water for elephants - pat's thoughts

like kara, i also burned through gruen's novel rather quickly (sitting around at home, recovering from wisdom teeth surgery gave me some free time). i was a bit unsettled by the book's "best-seller" status, as well. and again, like kara, i was pleasantly surprised, but not for the reasons i expected.

i will say immediately - and briefly - that gruen's book doesn't wow me with its use of language. looking over the cover art and print-matter, i came to expect a wild, maybe even trippy experience while reading. i think the notion of "freaks" and "exotic" animals, the "grotesque grandeur" of the circus, and all that business, prepared me (or at least made me hope) for a sort of consciousness-altering break from reality. jacob's narration, the characters' dialogue, and the relatively clear-cut back-and-forth between "now" and "then" took the story - for me - in the opposite direction, creating a tone that seemed a bit more subdued and controlled than the content would seem to suggest. nothing, in the language of the book that is, seemed all that outrageous to me...

but all this dwelling on storytelling made me think about why gruen might have written the book this way, and made me feel like this is a book about storytelling as much as it is about the circus or young love or fear or anything else. one of the first questions i had of "old jacob" is - who is hearing this story he's telling? for whose sake is he remembering it? does he always remember it this way (remember, some describe him as, and he even wonders, if he's "senile")? gruen does a funny thing by captivating us by the color of jacob's memories at the same time that she calls into question the reliability of her narrator. i guess this is why it seems like such a crucial moment when august points out to jacob that this is all imaginary - that no one expects or wants it to be real. these memories don't need to be real, and to me, that's what made reading the book enjoyable: pointing out that these episodes hardly seem as matter-of-fact as jacob feels them to be, and then pushing me to realize that that doesn't matter. in a way, the novel was making me, through its fiction, super-aware of the experience of reading a fictional novel.

it was also a cool way to stage the flexibility between reality and imagination. where i expected gruen to do it through her style, with expressionistic descriptions and trippy metaphors (the way lots of authors - i'm thinking of hunter s. thompson here - try to deal with this idea), she does it thematically instead, relying on that subdued tone to make this particular point all the clearer. the intermingling of historical photographs with a purely fictional narrative about a purely made-up circus troupe seems to fit that task, too. it might feel real and unreal at the same time, and that's why it's intriguing. i'm not sure the book would have worked if it had turned out the way i expected.

good pick, steph!