I mentioned yesterday that I had started reading Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, the second straight book I went into apprehensively.
But wow, I really really liked it. And went through it like gangbusters. Chapters alternate between the musings of a grumpy old man in a nursing home and his reminiscences of life on a circus train during the Depression, with a considerable emphasis on the latter.
Crotchety old men aren't generally my favorite literary subjects, but this particular one is so adorably frustrated and above all human. He reminded me of my grandmother, and made me rethink her last months with a newfound sympathy. Even when she seemed to be not there at all - or was doing something that seemed designed just to make us give in to her petulance - there may have been more there, a spark of life that she couldn't always communicate in any way we could understand.
Of course the center of the story is how a Cornell student can run out from his final exams and end up in the circus, and have his heart captured by a pair of performers: one human, one pachyderm. Jacob is an interesting young man, both of a gentle heart and a willingness to use his fists. Honorable. Many of the other characters are more caricatured, but in a way that mostly works. Gruen is evoking a time and a culture, and I believe does so admirably, appealing to all five senses. The circus is exotic but also everyday; the love story is romantic and yet also not so unusual. ...Anyway, I may be babbing. But I'm so pleased at finding (alongside thousands of others, it seems) a story that so confounded my expectations of the topic.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Roundup
Between work and illness over the last couple weeks, I just haven't felt like blogging. I have been reading some though, when I can steal time.
First off, I am all set for next week's inaugural book club meeting. We'll be discussing The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, a book that I owned but was likely never going to get around to reading. Oddly enough, my main association with Atwood is the short story "Rape Fantasies" which we read in my AP English class. Anyway, I'll write about the book after the meeting, but suffice it to say that I was apprehensive about it; I don't often like dystopias, and 1980s feminist versions seemed intimidating. But. In the end I really enjoyed it, and was particularly fascinated by the coda chapter.
Speaking of Canadian female writers and rape fantasies, the anniversary issue of the New Yorker featured a short story by Alice Munro that addresses age, fear and fearlessness, and guile in the face of male violence. Thumbs up to "Free Radicals."
The article in that issue that I went crazy for, however, was David Grann's "True Crime" (sadly, the link is just to an abstract, but the article is AWESOME). It's couched as "a postmodern murder mystery" and I think would make a fantastic movie. A Polish detective, looking at a cold case, connects it to an author who wrote (shortly after the murder) a strange, violent, and disturbed novel that may or may not have some connection to the case. Grann talks about the suspect's philosophical bent, and desire to be a Nietzschean superman mixed with Derridean suspicion of language and truth. Oh, and the book - and maybe the murder case - are deeply intertwined with Dostoyevsky and Crime & Punishment. Ooh, I get goosebumps just thinking about how good this article was.
Also happening: BCAM was a lot of fun and hooray for free tickets. And I started reading another new book that was making me apprehensive: Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants. I was like "hmm, this book has been on the paperback best-sellers list for ages. It must be good." So I checked it out and then found out it was about the circus. But 70 pages in, I am pleasantly surprised. Thank goodness.
First off, I am all set for next week's inaugural book club meeting. We'll be discussing The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, a book that I owned but was likely never going to get around to reading. Oddly enough, my main association with Atwood is the short story "Rape Fantasies" which we read in my AP English class. Anyway, I'll write about the book after the meeting, but suffice it to say that I was apprehensive about it; I don't often like dystopias, and 1980s feminist versions seemed intimidating. But. In the end I really enjoyed it, and was particularly fascinated by the coda chapter.
Speaking of Canadian female writers and rape fantasies, the anniversary issue of the New Yorker featured a short story by Alice Munro that addresses age, fear and fearlessness, and guile in the face of male violence. Thumbs up to "Free Radicals."
The article in that issue that I went crazy for, however, was David Grann's "True Crime" (sadly, the link is just to an abstract, but the article is AWESOME). It's couched as "a postmodern murder mystery" and I think would make a fantastic movie. A Polish detective, looking at a cold case, connects it to an author who wrote (shortly after the murder) a strange, violent, and disturbed novel that may or may not have some connection to the case. Grann talks about the suspect's philosophical bent, and desire to be a Nietzschean superman mixed with Derridean suspicion of language and truth. Oh, and the book - and maybe the murder case - are deeply intertwined with Dostoyevsky and Crime & Punishment. Ooh, I get goosebumps just thinking about how good this article was.
Also happening: BCAM was a lot of fun and hooray for free tickets. And I started reading another new book that was making me apprehensive: Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants. I was like "hmm, this book has been on the paperback best-sellers list for ages. It must be good." So I checked it out and then found out it was about the circus. But 70 pages in, I am pleasantly surprised. Thank goodness.
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