Water for Elephants
Jacob Jankowski, a 90 something year old man in a nursing home recounts his days working in a circus. He was taking his final exams at Cornell Veterinary School when he was told that his parents were killed in a car accident. He walked out and found out that he was penniless. His parents had mortgaged everything to send him to college.
He hopped a train to get out of there and it turned out to be a circus train—a third rate circus. He has memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain, and anger and passion: a world with its own irrational rules, its own way of life and death. To Jacob it was both salvation and a living hell.
This took place during the early part of the great depression.. The chapters of this novel go back and forth from Jacob in the nursing home and his memoirs. His insight into both stages is——insightful. One can feel how it is to be of that age and in a nursing home.
The author was attracted to a book of pictures of a photographer who followed circuses and took pictures. She visited the circus winter home in WI and the museum in Sarasaota,FL. She said she took some of the stories most outrageous details from facts or antidote. In the circus history the line between the two is famously blurred.
This is a book that I couldn’t put down until I had finished it. This is unusual for me nowadays. I highly recommend it.
PS I posted this when I read it I think and you could probably find it in archives or something but in case not I copied it and posted again.