional views of the fron tier experience. MARY S. WEINKAUF Dakota Wesleyan University The Roll Away Saloon: Cowboy Tales of the Arizona Strip. By Rowland W. Rider, as told to Deidre Murray Paulsen. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1985. 114 pages, $9.95 paper.) Western historians who accept Walter Prescott Webb’s ideas on the importance of the end of the open range in the 1880’s recognize that there were open areas in the West much later than that. Rider’sbook is evidence of this fact, thus fitting in with other books such as Dane Coolidge’s Texas Cow boys (1937), Arizona Cowboys (1938), and Old California Cowboys (1939). Rider’s range was the Arizona Strip, which lies along the border between Arizona and Utah, west of today’s Glen Canyon Dam and Marble Canyon. This territory was unfenced, as barbed wire had not yet reached the area. The Roll Away Saloon which traveled up and down this vast range was designed to escape the attentions of the Relief Society (the women’s organization of the Mormon church). Its owners would roll the saloon across the state line, away from its attackers. These stories present a picture unified by the storyteller’s retrospection— his memory of a land out of step with the industrial revolution, which he later supported as an engineer. Rider knew Butch Cassidy, Zane Grey, Theodore Roosevelt, and other famous people, but they are the least important aspects of Rider’s narrative. Cowboys are his focus. ORLAN SAWEY South Boston, Virginia Lake Wobegon Days. By Garrison Keillor. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985. 337 pages, $17.95.) Although the quirky Minnesota surveyors failed to include it in the official state survey, Lake Wobegon can be located on an appropriate map. Look well north of Yoknapatawpha County, east of Tilbury Town and Winesburg, north of Spoon River somewhere between Gopher Prairie and Zenith, not far from the Yellow Brick Road. Here you will find the Norwegian bachelor Reviews 243 farmers, the Nordic Lutherans, the German Catholics, and the nineteen Sanctified Brethren who make up the population (942), plus the establish ments and landmarks around which their lives revolve : the Sons of Knute Lodge, Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church, the Chatterbox Cafe, the Sidetrack Tap, the Co-op grain elevator, the Prairie Home Cemetery, the Statue of the Unknown Norwegian. Life here is lived deliberately. The town motto is “Sumus quod sumus” (We are what we are). Pretension has no place in the local scale of values: “Left to our own devices, we Wobegonians go straight for the small potatoes. Majestic doesn’t appeal to us; we like the Grand Canyon better with Clarence and Arlene parked in front of it, smiling.” Wobegonians are anti-hype. They eschew the neighboring shopping malls and supermarkets to shop at home, in, for example, Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, where “if you can’t find it, you can probably get along without it.” Capitalism has been kept to scale in Lake Wobegon. The motto at Bob’sBank is “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” The pace of life is tied to the seasons; the agrarian rhythms come from nature. As literary proprietor and curator of nostalgia, Keillor lingers lovingly over the memories, reflections, and imaginative constructs that make up his world—and reflect the full range of human experience. Here is God’s plenty once again. These casual but vividly rendered tales prove that we all grew up separately together and that the experience was funny, sad, and usually more profound than we knew. Returning to these experiences through Keillor’s masterful narrative helps us to learn what we might have missed the first time around. M. GILBERT PORTER University of Missouri-Columbia All’s Normal Here: A Charles Bukowski Primer. Edited by Loss Pequeno Glazier. (Fremont...
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