This is what I knew about Angela Carter when I picked up "Nights at the Circus" from the used bookstore: she was a feminist writer.
That in no way prepared me for the experience of reading "Nights at the Circus". /Reading/ "Nights at the Circus" doesn't feel like it prepared me for reading "Nights at the Circus".
In the best way.
The life story of a winged trapeze artist as told to a skeptically intrigued American journalist, seguing into the breaking of the day-to-day routine of the circus and its residents, which becomes the destruction of the circus and the journey of Fevvers and her colleagues when lost in Siberia.
It's ... a road novel? Sort of? A post-modern road novel reminiscent of 17th and 18th century picaresque fiction? Dickensian magical realism colliding with Russian modernism? It reminds me of so many things and is like none of them. It's a hypnotic journey where I kept going "wait, what? what? really?" much like the journalist Jack Walser in the first part of the novel when Fevvers is recounting her winged foundling childhood in a brothel.
There's a section that alternates between third and first person in the /same paragraph/ and while I noticed it, it never threw me off. How did she DO that?
I see she died quite young, in her 50s, so I have a finite bibliography to explore, and I will be exploring it to the best of my abilities. It seems that "Nights at the Circus" was her penultimate novel, which explains how it was so masterful in its strangeness. I can't wait to put together pieces of the development that lead to such a singular work.
