Hoffman, Alice. The Museum of Extraordinary Things. New York: Schribner. 2014. Print.
First Sentences:
You would think it would be impossible to find anything new in the world, creatures no man has ever seen before, one-of-a-kind oddities in which nature has taken a backseat to the coursing pulse of the fantastical and the marvelous.
Description:
I'm not really sure how to categorize Alice Hoffman's The Museum of Extraordinary Things. A romance? Historical fiction? Fantasy? Mystery? Character study? Really, it is all of these things and much more.
Coralie is the daughter of Professor Sardie, the proprietor of the small Museum of Extraordinary Things in 1911. The Museum is a collection of "Living Wonders" such as odd people, animals, and other freaks of nature placed on exhibit to the public vacationing at nearby Coney Island.
Coralie appears in the museum as a mermaid who swims in a giant tank under the observation of paying customers. She is rarely allowed outside the museum except for occasional swims in the Hudson River, where one night she spies a handsome photographer, Eddie, shooting pictures in the moonlight.
Eddie has his own demons as an immigrant Jew who fled Russia with his father. He becomes Americanized, changes his name from Ezekiel to Eddie, and strikes out on his own, abandoning his father and his faith, to become a photographer. He documents the historic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire where hundreds of workers, mostly women, died because they had been locked in their workrooms by owners who wanted to prevent workers taking breaks.
Eddie is persuaded to search for one young woman from that factory whose body was not dound among those who perished in the fire. As he unravels her story, her fate and the lives of Professor Sardie and eventually Coralie come together.
In 1911 the museum is facing competition from the new attractions of Dreamland, a lavish amusement park that will open soon to huge crowds, people who no longer are interested in the small sideshow offerings of the Museum. So Professor Sardie hatches a scheme for an attraction like no other, a new creature that will capture the attention of the world and bring back his audience ... with the reluctant assistance of Coralie.
The story is bracketed by two major events in America at the turn of the century: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the fire at the Coney Island Dreamland fire. This peek at turn of the century New York life also introduces readers to a variety of extraordinary characters including a mystic, a recluse, a grifter, an blind photographer, a scarred housekeeper, and many more.
It is a strange story, full of wondrous people and events, a story that gently takes hold of you slowly until you cannot extract yourself from it by putting down this book. I was completely caught up in these conflicts and personal struggles, as well as absorbed in the historical events of the two great fires that changed the world at that time. There are the struggles of daughter and father, of father and son, that are recognizable to everyone, yet here played out with intelligence and emotion. And of course there is the compelling love story between Coralie and Eddie.
Love is the one thing that's not easy to find.It's an achievement, Eddie, to feel such a glorious emotion, whether it's returned or not.
Happy reading.
Fred
www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com
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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
Swyler, Erika. The Book of Speculation
A mysterious book of a magician's is passed from hand to hand between small carnival and circus performers, including someone known as a "swimmer," someone who can hold her breath for long periods underwater during performances. She searches for the history of this book and its importance. (Previously reviewed here.)
Morganstern, Erin. The Night Circus
Wonderful behind the scenes look at a circus and the lives of two young magicians competing to be the best in the world.
Macy, Beth. Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South. New York: Little, Brown. 2016. Print.
First Sentences:
The story seemed so crazy, many didn't believe it at first, black or white.
But for a century, it was whispered and handed down in the segregated black communities of Roanoke, the regional city hub about thirty miles from Truevine. Worried parents would tell their children to stick together when they left home to see a circus, festival, or fair.
Description:
With the recently-announced closing of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, it was coincidental that I had just finished Beth Macy's fascinating Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South. And what a story she uncovered about the circus and the people who were part of them.
In 1914, George and Willie Muse, age 6 and 9, were albino black children with ashy white skin and blue eyes. They spent their days working with their sharecropper family picking tobacco on a plantation in Truevine, Virginia. Their skin burned easily and their eyes constantly watered in the bright sunlight, so they were forced to squint and look down throughout the day. Their working hours were nicknamed, "Can see to can't see" - daylight to dark.
But in 1914, under mysterious circumstances, George and Willie were taken from the tobacco fields by a carnival man and transported away. Told that their Momma was dead, they were put on exhibition as part of the freak show where they stood on a platform to let small town locals stare at them. They were billed at Eko and Iko, the Ecuadorian Savages, wearing huge dreadlocks (unusual in that era) and various costumes, not speaking or looking up. When it was accidentally discovered one day that they were natural musicians able to play any tune on any instrument, music was added to their sideshow performance.
Their "agent" (who had taken them from the fields) kept their meager pay for himself, giving them only food and clothes for years. He moved them to different carnivals and finally, after eight years, they became part of the biggest show on earth, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.
Their mother, Harriett Muse, after realizing her boys were gone, spent years waiting for the carnival to return to her town and for her to reclaim her children. If that happened, she also planned to extract her revenge on the carnival for taking her boys and not returning them. And that day did finally come.
Author Macy did extensive research on George and Willie Muse, as well as any relatives and townspeople in Truevine who might have known them. It took her years to get Nancy Saunders, to open up to tell her story. Nancy was Willie and George's great niece and primary caregiver for Willie, who was still living when Muse started her research. Macy was never able to interview Willie (prevented by Nancy), but many people did share their stories. Macy also interviewed circus memorabilia collectors and "freak authorities" who knew of the Muses through articles, posters, and a few photos shared in this book.
It's a gripping book as Macy painstakingly paints the world of circuses, the life of performers like George and Willie, and the hardscrabble existence of people living in small towns and working on plantations during that era.
And hanging over the entire book is the uncomfortable situation where the illiterate Willie and George were forcibly separated from their families and their slave-like existence of picking tobacco in desperate poverty with little prospect for change, but with their loving mother.
While they probably enjoyed the luxuries of traveling the world with food, clothing, shelter with a new family of similar people, highly respected albeit exhibited as freaks, they were lied to about their mother who never stopped looking for them. And once reunited with her, they were able to arrange to continue their carnival life, but with the approval of their mother and financial compensation for their families, a much more positive conclusion for all.
Thoroughly informative, fascinating, and often disturbing to revisit that world of carnivals, circuses, and performers in the early twentieth century through the story of Willie and George, two albino black children/men.
Dean, Jensen. Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love & Tragedy at the Circus.
Life and era of Leitzel, the internationally famous trapeze artist of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus at the same time the Muse brothers were sideshow act with the same circus. Brilliantly written about the true life of a girl with a talent that brought her to the pinnacle of fame and fortune throughout the world. (previously reviewed here)
Swyler, Erika. The Book of Speculation. New York: St. Martin's Press. 2015. Print.
First Sentences:
Perched on the bluff's edge, the house is in danger.
Last night's storm tore land and churned water, littering the beach with bottles, seaweed, and horseshoe crab carapaces. The place where I've spent my entire life is unlikely to survive the fall storm season.
Description:
Know what a "swimmer" is? A swimmer is a performer in a circus sideshow who can hold his/her breath for long periods of time, over 10 minutes in most cases, while swimming underwater posing as a mermaid. The narrator of Erika Swyler's captivating novel The Book of Speculation, Simon Watson along with his sister Enola learned this technique from their mother, a swimmer for a travelling sideshow company... someone ironically who committed suicide by drowning.
Simon, a small town librarian, receives an ancient book written in the 1700s full of notes, drawings, and rambling notations about a travelling sideshow circus. While interesting in itself as a rare book, the crumbling record also mentions Simon's great grandmother, grandmother and other relatives who all were swimmers with this show.
Fascinated, Watson researches these names and finds the odd coincidence that each of these swimmers committed suicide on the same date, July 24 - all by drowning just like his own mother. Impossible for a swimmer, but it happened. Of course, Watson has to get to the bottom of it to understand what actually occurred and to prevent his eccentric sister, currently drifting about as a fortune-teller with a travelling show (and also a swimmer), from possibly repeating her ancestor's actions.
I have a week. The book is a beautifully broken window with an obstructed view of what is killing us, and something is definitely killing us.
Jumping between the 1700s life and people of the travelling show, and then the present day, author Swyler keeps the story absolutely captivating. There are mysterious elements that span both time periods, from ancient tarot cards and fortune-tellers, to horseshoe crabs, floods, portraits, and even a tattooed man who can turn on electric lights with his fingers.
Those who long to live in [the] past dream just as much for the future.
I loved the oddities of the circus life and its unusual performers, the element of mystery for each generation, the dusty research Simon pursues to unravel the story, the romance he finds with an old friend, and the tension when July 24 finally arrives in Simon and Enola's life.
We carry our families like anchors, rooting us in storms, making sure we never drift from where and who we are. We carry our families within us the way we carry our breath underwater, keeping us afloat, keeping us alive. I've been lifting anchors since I was eighteen. I've been holding my breath since before I was born.
A wondrously beautiful, gripping, and magical book. Highest recommendation.
If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
Davies, Robertson. The World of Wonders
Fantastic telling of one boy's rise from a tragedy in his childhood to becoming an internationally famous magician, but still finds he must face his past and friends. (previously reviewed here)
Davies, Robertson. World of Wonders. Toronto: Viking Penguin : Macmillan 1977. Print.
First Sentences:
"Of course he was a charming man. A delightful person. Who has ever questioned it? But not a great magician."
"By what standard do you judge?"
"Myself. Who else?"
"You consider yourself a greater magician than Robert-Houdin?"
"Certainly."
Description:
OK, I just couldn't wait. Once I finished Robertson Davies' Fifth Business last week and learned it was the first book in a trilogy, I had to read the other two. And World of Wonders is the most satisfying of the three, so wanted to share it with you immediately.
World of Wonders is an intoxicating, Arabian Nights-like extended storytelling as narrated by Magnus Eisengrim, magician extraordinary, who paints the grim, fascinating details of his life story that made him the world's leading magician. Eisengrim (The Wolf) is filming a documentary about Robert-Houdin, another famous magician. After the daily shoots, he settles in with the filmmakers and friends around lavish meals to leisurely reveal what a wild life he experienced that brought him to his current position position of skill and celebrity. Each night he leaves the story at a critical point, making his listeners (and us readers) hungry for more.
Also in attendance are his lover, Leisl Vitzliputzli, and boyhood friend, Dunstan Ramsay, both major characters in the first book in the Deptford trilogy, Fifth Business. The first secret is that Eisengrim is really Paul Dempster, the boy we met in the first book who was born prematurely to his mother when Ramsay dodged a snowball that hit Dempster's mother, causing her to fall and give birth prematurely to Paul, then go slowly insane. Strap yourself in. The story is a wild one.
At age 10 Paul is abducted by a traveling carnival, the World of Wonders, where he becomes a magician's "assistant" and more for the next ten years. He learns some skills but mostly is trapped in a card-playing mechanical robot illusion, and observes life at its lowest level from his jaded eyes as a carny worker. His only relationships are with the other sideshow acts like the fat woman, a sword-swallower, the knife-thrower, an orang-outang, a fortuneteller, and the wild man.
Later he strikes out on his own to survive in the harsh world, relying only on his few skills as a performer.
I, too became cynical, with the whole-hearted, all-inclusive vigour of the very young. Why not? Was I not shut off from mankind and any chance to gain an understanding of the diversity of human temperament by the life I led and the people who dominated me? Yet I saw people, and I saw them very greatly to their disadvantage....When the Pharisees saw us they marveled, but it seemed to me that their inward parts were full of ravening and wickedness...and their greed and stupidity and cunning drove them on....
Occasionally during his travels, he sees his childhood acquaintance, Ramsay, in the audience but rebuffs him, uninterested in the fate of his mother or life in Deptford. World of Wonders unravels Paul's life to the last pages of Fifth Business (which had been narrated by Ramsay about his own life) and continues on to explain how Paul (now called Eisengrim) shapes his skills and persona into the premier magic act in the world.
But hanging over Paul/Eisengrim and Ramsay is the fate of Boy Staunton, the boyhood friend who originally threw the fateful snowball that caused the birth of Eisengrim. Staunton has risen to become a powerful and rich man, but at the end of Fifth Business was found dead of an apparent suicide. Did Eisengrim commit murder as revenge as Ramsay believes, or is there another explanation? Only the tantalizingly slow unfurling of events contained in Eisengrim's narrative storytelling in World of Wonders reveals these secrets.
This is a fascinating telling of a unique and highly personal story, with plenty of unusual characters and actions which promote discussion and arguments among the listeners as they try to interpret and debate events once Eisengrim leaves for the night. What is the truth? How much can events of one's life influence one's final personality, and how much is simply fate?
The story is gripping, the characters both good and evil, and the conclusions continually surprising. The aura of mystery and magic permeate the narration set in the struggles of life for one person trying to achieve dreams, but always trying just to survive and improve.
But part of the glory and terror of our life is that somehow, at some time, we get all that's coming to us. Everybody gets their lumps and their bouquets and it goes on for quite a while after death.
Highest recommendation possible. Read Fifth Business first, but make World of Wonders the cherry on top of this delicious trilogy.
(P.S. I found out that Davies has written two other equally acclaimed trilogies, The Cornish Trilogy and The Salterton Trilogy, so my bedside table is going to be piled high with his wonderfully-written books. Can't wait.)
If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business
Dunstan Ramsay. retiring history teacher, writes his memoirs in a letter to his headmaster to set the record straight. And what a record it is, from boyhood in Deptford, Canada to heroic actions in World War I to his acquaintance with the mysterious Paul Dempster, alias Eisengrim, the world-famous magician, all of whom hold secrets about themselves and each other. Highest recommendation. (Previously reviewed here)
Gold, Glen David. Carter Beats the Devil
Based on the real life of Charles Carter, a magician who performed before President Warren Harding who died later that night under suspicious conditions. Fantastic details of the man and his magic. One of my favorite books of all time. (previously reviewed here)
Dean, Jensen. Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love & Tragedy at the Circus. New York: Crown. 2013. Print
First Sentences:
Firelight was entering the circus wagon through a narrow open door when Nellie woke.
The orange light was jumpy, flickering. It played over the walls of the roofed wagon and its collection of costumes, trunks, hoops, juggling balls, and other props. The air in the wheeled cabin was scented with woodsmoke and meadow grass.
Description:
To me, the circus presents a conflicting experience. On one hand, it is a magical world visually and sensually of animals, colors, smells, and lights, a world populated by fantastic beings with unusual talents and masterful presence.
On the other hand, the behind-the-scenes workings of the circus can be disquieting, almost shameful. The circus brings together the exotic, the peculiar, the poverty-stricken outcasts and caged animals to perform before audiences eager to gape at them. It is a demanding environment, as performers and animals struggle to perfect unnatural, dangerous skills. But it also seems demeaning for elephants to dance on balls, obese sideshow figures to sit on stages waving, and trained dogs to run up ladders wearing dresses.
But oh, then there are the trapeze artists. Their grace, strength, and breath-taking daring make the circus an other-worldly experience. These men and women are "godlike, artists who consecrated their entire beings to their calling, and in some cases, even risked their lives for it," according to the painter John Steuart Curry, who travelled with and painted circuses in the 1930s.
Dean Jensen, former art critic for the Milwaukee Sentinel, has written three books on the circus. In Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love & Tragedy at the Circus, he is at his best as a storyteller and researcher, bringing to life what really made up a circus and its inhabitants during the early 1900s.
Jensen focuses on the true stories of Lillian Leitzel and Alfredo Codona, the biggest stars ever to hit the circus world. Leitzel was a trapeze artist from Czechoslovakia in the early 1900s, a wisp of a girl/woman who perfected a unique move: a one-armed swing as she hung from a single rope, jerking her body 50 - 100 times in head-over-feet revolutions, all performed 70' in the air without a net.
Leitzel's mother, only 13 when Leitzel was born, was herself an international trapeze star. Nellie performed throughout Europe with the Leamy Ladies on the "Trapezone Rotaire," a circular arrangements of trapezes that revolved overhead, which was a stupendous sensation for audiences in the 1890s. Leitzel was left alone for years with her grandparents while her mother travelled.
Leitzel started aerial performing at age three on a small pair of Roman rings and a trapeze bar. By age 11, she teamed up with her mother as a Leamy Lady on the Trapezone Rotaire. Their act was seen by John Ringling at a performance in Berlin's Wintergarden, and they were immediately booked to join the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth in America.
Leitzel became the most popular attraction in circus history, drawing huge crowds everywhere as the star. She eventually commanded her own train car, tent, and a salary of $1,200 per week from the Ringling Brothers, an unheard of amount in the 1920s when a good car cost $400. She continued to return to the European stages in the circus off season and even appeared on Vaudeville stages in America, performing her demanding routine many times a day year after year.
Alfredo Codona, the other star of the book, was also a trapeze artist, working with his brother as "The Flying Codonas" in small circuses in Mexico before tiny audiences. He became obsessed with perfecting the feat no other flyer had ever completed: the triple somersault.
Once he actually achieved the triple and could perform it before audiences, his skill was noticed by the Ringling Brothers who signed him to their circus that featured Leitzel. The two stars, these magnetic personalities, now were thrown into the same star-crossed orbit. What happened to them next was both beautiful and shocking.
Queen of the Air is a wonderful book. Jensen weaves a clear story with a descriptive narration that let readers intimately understand the world of the circus and their performers. We lucky readers can breathe the big top air, watch the performances, feel the tension, and cheer the successes. We get to know and understand the motivations of these unique performers as well as the managers of the circus and the audiences who worship the stars.
It is a gripping, fantastical tale of two people and the circus world they dominated as god-like stars. In Jensen's words:
"The story of Leitzel and Alfredo was the greatest one the big top has ever had to tell. They presided over an ever-relocating sawdust-and-rainbows-made Camelot where, one after another, wonderments kept occurring. Their love story was epic. Had it played out in the ancient world instead of the first third of the twentieth century, it might have been presented on the stage by Sophocles. Their story moved in the arc of a Greek tragedy, and, I believe, was complete with mischievous fates and vengeful gods."
Who can resist a story as big and as personal as this? Certainly not me, and I hope not you either. It is wonderful.
Happy reading.
Fred
True account of a relationship between an elephant and his friend/trainer over seven decades, from surviving a shipwreck together to performing in circuses worldwide.
Recollections of a 90-year-old man about his wildly varied experiences with the circus. Wonderfully written and a great fictional story.
First Sentences:
