#431 July Fourth- Anthony Doerr
This story was scheduled to come up in the rotation next
week when I start a new stack of books, I didn’t look at the titles till I
randomly opened this collection, The Shell Collector, this morning. It’d be
foolish not to use this for this week. Having already read the title story, as well
as one other last year, and his Pulitzer prize winning All The Light We Cannot
See, I am already a big fan of Doerr’s writing.
A group of blowhard Americans get drunk with a group of
blowhard Brits. Each group bragging of their amazing fishing prowess. So
naturally a bet was born.
“There were the standard provocations: tequila, reminders of
the Marshall Plan, rudely phrased questions about the queen’s gender and the
president’s bedside fancies. It mounted to a challenge, as these things do, and
a contest was born. Limeys vs. Yanks. Old World vs. New.”
The team that catches the biggest fish in each continent
wins the bet. The losers have to parade naked through Times Square with signs
announcing their inadequacies. They will spend a month on each continent, the
first is Europe. We see the Americans traipsing around looking for fishing
spots. It ends up in a baboonish trail through Belarusian Bison farms, a Slovakian
slaughterhouse, Carpathian mountains, and a dried up Lithuanian canal.
Losing horribly and on the brink of embarrassment, the last
day is July Fourth. Being mocked by school children as they fish, they finally
hook a monster. It’s the largest carp they have ever seen, and it was there’s for the
taking. But alas, their camera didn’t work. They would have to kill the fish for
proof or let it go and lose the European leg of their bet.
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