When there's no hare in the race, a turtle can have his day in the sun, or, A Winner!

Readers, you have outdone yourselves! I asked for your turtle stories, in celebration of the publication of Russell Hoban's wonderful and odd novel Turtle Diary, and you came through brilliantly!

Fifteen of you posted stories--you can read them all in the comments to this post, and I urge you to do so--and so many of them are good that picking just one to win the promised copy of Turtle Diary has proved to be very difficult.

It's probably no surprise that the most beautifully written, calling up a summer night in all its humid verdancy, comes from Patrick Kurp, discerning shopkeeper over at Anecdotal Evidence:

In the late summer, the fields and marshes along Riverview Road are dense green jungles dotted with the gaudy magenta of purple loosestrife. The road follows the southernmost edge of Saratoga County, N.Y., paralleling the Mohawk River and stretches of the old Barge Canal.

The rest of the story lives up to its opening, bringing together youth and age, wisdom and inexperience, and uniting them through simple care for an animal that most likely is incapable of understanding it.

The simplest, on the other hand, is Lisa Peet's account of dreaming of owning a turtle named Quonset, while the saddest is undoubtedly Bentham Hurtado, Jr.'s lament for his late turtle friend, Cabbage.

Alas, there can only be one winner, and that is Thomas, who shares this story:

In 1997, in Athens Greece, a cousin of mine had an extended house-sitting arrangement with an elderly woman who had gone to London for some kind of therapy. It was a one-floor house in Kypseli, an area of Athens that had once been both a popular middle-class neighbourhood as well as home to all kinds of writers, musicians and arts, but had now become overpopulated, even slummy in parts. The living room had French windows that opened to a shabby, dusty garden surrounded on all sides by apartment buildings. The old woman had rescued two turtles in the early 1980s and given them a home in this garden. They were still alive when my cousin was staying there and one of her duties was to make sure they had food and water.

One day she was sitting in the living room when she heard a thudding noise on the French windows. She tried to ignore it, but it kept occurring. Finally she got up. Through the window she saw one of the turtles knocking at the base of the door with its head. When she opened, it turned around and started walking away. After a few steps, it stopped and looked back at her. It took a few more steps and again looked back. To my cousin's amazement, the turtle was trying to lead her to the end of the garden.

She followed it to where some empty ceramic pots were kept, and among them she found the other turtle, which had somehow managed to fall over and was stuck on its back. She turned it over again, and the two turtles went off to another corner of the garden together.

I'm a sucker for a good Lassie story, especially when the Lassie character wears a shell. Thomas, if you'll drop me an e-mail with your address, I'll get the book out to you.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed. As William G. might put it, it's been nice to think turtle thoughts with you.

From turtles to water-beetles

While I'm busy collecting turtle stories--go leave yours in the comments to Wednesday's post!--I'll share another passage from Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary. This one is from Neara's diary, written after a session of watching her pet water-beetle:

It was past three in the morning and I was staring into the green murk of Madame Beetle's tank. The plants are all shrouded in long green webs of algae, there are white and ghostly bits of old meat hanging about blooming with mould, the sides of the tank are very dim. It's like the setting for a tiny horror film but Madame Beetle doesn't seem to mind. I can't think now how it could have occurred to me that I might write a story about her. Who am I to use the mystery of her that way? Her swimming is better than my writing and she doesn't expect to get paid for it. If someone were to buy me, have me shipped in a tin with air-holes, what would I be a specimen of?

I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that, as her eventual partner in well-meaning crime, William G., points out, she would be the source of Neara soup.

You can never have too many turtles, but maybe you can have too many Turtle Diaries? Or, a contest!

For several years now, Ed Park has been urging me to read Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary. So it's fitting that in his introduction to the new NYRB Classics edition what he does is, essentially, urge you--and you, and you over there--to read it. "I'm going to make you need this story," he writes, and elsewhere,

My own shelves are crammed with books I mean to get around to sometime. Yours probably are, too. What if I told you that this novel, of two loners on a mission to liberate the sea turtles from the London Zoo, is like a lot of things you already like, while being so much its own stupendous thing that it's become one of my literary yardsticks?

And what if I told you that my shelves, too, are crammed, with books Ed has convinced me to read (while his, I suspect, groan under a similar weight in return), and that those I've followed through on (Charles Portis! Charles Portis! Charles Portis!) have taken their place among my favorites? When Ed Park tells you to read something, trust him.

He's right about Turtle Diary, too. Told through dual (not quite dueling) diaries, it comes to life through the voices of its twin narrators, William G. and Neera, and the wild (and often hilarious) peregrinations of their strange, solitary thoughts. On the first page alone, William dreams of an octopus, then looks up a picture of one in the bookstore where he works:

Their eyes are dreadful to look at. I shouldn't like to be looked at by an octopus no matter how small and harmless it might be. To be stared at by those eyes would be altogether too much for me, would leave me nothing whatever to be.

From that unexpectedly bleak thought, within sentences he's on to this:

They're related to the chambered nautilus which I'd always thought of only as a shell with nothing in it. But there it was in the book full of tentacles and swimming inscrutably.

"Swimming inscrutably." Perfect, and perfectly strange. A later entry opens:

Briefcases. Businessmen, barristers carry briefs. When I was in advertising we always talked about what our brief was. Brief means letter in German. Brief is short. Life is a brief case. Brief candle, out, out. In the tube there was a very small, very poor-looking man in a threadbare suit and a not very clean shirt, spectacles. He made a roll-up, lit it, then took from his briefcase a great glossy brochure with glorious colour photographs of motorcycles. Many unshaven men carry briefcases. I've seen briefcases carried by men who looked as if they slept rough. Women tramps usually have carrier bags, plastic ones often. I carry one of those expanding files with a flap. Paper in it for taking notes, a book sometimes, sandwich and an apple for lunch. The apple bulges, can't be helped.

Lately I've been admiring Alice Thomas Ellis's ear for the quiet, often punishing asides we deliver, sotto voce or even silently, in the interstices of difficult conversations--and her ability to render their often unsettlingly oblique quality. Hoban has a similar skill with what we say truly to ourselves, the altogether more benign jokes and tangents that pepper our thoughts throughout the day, and that in quantity and importance often outweigh the words we speak aloud.

(My favorite of those? This one, which I have found myself thinking about pretty much every day in the month since I first read it:

Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: "The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup . . . " I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.

How can you resist that?)

The voices, and the underlying sensibility, are what draw you in, but Hoban doesn't rely solely on that--he instead sets his two seemingly inertia-ridden characters in motion and works them through a plot, and even a romance. If the plot is a bit fractured, if, as Ed puts it, "the dramatic mainstays of love and death . . . are not necessarily in the places you expect," well, that's what happens when you set out with oddballs. The book starts off funny, and, while never losing its charm, winds up being moving, earning its place as "one of the great novels of middle age," as Ed puts it:

It's a book that can help you, even if you don't think you need help. (If you've read this far, you do.) It offers solace to anyone who has ever looked at her situation in life and wondered, as one of Hoban's characters does, "Am I doomed?" (Answer: No.)

Now that I've filled your mind with turtle thoughts ("Funny, two minds full of turtle thoughts"; "Now here we are, both of us alone and thinking turtle thoughts."), let's put them to good use! I've ended up with an extra copy of Turtle Diary, and rather than let it moulder on my shelf, I thought I'd give it to someone: I'll send the book to the person who leaves the best turtle story in the comments by June 20.

I'll start. A few years back, I was walking out of Central Park up the 77th Street ramp, when a young man on a bicycle came barreling down the ramp, swept around the curve, and headed north, towards Belvedere Castle and Turtle Pond. How did I know that's where he was headed? In his right hand, held out away from his body, was a turtle, legs swimming in air. As he flew past, the man was saying to the turtle, "Don't fret! Don't fret!"

And your turtle story?