Happy to Be Here
by Garrison Keillor
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Book Summary Information
Author: Garrison KeillorEdition: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 1990-04-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 288
Book Reviews of Happy to Be Here
Book Review: A Discursive Review
Summary: 4 Stars
I once had the great good fortune to win, from Penguin Books, a scroll with a long quote from Garrison Keillor on it (and signed by him). It's the only thing I've ever won except for a beer key chain. It's a quote about books. Part of it was on the cover of one edition of "We Are Still Married". The rest is on my wall. It's very profound, about how people always say the book is going away, and yet it survives. I've also dipped into a bit of GK: The Book of Guys, We Are Still Married, and heard bits from The Prarie Home Companion.
Most of this book appeared in The New Yorker. I think how most of P.G. Wodehouse (the funniest writer not still alive) appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and it makes me think that if you don't make it in New York you don't make it at all. Those days laid a secure foundation for the then young writer such that he could later broadcast from Minnesota, but I'm not sure he could have started there.
That said, this is one of the funniest books I've ever read, up there with Sein Language by Jerry Seinfeld, Without Feathers by Woody Allen, and the Jeeves books of the immortal Wodehouse. But the delight in it is the same as in Wodehouse: in the nuances of language, the pastiche of a certain kind of speech, bringing to the heartland the mainspring of British comedy: a delight in the various dialects as translated into writing. Of this last, Keillor is a master.
Among the gushing praise blurbs in the not nearly so well designed mass market paperback I read is one from Roy Blount Jr. that says "This book will leave you either dumbfounded or happy-- almost deservedly happy-- to be anywhere." There's a sense of place here that heightens the senses while it relaxes the soul, and once having been to Keillor's midwest, wherever you are becomes special and different. The placeness comes across.
It's a bit of a wonder that in "WLT", to my mind the most perfect piece here, Keillor can write about 1919 and the birth of local radio like he was there. No, it's not Doug Adams, not an SF cavalcade of the fantastic, it's hitchhiking across this vast unknown tract of space and time, immersed everywhere in a sense of place. And to find, to one's surprise, that somehow the book survives, to pause within its pages to rest, relax, and look around, happy to be here.
Summary of Happy to Be Here
Contains the author's reflections on life in the 20th century. Garrison Keillor is the author of "Leaving Home" and "We Are Still Married".Literature & Fiction Books
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