I enjoy Garrison Keillor's books. He has such a knack for creating such quirky characters. They're always just a bit over the top. They seem to quiver on the edge of believability. But yet, you know there's someone out there that's 80% of that character; Keillor has just amplified their eccentricities. I'll give you a sampling. In this book, you have Fran, the North Dakota prairie girl that has turned Ojibway via a poignant desert ceremony and now has the guts to take a naked picture of herself and hang it in her living room. (She's of advanced years; it's not pretty.) She blathers on in passages such as: "Christmas is the force field of heightened possibility. It's not about religion, those myths we were brought up with are only tools to direct us toward the mystery of the under self. It's about the ecstatic visualization of the psychic metaphor."Keillor has a good half dozen of these, shall we say, distinctive characters. They all have their own laughable dialogue and amusing musings. In addition, our main character is moving in and out of reality through his fears and dreams. Somehow, all the people seem to fit together. The reader feels like they've just peeked in on some quite off center community, but a community all the same. A wealthy man on his way to Hawaii for Christmas vacation gets stuck in a blizzard in his small North Dakota hometown where he eventually learns the true meaning of Christmas - and his life.Listened to this on audio as narrated by the author, who had a somewhat droning voice which didn't really add to the story. Typical lesson learned by protagonist in a Christmas story with some interesting regional details from the upper Midwest. Not one I'll go back to.
What do You think about A Christmas Blizzard (2009)?
Lovely pre holiday read for the cynics among us.
—Nick
