When Someone Dies, You Up And Join The Circus

There’s this hypothetical bucket list I’ve set for myself, where most of the things are almost impossible to happen, such as seeing the Rio Carnival or riding on top of a train in India. Among those, it’s obvious you’ll mostly find my love for traveling and the ultimate journey is joining the circus. The dead inside, dirty but spectacular, also magical circus world.

• Water for Elephants

Jacob Jankowski is a Polish American veterinarian, barely out of college, whose parents die in a car accident. In a moment of despair and incapacity of seeing a light or a purpose, he hops on a train headed West. This train is not an ordinary train, but a moving circus, where he gets hired as the veterinarian. He has trouble adapting, the working men try to red light him (through him off the moving train) when he first hops on it, later on he gets to share a room with a performer which really upsets the performer at first, making Jacob’s life miserable. He falls in love with Marlena (one of the artists), but she’s married to August a paranoid schizophrenic. The story is set during the Great Depression, but is told through a 90 or 93 year old Jacob, who spends the last days of his life in a retirement home, reminiscing.

Even though in the end the circus falls apart, or rather goes bankrupt and the animals break free, the story has a happy ending in what concerns the love story.

• Carnivàle

This is an HBO television shows that I consider to be my second favorite TV show after Six Feet Under. The story is also set during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl and tells the story of Ben Hawkins, a young man who follows the circus that crosses his town after his mother passes away. He starts having prophetic dreams and an ability to cure illnesses and evil. His path crosses a man of God, preacher Justin Crowe who also has visions telling him to go against the young man. It’s a beautiful metaphor involving good and evil, God and the Antichrist.

The show was cancelled after the second season and this also culminates with the weird ending of the series, where neither good, nor bad wins.

 

• La Strada

This is a movie about a street performer who travels through Italy – Zampano (played by Anthony Queen) and a young woman whose sister used to be his assistant up to her death. Zampano comes to her family to ask for Gelsomina to replace her dead sister in the show. She’s a naïve young woman and gets attracted by this life, but he treats her as a brute and she easily looses her so called joie de vivre. After a series of unfortunate situations and conflicts, she even proposes marriage, but he refuses. He abandons her while she is sleeping, only to find the memory of Gelsomina a few years later with a song she used to sing. He finds out she died and cries in despair.

All of these three circus stories begin and end with death – physical or metaphorical. They speak of a world that looks appealing for the majority, because we barely know anything about it and can hardly touch it.

The circus is the ultimate frontier.

The One With The Book And The Right To Closure

I knew what to expect when I first started reading this book, a few days ago. I knew about the ultra romantic setting, the premise was simple: a little girl meets a man who came from the future and with every conversation he tells her things about her future – or actually, about their future together. After a few chapters we are in the present – she is 20, he is 28 – and they meet for the first time, more precisely, he meets her for the first time, she first met him when she was 6.

The book doesn’t have the most spectacular development, the most disturbing fact is stated in the beginning, when we find out he time travels. The following is actually a recording of their encounters when she’s a kid, or of their present days, up to his death.

So this is a pretty romantic book, probably really catchy for teenagers (especially because of the language, the perfect love story or the taste in music of the protagonist), but I’m not saying I didn’t like it. It was a pretty easy read, so I devoured it in a few days, reading avidly until I reached the back cover.  

What really puzzled me was the idea that prevails: waiting for someone your entire life. I find it unfair and I feel it has already been suggested in a bunch of books considered classic literature. A modern writer should give into the social pressure and just admit this is never going to happen nowadays. And it almost didn’t happen in the book either. Until it did. I feel that people should be able to get closure (even if it’s a matter of right or wrong, death or relationships). I hate the hook (as Barney, the character of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ names it) and I admit I have been under its influence too and I know how it feels. This is why I find it unfair to also read about it in a book I actually liked up to the last chapter where she’s 82 and waiting for their last date.

It’s like a person that’s brain dead, you’ll always live with an IF locked deep inside your life. It’s like living your life being unhappy, but hoping that someday you will find happiness.

I know artists should reach catharsis through their art – I do exactly the same thing and I can barely call myself an artist – but if you read the acknowledgement, Niffenegger actually claims the waiting has worked for her – NOOO!, just as it worked for Penelope. 

I send this book out there with the closure issue as a warning. I recommend it to girls, mostly, because even the male characters are pretty feminine in actions. Don’t get fooled by the time travel thing, it’s still a romance and should be treated as one.

We Had Our Month - It's Over

My bad day began at 11:00 AM this morning when I finished the book after a long month of reading only a few pages at a time, hoping for a never ending version of it. Neither the sun shining at my window, nor the warm coffee on my bed stand could turn this morning back into a usual December morning.

It’s been a long time since a book drew and captured me like this one did. Fairy tales weren’t my thing as a kid, but as I grew up, I started re- reading childhood books, such as Poil de Carotte and falling in love with them for real, this time. The association between Poil de Carotte and Still Life With Woodpecker isn’t involuntary – both of them are full of adventures, almost falling out of the their covers, they both mess with your imagination and perception up to the point where you start acting the same way the characters would, or find yourself in a real situation and ask yourself the inappropriate question that will tell you the degree of addiction you’re facing: ‘What would Poil de Carotte/ Bernard Mickey Wrangle (Baby) do?’

The narrator is omniscient, and has only a few 1^st person ‘interventions’ throughout the whole book. These are either distinct chapters, epilogues or prologues, whenever he switches from one moon phase to the other (the moon phases are larger units and include a few chapters each). The narrator launches a basic question in the beginning – What makes love stay? – and a few others that derive from this one and get answered on the way – What’s the importance of the moon?, What’s the significance of the Camel pack design? He tries to answer the first question structuring the story as a post-modern fairy tale, where the princess is a vegetarian ex- cheerleader and her future - to – be – prince is… a lot of guys. But mostly, Bernard, a redhead (such as the princess herself) outlaw (not criminal!) who has a passion for explosives. We then have a mixture of random fairy tale – like characters, such as the princess’ servant – the actual throne heir and a cocaine addict -, her parents – a father with a noisy mechanical heart valve and a foreign mother, with a strong accent and a little dog -, the vengeful sheikh who painted the pyramid black and an unopened pack of Camel cigarettes.

These handful of characters have to make peace with themselves and their captivating personalities and solve their problems at the same time. Tom Robbins has written the funniest comparisons I’ve ever come across in literature (e.g. ‘The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist.’) or just funny, interesting, morally correct or slightly philosophical sentences, such as ‘It's never too late to have a happy childhood.’

If I were to think of these characters as real life human beings, I would say they are full of flaws, egocentric and immature bastards. As characters from a book they become fascinating and close to role models. After she heard about me reading the book, the girl who recommended it to me asked me whether I was already in love with Bernard (of course I am, damn it).

It feels I went on an entire trip with these special, but dysfunctional people and I have to let them go now. And we all know I’m terrible with that.

A fairy tale ended with a crooked, but happy ending. We were together for a month. I can’t make myself set it on the book shelf, next to the other victims.