Well, "Nights at the Circus" is very different from "Water for Elephants." I convinced my friend to let it go and he did. Jack Walser, a young but well-traveled journalist, is interviewing Sophie Fevvers, an aerialiste, originally for the Cirque d’Hiver, but now for Captain Kearney’s Grand Imperial Tour. I was delightfully surprised that I liked this gothic, magical realism type of novel where the principal protagonist is a tall, long-haired, round-faced woman WITH WINGS. Nights at the Circus is a magical realism novel by Angela Carter. March 4th 1986 Last Night I Dreamed a Circus by Maya Gottfried, Robert Rahway Zakanitch and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at AbeBooks.com. Nights at the Circus is first and foremost a very fine novel. Nights At The Circus | Strong Sense of Place This historical fantasy fiction (304 pages) was published in March of 1986 by Penguin. Well this is probably as much fun as can be had reading, for me anyway. As well as being substantially longer than anything she had previously produced, it developed Carter’s earlier interest in fairy tales into a form of magical realism. The story itself is fantastic: Jack, a young journalist, decides to do a story on a mysterious half-woman/half-swan trapeze artist (Sophie/Fevvers). Marina Warner explores cross-dressing and the performance of identity in Angela Carter's fairy tale-inspired works. Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter - 10 Years Online. Fevvers is the protagonist and hero of Nights at the Circus. Nights at the Circus is a novel in three parts, with each part distinguished by its geographic location. Nights at the Circus employs learning disabled actors in the performance and their presence on stage is magical and alluring. Literally, fabulous. Nights at the Circus is the eighth of nine novels written by Angela Carter (1940-92) before she died of cancer at the age of 51, in her literary prime. This was just stunning. Well I will now. Fabulous. The carnavelesque atmosphere gave it an almost gothic cast (though it was set too late to really be gothic) similarily it brought to mind steam-punk without really being that either. Quiet possibly. In typical Angela Carter fashion, "Nights at the Circus" appeals to our baser human instincts by attempting to shock us with freaks, incest, cannibalism, and excrement. Your views could help shape our site for the future. She was allegedly hatched from an egg and left on the stoop of Ma Nelson's brothel as a hatchling. Since I had gotten past page 50 (every book gets a 50 page chance from me) due to the book's, at times, lyrical and surreal beauty, I felt violated by so much ugliness in the book's second half. These methods open postmodern questions of what constitutes truth and reality. What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? It took me an entire month to read this novel because of its pretentious, self-reflexive moments that reminded me of the intellectual masturbation of a writer in the midst of graduate school. In Nights at the Circus Angela Carter creates a raunchy, raucous Cockney voice for her heroine Fevvers, and takes us back to the turn of the nineteenth century. And I, for one, would rather believe. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. The main characters of this fiction, fantasy story are Sophie Fevvers, Jack Walser. The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr: sketches and original artwork, Sean's Red Bike by Petronella Breinburg, illustrated by Errol Lloyd, Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women's Rights, The fight for women’s rights is unfinished business, Get 3 for 2 on all British Library Fiction, All Discovering Literature: 20th century works, Why you need to protect your intellectual property, Angela Carter: fairy tales, cross-dressing and the mercurial slipperiness of identity, Bad-good girls, beasts, rogues and other creatures: Angela Carter and the influence of fairy tales, Galleries, Reading Rooms, shop and catering opening times vary. It is as hard to capture the essence of her tone and her outlook as it is to exactly pin down all of her insightful commentary, as wrapped up in velvet and hidden by veils of fairy dust as they can be. If ever a story defied categorisation and deconstruction, here it sits! As a teenager she battled anorexia. Nights at the Circus is an endlessly original, entirely absorbing magical realism saturated with ambience. The story itself is fantastic: Jack, a young journalist, decides to do a story on a mysterious half-woman/half-swan trapeze artist (Sophie/Fevvers). As in her previous works, Carter plays with many literary aspects and dissects the traditional fairy talestructure.Wikipedia) More about this book: Tall Tales and Brief Lives: Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus . Part One of the book takes the form of an interview Fevvers gives to the American journalist Jack Walser, who subsequently joins the troupe – Colonel Kearney’s Circus – out of love and curiosity; from there, the book moves into travels across 19th-century Europe, St Petersburg and Siberia. The breadth of characters and otherwise passed-over stories-within-stories rivals Pynchon, as does the way in which both interrogate reality in earnest through application of elaborate systems of meaning in which ev. I surrender utterly to the allure of Fevvers; I believed every wonderful word of her story and every page of it yielded some new pleasure to my feminist consciousness. At just over 45 minutes Nights at the Circus feels like a very brief show. At times it was full of hauntingly beautiful imagery and lyricism, but at other times it was just poorly written. On the level of prose, this is as extravagantly creative and exuberant as it could possibly be. The portrayal of a group of sex-workers (and ridicule of their would-be self-appointed saviours) seemed particularly well-observed to me. Later, during the circus show, the nerdy kid, minus his glasses and looking much less nerdy, appeared in the ring and proceeded to do an ac. Truly a folk tale for grown-ups, the character of Fevvers will linger for a long time after you have finished turning the pages. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of 295 pages and is available in Paperback format. Jack becomes smitten with Fevvers and decides to join the circus so he can be with her. Take the bawdiness and vocabulary of Music Hall, add a dash of Classics, a soupcon of feminism, give it a good shake and season with a touch of je ne sais quoi and you have "Nights at the Circus". Call it, an ad. Carter's style echoes Fevvers' fetid dressing room, cluttered with nonchalently veiled and camouflaged magical amulets, almost animate animal-like lingerie intimidating to the timid male guest (snaky stockings seem to threaten and discomfort him), the debris of the star's ablutions and voracious consumption of decidedly local and humble refreshments such as eel pie and sugar-loaded tea: it is a divine, diabolical, vernacular, esoteric, ingenious, streetwise, starry-eyed, audaciously feminine mess. The quality of the book was uneven. Update - A story about stories and illusion. ! That's the plot. Nights at the Circus incorporates multiple categories of fiction, including postmodernism, magical realism, and postfeminism. I fear a reader wedded to character arcs and sound narrative structure might struggle with this - however, the novel’s symbols and themes are brilliantly coher. I have a feeling it was because I came so en-rapt in Sophie's tale I forgot all else. I fear a reader wedded to character arcs and sound narrative structure might struggle with this - however, the novel’s symbols and themes are brilliantly coherent. Take the bawdiness and vocabulary of Music Hall, add a dash of Classics, a soupcon of feminism, give it a good shake and season with a touch of je ne sais quoi and you have "Nights at the Circus". Carter breathes startling new life into the very well-trodden circus-as-metaphor trope. And just like his fantasia, this one is one irrational mess that impresses but--perhaps like the nature of the circus acts themselves--doesn't remain with the spectator long after the show is all done. Nights at the Circus is divided into three sections. I really enjoyed this book. Jack becomes smitten with Fevvers and decides to join the circus so he can be with her. In 2006, the novel was adapted for the stage, and in 2012, it was named the best ever winner of the James Tait Black; a prize that dates back to 1919. The first section is set in London in 1899, just before the turn of the century. Get this from a library! Nights at the Circus is full of stories, its basic structure regularly opening out to offer us the potted biographies of minor characters. Literally, fabulous. It was obvious that he would have taken my friend apart in less than 20 seconds. She has wings, which fully spread during her adolescence. For me the novel has a similar sort of philosophising focus as Candide and Rasselas (and the even same charming magic realism - as if it was a late-20th-century riposte to those Age of Reason texts). Noté /5. 1 talking about this. It's enormous, majestic, confounding even as fascinating, unwieldy with determination to fill in every backstory that would otherwise go overlooked, poised at the edge of the 20th century and so encompassing all of its bitter disillusion. The writer Sarah Waters called it Carter’s ‘masterpiece … the most engaging and accessible of her fictions’. Noté /5. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2013-05-10 20:26:43 Bookplateleaf 0002 … Her, (Spoilers, eh) In the same fantastical circuit as the 1001 Arabian Nights, it is set in a real palette of colors--it's like seeing a Toulouse Lautrec through tears. Start by marking “Nights at the Circus” as Want to Read: Error rating book. When I was 13 years old, I went to a traveling circus with a friend who was a year older than I and his family. You can only define the future perfect by the present imperfect, and the present, in which, inevitably, we all live, always seems imperfect to somebody" (239). Prose - 5 Awesome and fascinating. Raised in Yorkshire and London by middle-class parents, Carter began writing in the 1960s, publishing her first novel while still an undergraduate at … Nights At The Circus de Carter, Angela sur AbeBooks.fr - ISBN 10 : 0099388618 - ISBN 13 : 9780099388616 - Vintage Classics - 1994 - Couverture souple We never find out the veracity of her claims, but it doesn't matter. Why not take a few moments to tell us what you think of our website? Sometimes I wish Angela Carter wouldn't subject her readers to passages like this one: "Third place, how will you recognize "perfection" when you see it? This was just stunning. Nights at the Circus is the penultimate novel by Angela Carter; published in 1984, it marked a change of direction in her work. Though it won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the book had a mixed reception, and Carter wrote only one more novel, Wise Children (1991). The whole time I was reading it, I called it my albatross. Nights at the Circus de Carter, Angela sur AbeBooks.fr - ISBN 10 : 0140077030 - ISBN 13 : 9780140077032 - Penguin Books - 1986 - Couverture souple Her earthy, body based, yet highly intellectual feminism is my favorite. I really enjoyed this book. Melissa read Nights At The Circus and loved it; it wouldn't be on our site if she didn't recommend it. You might know comedian Colin Jost from his work as the co-anchor of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, or perhaps you know him as Scarlett... Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe's capitals, part swan...or all fake? We’d love your help. ‘Night’s at the Circus’ is too clever by half, too bad it knows it. As with much of Carter’s work, there is a complex, committed feminism at the heart of the book, particularly in the way Lizzie, adoptive mother to the main protagonist Sophie Fevvers, steers her charge away from the patriarchal structures of marriage. First published in 1984, the book is about an American journalist determined to find out whether … Fevvers is a six-foot-two Cockney trapeze artist who claims to have hatched from an egg and grown wings on reaching puberty. There is a woman trapeze artist that may be a swan, a tiger attack, and a train derailment. The whole clock that strikes midnight continuously, the speculations about the wings being "fake" all fits into the world of the brothels, houses of horror and circuses and creates this fantastical almost-realist picture (which of course eventually Carter stunningly rips to shreds, leaving the reader feeling suddenly naked...that is a warning rather than a spoiler). Ph.D - Writes your Essay Work!! Did I say this book is good? If only I actually cared about what she was saying. Nights at the Circus. This mode of writing – which was also practised at this time by writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Carter’s friend Salman Rushdie – uses imaginative, fantastical scenarios as a means of discussing stark social and political issues. cause i sorta need it for my book report, and what is the theme?thanks, See all 5 questions about Nights at the Circus…, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, Nights at the Circus | Angela Carter | 5 sparkling stars, This Just In: ‘SNL’ Star Colin Jost Is Seriously Bookish. Nights at the Circus Angela Carter No preview available - 2003. The first edition of the novel was published in September 27th 1984, and was written by Angela Carter. From there, she was taken in by Lizzie and raised among the women at the brothel. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. “The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.”, “Out of the frying pan into the fire! When we walked in, we passed a somewhat nerdy teenage kid who was wearing glasses and was sitting on a railing. On the level of prose, this is as extravagantly creative and exuberant as it. The context of the circus – with all of its apparatus of entertaining deceit – serves Carter as a means of commenting on the similar tricks involved in writing fiction. by Penguin Books. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature. It's wildly imaginative and has a great tone - the book combines the unrestrained fantastic elements of a childrens book with a very adult approach, so that a brothel full of freaks or a man with a head injury being kept drugged on amanita-laced urine by a pedaristic confidence trickster is presented no less whimsically than a group of educated apes negotiating business contracts with a man dressed as Uncle Sam through the intercessions of a clairvoyant pig (which is not to suggest that the book doesn't take many dark turns). This book is good! When I read Angela Carter, I imagine her as the literary grandmother to someone like, In typical Angela Carter fashion, "Nights at the Circus" appeals to our baser human instincts by attempting to shock us with freaks, incest, cannibalism, and excrement. The portrayal of a group of sex-workers (and ridicule of their would-be self-appointed saviours) seemed particularly well-observed to me. But by then, I had to finish it. On the level of the symbolic, fill yer boots. Is this Angela Carter's epic? The whole clock that strikes midnight continuously, the speculations about the wings being "fake" all fits into the world of the brothels, houses of horror and circuses and creates this fantastical almost-realist picture (which of course eventually Carter stunningly rips to shreds, leaving the reader feeling suddenl. Refresh and try again. Call it, an adult Lewis Carroll. No different!”, James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction (1984), British Fantasy Award Nominee for Best Novel (1985), hi guys could anyone tell me a little something about this author? Magic is real; realism magic. Truly a folk tale for grown-ups, the character of Fevvers will linger for a long time after you have finished turning the pages. 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