Water for Elephants

Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants has everything that I hope for in a novel: a great story, wonderful characters, romance, history, a bit of a mystery, and a twist at the end that brings it all to a richly satisfying ending.

The storyteller switches between the past, when 23-year-old Jacob Jankowski, by a stroke of luck (good or bad) joins the BENZINI BROS MOST SPECTACULAR SHOW ON EARTH, and the present, when 90 or 93-year-old Jacob remembers the past from the nursing home where he lives. Both stories are compelling but for very different reasons. The circus is naturally a great source of stories and fascinating characters, among them the curmudgeonly dwarf who turns out to have a big heart to go along with his diminutive size, the manic-depressive ringmaster who combines charisma with brutality, beautiful and talented Marlena, and the equally talented Rosie the elephant, who only understands commands spoken in Polish.

While the circus story tells of a world, time, and lifestyle far removed from my own, the present day Jacob's story is completely resonant with what so many of my friends and I are facing now, as both we and our parents age. Here's the setting: the circus is in town and of course Jacob plans to go, but his 70-year-old (or thereabouts) son, Simon forgets that it's "his" turn to visit Dad, and Jacob is left alone. Jacob understands that his children and grandchildren have lives of their own, but he nonetheless feels discarded. Meanwhile, his health and memory are intermittently failing.

I love this book. It deserves all of the accolades that have been showered upon it. I have a copy if anyone wants to borrow it, but I'll want it back, because is this one of those few books that I will read again.

A month of reading

I've read five books I read since my last entry, two during our trip to California for the Bain Family Reunion in Morro Bay. Since our trip home took a total of about 30 hours, I probably could have read a couple of more books if I had them with me and wasn’t so exhausted. Anyway, just so I don’t get too far behind, I’m going to give a quick rundown of the first four, with the final one to follow.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. This autobiography reminded me of something I heard Isabel Allende say once when I hear her speak, something to the effect that you should thank your lucky stars if you have a crazy family, because it provides you with a lot of writing material. Jeannette Walls’s book proves there is a limit to this; although she and her siblings show amazing resiliency simply in surviving their parents’ extremely poor parenting, I can’t imagine they would feel grateful for the story material. But who knows? I had a hard time accepting her (Walls’s) apparent forgiveness of parents who neglected and abused her and her siblings. While her father’s behavior was particularly egregious, it was her mother’s lack of any maternal instinct that I found most troubling.

The many minor and major disasters experienced by these children (most of them avoidable) are presented, and apparently experienced, as adventures. This, and the father's soaring imagination, charm, and love for the children I suppose rescues them from lives in the gutter, where the parents end up. These factors, as well as the lack of self pity and incredible attention to detail, make the book an enjoyable, albeit sad, read.

The Bird Artist by Howard Norman. I read this book many years ago and barely remembered it, although my friend, Laura, claims it’s one of her favorite books so I deemed it worth of a reread. I was not disappointed. Norman’s characters and the setting of the story (Newfoundland in the early 1900s) are strange and quirky, but after a somewhat slow start become compelling. Norman does a great job of conveying the experience of living in an unforgiving, isolated environment with a handful of fully developed, though not necessarily likable, characters.

The Abortionist’s Daughter by Elisabeth Hyde. The abortion debate provides a back story in this murder mystery, and Hyde does a good job of presenting the debate from multiple perspectives without ever taking a position one way or another. Character development takes a back seat to the plot, although the characters are interesting enough to sustain the story, and I particularly liked the blue-eyed detective and the romance that plays a pretty minor role throughout the book. I thought these elements added the spice necessary to raise the book above more pedestrian fare. Read this book for the mystery,not for the elegant writing.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. In contrast to The Abortionists Daughter, The Virgin Suicides is written with tremendous elegance but little in the way of plot. The story is given away on the first page: five sisters commit suicide over a period of less than a year. The structure of the novel is really interesting and unusual: the story is told by a group (always written in the first person plural) of boys intently observing the family as the events unfold. The parents are sort of blurry through the entire story, which is totally in keeping, I think, with the way adolescents view their parents as incidental to their lives. An amazing, rich, but short book that really established Eugenides as fine writer.