Aw! I wanna join the circus!

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.