06 Jun, 2008
Watering Elephants and More of the List-o-Tron 3000
Posted by: Justin In: Big. Fat. Nerd.| The Amazing Justin-o-Tron Book List 3000
You know what the problem is with books like One Hundred Years of Solitude? Books that are so damn good you can’t stop thinking about them for days after you put them down? They’re TOO good.
No matter what book you pick up during your rebound period, it’s going to suck balls. You’re going to be disappointed. You can’t follow Lolita with, say, Life of Pi, and not be a little let down. It’s like chasing a wee dram of The 18-year-old Glenlivet with a PBR tall boy.*
And so it goes with One Hundred Years of Solitude and the book I polished off this morning, Water for Elephants.
Spoilers abound ahead. Sorry. I can’t throw something under the bus without giving the reasons, and I can’t give those reasons without spoiling the book. There’s your warning. Avoid the jump if you don’t want to know things about, oh, how the book ends.
Otherwise, come with me if you want to live.
So here’s the thing. Overall, the book is aight. Certainly not my fav book ever, but it’s not like I’m going to start stalking Sara Gruen and demanding compensation for the time spent reading it or anything.
Yet.
It’s a quick, easy read. I knocked out the first half of it on my flight from Houston to Portland, then finished it off yesterday morning before I noticed my new train friend. I’m not speed-reader, either.
Again, I’m not sure if some of my problems with it were that really related to this book, standing on its own merits, or if it just followed a better act. Or if I’m a victim to my own idiosyncrasies. Or if it just plain sucked.
Reading Water for Elephants, though, I couldn’t help feel that I’d read/seen/heard this story about 8.4 million times before. Every page seemed somehow familiar, every character seemed cut from well-used molds. If I had to sum it up in one word? Cliché.
Story goes like this:
- Boy flees tragedy
- Boy meets girl
- Girl is married to Bad Man
- Boy and Girl fall in love
- Bad Man is mean to Girl
- Bad Man dies
- Boy and Girl live happily ever after
It’s a Leo and happy ending (not that kind, perv) away from being Titanic. Replace the boat with a circus train and you’re 4/5 of the way there.
She tells the story well enough, but it seems almost a little condescending at times. Like she feels she needs to explain each and every unfamiliar phrase lest we get lost. We’re smart people, though, capable of figuring things out through context or, if necessary, through Google.
Here’s your “for instance:”
“Who sits on the other side? Performers?”
Camel shoots me a look. “Good God, kid. just keep your trap shut till you learn the vernacular, would ya?”
<…snip…>
“So, what’s the vernacular then?” I say finally.
“They’re called kinkers,” says Camel, talking around a mouthful of chewed food. “And your department is baggage stock. For now.”
“So where are these kinkers?”
“They’ll be pulling in any time. There’s two more sections of train still to come. They say up late, sleep late, and arrive just in time for breakfast. And while we’re on the subject, don’t you go calling them ‘kinkers’ to their faces, neither.”
“What do I call them?”
“Performers.”
So that’s not the worst bit in the world, but there are tons of these let-me-try-to-squeeze-in-a-definition exchanges scattered throughout the book, some a lot worse than this example.
I understand why she feels the need to break it down, that we’re probably not hip to the ’20s circus lingo, but her method of spelling it out reminds me of that whole “show, don’t tell” philosophy on writing. No need to spell it out for us so bluntly. Not like we’re going to think “kinkers” is the southern name for that place you go to make copies or something.
Oh, and the gimmicks. I hate gimmicks.
First, there’s the intentionally misleading prologue. Really no need for that prologue, either, except to set up The Twist at the end. Drives me nuts.
Then there’s the temporally split story telling, with most of the book written from the protagonist’s perspective when the main events went down in the ’20s and the rest taking place when he’s an old man in a present day nursing home. I could deal with that bit, but the fact that both parts are written in first-person, present tense made me a little batty. I know he’s supposed to be reliving those days of yore in his age-addled brain, but it didn’t work for me.
And why is it that modern women authors seem to have a virtual hard on for that one? Mary Doria Russell did it in The Sparrow, too. Too many Q movies? Or maybe that ST:TNG series finale made a bigger impression on them than on me?
Speaking of things that drive me nuts…
I hate it when publishers throw “Book-Group Discussion Questions” in the back of a novel. My edition had some, our copy of The Sparrow has some… Just dumb. Wreaks of Elitism. Don’t blame that on Gruen, of course, just another curmudgeonly observation.
Just realize how negative this whole thing sounds, and the digs in here are totally disproportionate to how I really felt about the book. The second half, for example, really picks up steam. The ending is a little weak (the old man part of the story, anyway), but that’s fine. I hate writing endings, and her only other option would have been as depressing as this was sappy.
Seriously, it’s worth picking up, just don’t make the same mistake I did and try reading it after a book you really, really love.
And that brings us to the next installment of The Amazing Justin-o-Tron Book List 3000.My original plan was to include whatever section of ten books contained One Hundred Years of Solitude. Seemed appropriate, considering how much I’ve been blabbing about that novel recently, huh?Problem is, though, that the lists I used consisted of the top 100 ENGLISH books of the last century, and Marquez’s book was translated from Spanish. Balls.Instead, you get books 71-80, picked for no other reason than the fact that I really dig #80 on the list and, if I can’t share the part with my new fav book, I figured I’d share a section with one of my older favorites. Enjoy.
*Portland hipsters might argue. To them, I say “eat me.” And I point them to this: http://www.worldofbeer.com/brightbeer/pabst.html
