Water For Elephants - By Sara Gruen

I decided to read Water For Elephants to find out all the buzz about it. Had a vague idea about the plot, but not much.
I found it a good book, but not for the obvious reasons. I have to say I did NOT fell in love with Marlena, or the young Jacob for that matter. The characters are cute, the story very well told, but nothing that really made me crazy about them.
Let's go to the usual suspects: The richness of circus history. Yes, it is great. You can actually feel the circus of that era. Every detail, every scenario, discrimination of social class, behavioral in general, seems pretty much real and believable. You have to wonder just how hard were those times, the 1930's. It feels like it were a jungle were only the strongest could win - Strength meaning money, of course, almost at all times.
And what about Uncle Al? doesn't he sound like a very real ringmaster to you or what? for all his greediness and the "no-matter-what-the-show-must-go-on" attitude 24 hours a day. Fabulous, really.
And let me make a note about August, Marlena's husband might have been a vicious brutal man (making it very difficult to read at times about his cruelty to our adorable Elephant Rosie, specially for me who's a total animal lover) but at least the man was a Paranoid schizophrenic or "paragon schnitzophonic" as Uncle Al had called it (have to say, I cracked in laughs with that one!). The man was sick, part of his brain didn't work, for God sake!
I'm not saying that it justifies the horrible things he'd done, but I have to point that the man was damaged. It does makes a difference to be just a born prick, a cruel s.o.b. by nature.
Well, at least that's how I see it.
But in the end, what genuinely made my heart ache is the old Jacob Jankowski. I found it so heart breaking his portrait of old age. How he tells of one fine day being a busy father of five kids, having a wife and a good job, then, all of suddenly (because that's really how he feels that time passed by) realize he's ninety (or ninety three, he's never sure) and had been left behind on a nursing home.
The way he talks about loneliness, of people always telling him what to do, or what to eat, when to sleep.
Of his lost dignity for not felling he has a voice anymore, of being just a old man treated like a child on a corner of a nursing home.
What touched me the most, was his account of how the body "cheats" the mind. How come his hands are so wrinkly and old? who's that old grumpy little man on the mirror? where did the real me go?...
I thought it was very interesting to think about that. It is a road we all are going to take, there's no escaping from that.
I just pray when my golden years gets me, that I will have at least somebody to visit me on Sundays and talk to me about the weather. Just pray not to be forgotten somewhere with all my memories of a good life in a old frail body.