Josser: The Secret Life of a Circus Girl - Hardcover

Stroud, Nell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316848395 ISBN 13: 9780316848398

Verlag: Little, Brown, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

A "josser" is an outsider, someone who comes to, rather than from, the circus. Nell Stroud came into the circus from university, and from selling tickets during the morning and ice- creams during the performance she worked her way up to the role of ringmistress astride her beloved horse Prince in the family-run Santus Circus, touring Britain during the 1996 and 1997 seasons. This is her account of the people she encountered and the life she led, as she pulls back the Big Top's flaps and ushers us in. Her words are, in its truest sense, a chronicle. Early on she relates how circus folk accept her fairly quickly due to her private, non-gossipy nature, and this is a quality that shines through her text. The problem is, writers are usually fantastic gossips, and a body of writing stripped of curiosity seems bare, or at best functional. Her staccato style of adjectival abstinence is that of a diarist intent on preserving fact at the expense of reflection, leaving one longing for a sentence of Proustian extravagance. This is a pity, because her subtext, of how her family life was shattered by an awful accident to her mother which seemed to impel young Nell in to the ring, is certainly there, and would add dimension to what is essentially a series of anecdotes stretched to a narrative. What is clear is that Nell Stroud has circus in her soul. Whether she has poetry is another matter. --David Vincent Josser is the powerful and moving account of Oxford-educated Nell Stroud's life in the circus. It is also the story of the people of the circus: the trapeze artists, the clowns, the high-wire acts, the grooms, the llamas, the elephants - their commitment and expertise, their hard, marginalised, miraculous lives .Following a terrible riding accident which left her mother permanently brain-damaged, Nell ran away to the circus. What she found there was a life which became more real to her than the one she left behind.

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Críticas:

A dream book (THE BOOKSELLER)

She did something we all dream of doing. Her book is a brave attempt to keep this dream alive (Dea Birkett)

Above all Stroud has written an elegy for the circus and its traditions...We are lucky to have the record of this book (INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY)

JOSSER is a paean to the circus: an impassioned plea for understanding and tolerance of its performers, as well as an obsessive account of the daily hardships of life in the Big Top (TLS)

Reseña del editor:

Josser is the powerful and moving account of Oxford-educated Nell Stroud's life in the circus. It is also the story of the people of the circus: the trapeze artists, the clowns, the high-wire acts, the grooms, the llamas, the elephants - their commitment and expertise, their hard, marginalised, miraculous lives

.Following a terrible riding accident which left her mother permanently brain-damaged, Nell ran away to the circus. What she found there was a life which became more real to her than the one she left behind. She found people who had sacrificed their lives for their art, who worked in all weathers, perfecting some of the most dramatic and beautiful acts ever seen. She found third-generation show-people who travelled around forgotten parts of Britain to bring their abstract, polished, multi-layered show to ever dwindling audiences. She found herself in an art form that soon, if we are not careful, we will lose.Whilst she has lived and worked among the circus people for several years, she is not one of them: she was not born in the circus. In their words she is a 'josser' a person in the circus from the outside world. This is her story.

'The circus does cast a spell over some people. I felt overwhelmed by it. The circus filled up existence and left room for nothing else. What was there to do?

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Little, Brown
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0316848395
• ISBN 13: 9780316848398
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320