Cseri Donatella - Water for Elephants Review

Water for Elephants

“Circuses showcase human beings at their silliest and most sublime.” These are one of the closing ideas of Elizabeth Judd’s review on a New York Times bestseller book form the last decade, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. The New York Times online published this review in June, 2006, a couple of months after the book’s publishing. Its author has written several book reviews and her works appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Salon and other publications.

Rudd’s piece of writing starts out with a personal experience that is strongly connected to the subject of the book she has written about: a 1932 horror film that presents “dwarfs, fat ladies and other sideshow improbabilities” shares this characteristic with Water for Elephants that depicts the magnificence of the Depression-era circus. Apart from the mysterious life of circuses, Rudd mainly points out the sentimentality of the story that is well blended with Gruen’s courageous subject choice.

Using extravagant words, the author delineates the story and by the end of the third paragraph she draws the conclusion that the central line in it is how Jacob coaxes Rosie – the elephant being the main attraction of Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth – to perform on stage. Besides revealing the main force of the story, Rudd draws our attention to three other significant points. On the one hand, the drama in fiction is highlighted and explained by examples from the book, in which there are two murders, an animal stampede and omnipresent tension. On the other hand, according to her, the whole circus by its “frankly mercantile morality” symbolizes the agility of capitalism. Also, August, the menagerie director, embodies the attitude of that time which is struggling for making money anyhow. The third main topic mentioned is the love triangle between the protagonist, August and his beautiful wife, Marlena. The tension as an implication of this issue is existent throughout the story.

Rudd is completely amused by Gruen’s book as she writes about it in an enthusiastic way: she does not seem to run out of ideas. Throughout the sentences we come across carefully selected, “glitzy” phrases that are likely to be unable to express the grandeur and magnificence of the composition and course of surprising events of Water for Elephants. She implies her thoughts through a clear structure in her writing, which means that one topic is backed by an instance from the story in one paragraph. From the beginning Rudd describes the three topics mentioned above and finally draws a conclusion which says that “with a showman’s timing, she [Gruen] saves a terrific revelation for the final pages, transforming a glimpse of Americana into an enchanting escapist fairy tale”.

As the book itself, the review of the Water for Elephants is brilliantly composed: several (story) lines are put next to each other forming parallels. As for the review, it starts out from one point which continuously opens out and at the end the main idea emerges, which is an efficient structure. Although, there is one paragraph that breaks the coherence of the text, as it does not connect to any main ideas presented in the review. However, it is hard to stop reading Rudd’s sentences thanks to the rich use of sparkling words.