Rhymes with Safari

Sex, violence and circus animals. What’s not to love?

I enjoyed Water for Elephants from the start, but as it neared its conclusion, it just kept getting better and better. On my scale, it went from four stars to five stars in the final chapters.

There’s a technique I’ve been seeing too often in television shows, where something terribly dramatic happens in the opening scene. Then we see a title that says “24 hours earlier” and we find out the events that led to the dramatic circumstance.

Water for Elephants opens with a dramatic prologue that introduces us to Jacob (our hero), Marlena (his love interest) and Rosie (an elephant). Then we’re introduced to Jacob as a nonagenarian in a nursing home. When the circus comes to town, he reflects on the events that led to his becoming a circus veterinarian and falling in love with both Marlena and Rosie.

I started asking myself why the writer felt the need to start with that prologue. I felt like it detracted from the story because I thought I knew where the characters would end up. Without giving anything away, I will say that the prologue is, in fact, masterfully written and enhances an already powerful climax.

For some reason I want to compare my experience reading Water for Elephants with another heralded book about animals, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I found Sawtelle enormously disappointing, after being completely entranced by the dogs in the early chapters. I learned later in his interview with Oprah that the author didn’t know why his characters did the things they did. Sawtelle also had a deliberately mysterious prologue, but none of the questions it raised are answered in the story. As the story started falling apart, I kept reading, eager to find a satisfying conclusion, but found none.

So I was thrilled last night as I read the last 150 pages of Elephants, to feel it going somewhere and have it arrive with all the pieces intact. It’s not a perfect novel. I had some criticisms along the way, but I can’t remember what any of them were, because I so completely enjoyed the dénouement.

This month’s book club selection is Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m inspired by it already.

I’ve read a lot of memoirs/stories of people who come from a place of oppression and abuse. Ali seems a rare example of someone who really strives to make sense of her past and make changes for the future of others.

I’m shocked though, by some of her revelations about Islam:

The Prophet did teach us a lot of good things. I found it spiritually appealing to believe in a Hereafter. My life was enriched by the Quranic injunctions to be compassionate and show charity to others. There were times when I, like other Muslims, found it too complicated to deal with the whole issue of war against the unbelievers. Most Muslims never delve into theology, and we rarely read the Quran; we are taught it in Arabic, which most Muslims can’t speak. As a result, most people think that Islam is about peace. It is from these people, honest and kind, that the fallacy has arisen that Islam is peaceful and tolerant.

She’s not saying that Muslim extremists misinterpret the Quran. She’s saying that they’ve interpreted it exactly the way it was intended.

For me, her skepticism about Islam extends to all religions. I don’t know that this is something I will be able to discuss freely within my book group.

Ali looks around at the Western world and thinks, “Waitaminute, here’s a society that’s functioning better than the Muslim world from whence I came. (I’m paraphrasing here.) How can it be that they all are doomed to hellfire if Islam is the only way?”

Any religion that denounces all other religions is intolerant.

I’m reading a really long book. I’m enjoying it, but worried I wouldn’t be able to finish it by the book group meeting at the end of January, which I am supposed to lead, so I also got the 40-hour audio book from the library.

Since I’m in the car an hour a day to and from work, I’m making progress even on days I can’t manage to sit down and read without falling asleep. (This isn’t a reflection of the quality of the book, just of how much I enjoy napping.) It feels a little like cheating, but it’s not the same as watching the movie instead of reading the book — the words are the same. But someone else is performing it, instead of the voices in my head.

I have enjoyed many audio books, but this is the first one I have been able to compare directly to the experience of reading. I’m finding that I would much rather be reading with my eyes. I’m actually getting a little bored with parts, especially when I am driving home from work. I am less bored driving to work. My mind wanders more than it usually does when I’m listening to a book. I don’t think I would keep listening to it, if I weren’t already enjoying the printed book.

The speaker is British and he performs the characters in varying British accents. The voices in my head aren’t British, and it surprises me that I don’t prefer having the accents supplied to me. One of the first audio books I listened to in this manner was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and the skilled performance of distinct voices was one of my favorite parts.

The only other book I have both listened to and read is Atlas Shrugged. I read the book several years ago and adored it. To me it’s a perfect book, because although it is so long, every sentence has meaning and reason for being there. The ending is satisfying, and on top of everything else, there is a real point of view behind the whole novel. I started listening to it a few years ago and got irritated with it. Maybe because I am at a different time in my life, or maybe I was just uncomfortable with the comparison to some real-life events at the time, such as discussion of a Windfall Profits Tax, which sounded straight out of Ayn Rand’s head.

I’m not worried that I won’t have time to finish Pillars of the Earth, because I have enough time to listen to it, but I am looking forward to upcoming plane rides that will carve out some time for me to read with my eyes.

Last night we discussed Old School in my book group. My friend and I had so many insightful remarks that the leader asked us if we’d lead the discussion in January of Pillars of the Earth.

Spoiler: Old School is about a prep school boy trying to win a literary contest so he can meet Robert Frost, Ayn Rand or Ernest Hemingway. The three authors are characters in the book as they visit the school. I found the portrayal of Ayn Rand to be quite unfair, as did many of her followers on Ayn Rand websites.

The group leader played us a video of Mike Wallace’s interview with Ayn Rand from a billion years ago, as if to prove that her portrayal in the book was accurate. I argued that, while she has very strong opinions, she is kind in explaining her point of view to Mike Wallace, whereas in the book, she is nasty and condescending to the school boys who have not memorized her books and philosophy.

One of the themes of the book that spoke to me was literature as a shared experience. Early on, the author explains why he and his classmates have such high esteem for English teachers in particular:

Say you’ve just read Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.” Like the son in the story, you’ve sensed the faults in your father’s character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable; left alone, you’d probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son.

Much later, that brooding man with the limp is described:

He’d been a reader since childhood, and the habit had deepened during his years of travel for the Forbes-Farragut shipping line, but until he began teaching he’d rarely had occasion to talk about what he read. He could read a story like “The Minister’s Black Veil” and both shrink from and relish the soul-chill it worked on him without having to fix that response in words, or explain how Hawthorne had produced it. Teaching made him accountable for his thoughts, as as he became accountable for them he had more of them, and they became sharper and deeper.

After he leaves the school, the experience of reading is changed for the teacher:

For thirty years he had lived in conversation with boys, answerable to their own sense of how things worked, to their skepticism, and, most gravely, to their trust. Even when alone he had read and thought in their imagined presence, made responsible by it, enlivened and honed by it. Now he read in solitude and hardly felt himself to be alive.