Water for Elephants: A Novel
by Sara Gruen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sara GruenEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-04-09
ISBN: 1565125606
Number of pages: 350
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Book Reviews of Water for Elephants: A Novel
Book Review: The best I've read in a long time
Summary: 5 Stars
Every once in a while, there's a book that seems written for you. It speaks to you in a way books you love haven't. You don't just visualize the author's words, they leap off the page, and rather than watching the movie in your mind, you are living it. You feel the pain, the joy, the laughter. When the book is finished, you're more than disappointed. You feel invigorated, and you search eagerly through the author's books to see what, along the same vein, she has to offer. You search readers' recommendations to find the books that leave the same imprint on you. Inevitably, though the books satiate your appetite, they don't resonate in the same way. Welcome to Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants.
In the prologue, we're privy to a murder. We see it as Jacob sees it, and tries in vain to stop it. Though the victim and murderer aren't named, as we're introduced to them, it becomes clear in our mind who filled those roles.
Then we start from the beginning, in the midst of the Great Depression. Jacob is in class, during the final few weeks at Cornell preparing for his finals before he becomes a doctor of veterinary medicine.
In a moment, the Dean will enter and change his path. Jacob was to go home and set up shop with his father, working with the animals in his town. Instead, he goes home to identify the remains of his mother and father. He sees the sign his father added to their on-site practice: Jankowitz and Son Veterinary Practice. After identifying his family, he visits the lawyer, who tells him he has nothing. The bank owns the house and everything in it. The explanation as to why his parents mortgaged the house shatters him. He returns to school to finish his finals and finds that he can't.
Jacob flees and seeing a train pass, tries to jump aboard. Once on, he realizes it is a circus train. An old man, Camel, vouches for him and works to get him a job within.
As soon as the boss finds he is Ivy League educated, degree or no degree, he becomes the animal man. With such a prestigious job within, he straddles the division between the higher ups and performers, and the lower echelon who helped secure his place.
One performer in particular, Marlena, fascinates him. She reminds him physically of the girl he left behind at school, and emotionally captivates him. She matches his love of animals. Married to August, who has the boss' ear, she is off-limits, but a friendship develops anyway.
Later comes Rosie, an elephant pilfered from a circus that has gone defunct. Rosie suffers August's wrath many, many times. Jacob is stunned by her human like qualities. Understanding, pain, anger, empathy, happiness all emanate from her big brown eyes.
Following the story, I felt all of the emotions Rosie feels (except perhaps, the pain). Astonishment at the goings on to keep the circus running smoothly. The love Jacob develops for many people who help him in the course of creating a new life for himself, free of the memories surrounding his past. Sadness at the loss of animals, anger at the treatment of the animals and the red lighting of, as they're called today, carnies.
The characters came alive to me, as did the setting. As soon as I finished this book, I eagerly went to Sara Gruen's website to read excerpts of other novels she had written. While good, they didn't capture me the way this did. And I wanted more of this. So I went to Amazon's recommendations Disappointedly, I moved on to Barnes and Noble. No dice. So I tried the next best thing. Research. I wanted to read first hand accounts of the circus the way it was back then. The more I read, the more I craved.
Then, as though they knew my hunger, work offered me discounted tickets to the circus. I'm still debating. On the one hand, it's the circus. Elephants that feel things like people do! Horses that synchronize! How can I say no? On the other hand, it's not the 1920s. It's almost 100 years later. What if it's not the same? I mean true, we're in the middle of a depression (point 4 of pros: It's almost the same!). But people are categorically different than they were then. Theoretically, this extends to performers as well right?
But alas, I have chosen to forego the circus at this moment, because I fear, like the recommendations of Barnes and Noble and Amazon, it may fall short. So I will hold onto the satisfaction this book gave me, and the hunger for more of the same. Hopefully, there will be another book that catches my attention like this one. And soon.
Summary of Water for Elephants: A Novel
As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and, ultimately, it was their only hope for survival.Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.
Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the "menagerie" and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and... he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August's wife. Not his best idea.
The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there's trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the "revenooers" or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena's and Rosie's pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it--and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely. --Valerie Ryan
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