Beth F's Reviews > Water for Elephants

Just to put it out there, I’ll admit straight off the bat that I’m one of the people who enjoyed this book. It was a fast read (which I always appreciate, because I’m perpetually drowning in a list of books TBR) and it was fairly easy to get through. I also didn’t see the end coming until a few pages before it actually happened, which probably added immensely to my enjoyment factor.

I’ve been reading all the criticisms of this book in an attempt to organize my opinions after reading this book. It seems like most of the complaints have to do with cruelty to humans and animals in the story and the sex scenes sprinkled throughout Jacob’s experience with the circus.

I do not feel that the sex described in these books was inappropriate or gratuitous. In all instances (namely Barbra’s strip scene, Jacob’s deflowering with the circus prostitutes and the scene where he and Marlena finally made love), these descriptions helped to move the plot and create human experiences and reactions, which is what makes a book worth reading. Very few of us who will ever read this book can say that we were involved in a Depression-era circus, however, must of us has some concept or experience of our own with sex. In the case of this book, I feel that the sex in the book permits us to draw a parallel to these characters that we might otherwise never identify with (because they are truly from another world).

I won’t lie. There were several uncomfortable scenes where Rosie the elephant was brutally beat by August, and I cringed during those scenes. I was also extremely discomfited by the scenes where the big cats were fed rotting meat and other circus animals. The instances of redlighting were also appalling.

However, this is because I am 29-years-old. I was born in 1979. Not 1929. That time in American history is FOREIGN to me. FOREIGN, FOREIGN, FOREIGN. It’s hard for me to fathom sometimes that people actually had experiences like that so recently in the past. I have a grandmother who is 101-years-old. My father is 73-years-old. To listen to them describe life when they were my age is mind-blowing to me, because some of the stories they tell me fall into the same category of shock that I felt while reading this story.

My 87-year-old grandmother has told me stories about going to their family’s beach house in the summers and how her mother would lock her inside the house whenever the Chicago gangster’s had committed a big heist (there were several who would spend time in Minnesota and Wisconsin) while they were waiting for things to cool down. My father has stories about chasing trains and jumping on them to go for a ride out of boredom.

And so it’s my opinion that sex and animal cruelty were not the themes of the story and that to get hung up on them means missing out on something bigger. Life was different then, so we can’t apply our same logic to those events and have them still make sense. They were tangential ideas peppered throughout the story to support the actual point of the story, which I felt had to do with the aging of a human being.

The fact that the story was not just ABOUT the circus supports this. If the story was ABOUT the circus, there would have been no need to include details about Jacob as a 93-year-old man. Or to share conversations he has with the nurses in the assisted living home and with the other patients.

Aging is a very real, very human experience that none of us can escape. Even if someone dies as a young person, they won’t escape the issues that come with aging because there are people in our lives who WILL age and we will be there to witness it. I’ve already seen grandparents go through that transformation of a vital, independent adult to an old, frail being that needs help with even the most basic of a function, who can’t remember names of family members and who eventually dies.

The drastic comparison between Jacob’s life at the assisted living center and his flashbacks to his time spent at the circus give an extremely compelling glance at the passage of time and how it affects us all.

Now, all that being said. There were several instances of the author’s “modern voice” creeping in. The one that bothered me most was the reference to August’s diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. In 1933? Um, nope. It wasn’t recognized as a legitimate disease or even named until the 70’s (I think, which was when my oldest brother was diagnosed with it. If they’d known more about it at the time, he might be better off today, but there just wasn’t enough information or research available, even in the late 70’s).