Review: Water for Elephants

Every once in a while, I read a really lovely book about a time gone by - not so far gone by, but a time almost forgotten. It is one so foreign from our present that it meshes wonderfully with the fiction the author has created.
Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen, is an excellent example of this. A beautiful novel built around a traveling circus train, it follows the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth circus during the Great Depression.

Jacob Jankowski, the main character, is a "ninety or ninety-three year-old" rotting away in a nursing home in the present. One of his five children or many grandchildren visit regularly, and he lives a tolerable life, if not an interesting one. Bored by his dull present, he recounts his past with the circus.

At twenty-three, he is about to take his final exams to become a veterinarian at Cornell, when he is told his parents have died in an accident. Unfortunately, he also loses his home and everything in it, as his parents mortgaged the house to pay for Cornell, and his father had been working for food. Desolate and broken, Jacob jumps a train that turns out to be the traveling circus of the Benzini Brothers. (The Benzini Brothers do not actually exist as characters in the book, but their circus was bought by a central character.)

He is hired by the manipulative Uncle Al, head of the circus, as a veterinarian, and becomes friends with August, the unpredictable and frightening head animal trainer, who is married to the mesmerizing and beautiful Marlena. Also featured is Rosie, an elephant spontaneously purchased by Uncle Al. At first, Rosie is badly beaten  by August for not obeying commands - until Jacob discovers that Rosie speaks Polish, and will respond to a myriad of commands as long as they are in Polish.

This is not a ground-breaking book. It doesn't unravel any mysteries untouched by man, it doesn't make any sweepingly epic declarations on the state of being human. But it is a beautiful, readable book about a young man, the world of the circus, and his love for a woman and, improbably, an elephant.

Well worth a read if you are into subcultures, animals, true love, and/or historical fiction.
Yours truly,
RR