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Summary
Summary
Lake Wobegon goes to Italy in Garrison Keillor's latest
Twelve Wobegonians fly to Rome to decorate a war hero's grave, led by Marjorie Krebsbach, with radio host Gary Keillor along for the ride. The pilgrimage is inspired by a phone call from an Italian woman seeking her Lake Wobegon roots and by a memoir O Paradiso by a farm wife who found the secret of life and love in Italy. And by marjorie's longing to win back the love of her husband Carl. Far from home, sitting in the rain in the Piazza Navona, the pilgrims talks about themselves, as they never could do in the Chatterbox Café.
"You're not going to write about this, I hope," says Irene Bunsen. "Of course I am. I invented this town," says Mr. Keillor. "Oh my, aren't you something," she replies.
Author Notes
Humorist Garrison Keillor was born Gary Edward Keillor in Anoka, Minnesota on August 7, 1942. He began using the pen name Garrison at the age of thirteen. He received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1966 and paid for his tuition by working at the campus radio station.
In 1974, he wrote an essay for the New Yorker about the Grand Ole Opry, which led to his live radio program, A Prairie Home Companion. Stories from Prairie Home were collected and published, but his debut as a novelist was in 1985 with Lake Wobegon Days. His other novels include WLT: A Radio Romance, The Book of Guys, Wobegon Boy, Me by Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente, and Good Poems, American Places.
He has also written the children's books Cat, You Better Come Home, The Old Man Who Loved Cheese, and The Sandy Bottom Orchestra. He won a Grammy Award for his recording of Lake Wobegon Days and was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1994. Keillor received a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1999. In September 2007, Keillor was awarded the John Steinbeck Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
Garrison Keillor is best known in the US for his weekly radio programme A Prairie Home Companion, a popular variety show that travels around the country performing to live audiences. At some point in each broadcast, between musical interludes, comic skits and fake commercials, Keillor tells a story about the citizens of Lake Wobegon, his fictional home town in Minnesota. These stories have so endeared the Wobegoners to the public that Keillor has penned several novels about them, thereby increasing the audience for the peculiar brand of humour that is his stock in trade. How to describe it? It's not exactly satire, but it's mocking; it's not bawdy, but it's crude; it doesn't rise to hilarity, because it refuses, like Keillor's voice, to rise to anything. It is without affect, but not without irony. It tries the patience, yet one stays with it, as one may pause, charmed, by a mime on a cold day; he's not doing anything, but somehow he holds your attention. Pilgrims, for example, features a Minnesota farmwife "whose dairy farmer husband's heart burst while shovelling manure. He had had a run-in with a cow who'd been switching him in the face with its tail, which it had freshly defecated on. Hit him, splort, and he just plain lost it. Pure barn rage. A 1,500lb Holstein and he took a swing at her. Didn't hurt the cow but it had a different attitude about milking after that and seemed to be sowing discord in the herd." It's that kind of funny. Keillor has legions of fans but Margie Krebsbach, the ostensible heroine of Pilgrims, is not among them, and when she is assigned the job of introducing him to the Thanatopsis Women's Club she is advised to "rattle off his awards and tell people his radio show has 4 million listeners and let it go at that". "Four million people," Margie muses, "tuning in to hear Mr Keillor's quiet monotone murmuring on about the weather and gardening and how he once threw a tomato at his sister. Unbelievable. How empty people's lives must be. But of course on any given day there are millions in nursing homes, unable to reach the off knob . . ." Yes, Garrison Keillor is a character in his own novel, so it's that kind of funny too. He's following his fellow Wobegoners around Rome, but the story follows the adventures of Margie, the organiser and prime mover of the group excursion. Margie is looking for what the subtitle promises. Her husband Carl has mysteriously left her bed and she's hoping the Eternal City will inspire his return to conjugal felicity - or that she'll meet a handsome Italian who will offer more ecstatic relations than Carl could ever provide. But as Minnesotans famously avoid doing anything for the pleasure of it, Margie has had to come up with a motive that satisfies her neighbours' outsized sense of duty, and this is also a mission to decorate the grave of Gussie Norlander, a famous son of Wobegon who died in the allied liberation of Rome. Margie has come by a few letters from the dead hero, which she reads over the course of her adventure. In one of these, Gussie describes himself sitting, "bombers overhead, reading Innocents Abroad". This mention of Mark Twain, coupled with the "pilgrims" and "romance" of the title, suggests that Keillor intends to say something serious about Americans who leave these provincial shores to test their mettle in the old world. Though the caustic Twain is clearly his mentor, Keillor embraces the Jamesian view as well; these Wobegoners, frank and simple souls, are no match for European decadence and deviousness. Keillor succinctly captures the Roman take on the allied liberation of Rome in the tour guide's brief dismissal: "All dead men are heroes, the rest of us are cowards." A further clarification: "We Italians don't believe in morale. We love life too much." Exposure to such duty-free thinking will ultimately bring Margie Krebsbach to her knees in the church of Sant'Agostino, praying not for her husband's love, or for the return of the fortune she's managed to lose in a matter of days, but for "the existence of God". In the end, after a fine plot twist, Keillor is revealed as a thoroughgoing sentimentalist. Back in Lake Wobegon the radio host sits in a diner writing a poem about the expedition from which the pilgrims have returned sadder but no wiser. "Love can only be restored by practising love," he writes. "The daily labour of love - offering it to the Lord and to yourself and to your neighbour." Is that Mark Twain I hear, squirming in his grave? Valerie Martin's latest novel is The Confessions of Edward Day (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). To order Pilgrims for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. Caption: article-martinkeillor.1 [Garrison Keillor] has legions of fans but Margie Krebsbach, the ostensible heroine of Pilgrims, is not among them, and when she is assigned the job of introducing him to the Thanatopsis Women's Club she is advised to "rattle off his awards and tell people his radio show has 4 million listeners and let it go at that". "Four million people," Margie muses, "tuning in to hear Mr Keillor's quiet monotone murmuring on about the weather and gardening and how he once threw a tomato at his sister. Unbelievable. How empty people's lives must be. But of course on any given day there are millions in nursing homes, unable to reach the off knob . . ." Keillor succinctly captures the Roman take on the allied liberation of Rome in the tour guide's brief dismissal: "All dead men are heroes, the rest of us are cowards." A further clarification: "We Italians don't believe in morale. We love life too much." Exposure to such duty-free thinking will ultimately bring Margie Krebsbach to her knees in the church of Sant'Agostino, praying not for her husband's love, or for the return of the fortune she's managed to lose in a matter of days, but for "the existence of God". - Valerie Martin.
Booklist Review
Margie and Carl Krebsbach haven't made love in a long time, and now Carl's decamped from theirs into what used to be their eldest's bedroom. Margie still loves Carl, but how does he feel? What to do? When she gets a call from an Italian woman claiming to be the previously unknown daughter of Lake Wobegon's World War II hero August Gussie Norlander, she gets a glimmer. She organizes a trip to Rome to put Gussie's picture on his tombstone on the strength of Gussie's brother's promise that he, in no shape to do it himself, will give Margie what Mother Norlander left to cover such a pilgrimage a cool $150,000. Party of 12 for the Eternal City! Which includes the hometown success story, radio personality and author Gary E. Keillor, who, through an excited misstatement, promises to cover the same expenses, leaving the 150 thou for Margie. Once in Rome, complications ensue that ensure this will be an exceptionally memorable trip for Margie. Keillor re-justifies the comparisons to Mark Twain he has garnered over the years by not only making his usual comic poetry out of Minnesota idiom but also by injecting some ludicrous saints' lives and papal history into the mix.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2009 Booklist
