A fascinating novel about circus life.
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Book Description
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"I know that when I read and loved CAT MAN back in 1955, it was because Hoagland himself had done what I, and many I knew, longed to do. He had gone off and worked with a circus . . . . Here was a book that could not have been imagined. It had to have been lived."--Roger Sale
"It makes the circus world itself as startling and brutal as the sudden roar of a lion at five yards...descriptions that top anything of its kind in fiction."--Time
"It makes the circus world itself as startling and brutal as the sudden roar of a lion at five yards...descriptions that top anything of its kind in fiction."--Time
"Brillant impression of cirus life...a born writer."--The New York Times
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Back Cover
Fiddler, an intelligent young man, has joined the circus because he is broke. He becomes the Cat Man, keeper of the big cats, and his hands have the scars to prove it. The cats: the panther, the jaguar, the cheetah, the tigers, the enormous lazy male lion named Joe, and Rita, the killer leopard, all become intriguing characters in their own right, brilliantly populating the novel along with their freakish human cohorts, who include the animal department head, the train crew, the seat department, the prop men, the winos, and the townies. Etched in exquisite detail, Cat Man is a crystalline portal into the bizarre and fascinating world beneath the big top.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Forgotten Masterpiece Reprinted,
By
This review is from: Cat Man: A Novel (Paperback)
I am thrilled to see Cat Man back in print. This is a mid twentieth century novel of a young man who joins a circus on an impulse and becomes obsessivley drawn to the large cats (tigers and lions). The story is paced slowly, with suspense gradually building, as the author describes the workings of a circus organization in fascinating detail. The description of the men and elephants working together in the rain to raise the big top alone is worth the price. This is the ultimate circus novel!
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cat Man,
By
This review is from: Cat Man: A Novel (Paperback)
Edward Hoagland is best known for non-fiction environmental writing, but his first book in 1955 was a novel based on his experiences in his early 20s with a traveling circus. Most circus literature is about the performers while the crew are so much background ambiance. In Cat Man, Hoagland flips the picture and foregrounds the working guys while the circus itself fade into the background. There are two types of circus workers: performers and support crew. They have separate dining halls, buses and trains: the "first train" people are the guys who put up the tents, feed the animals, run the machines - the "second train" people arrive later. The performers are highly paid rare talent while workers tend to be down and out low-paid alcoholic drifters - "winos" with missing teeth, long hair, ratty clothing and a homeless odor. Times were different back then, rougher, and Hoagland's world is a dirty, smelly, low-brow violent place. Yet, as ex-clown Stephen Brennan said, Cat Man is "the best, the truest circus novel I've ever read." The plot is almost non-existent, other than about a young drifter who runs off the join the circus, and it even lacks a chronological progression with chapters jumping back and forth in time and place. Some of the chapters would stand alone quite well as short stories, vinaigrettes. Rather it is almost entirely a character study and hyper-real detailed description of day to day life working behind the scenes in a circus. One critic in the New York Review of Books compared it to Moby-Dick because of its encyclopedic detail.
I really enjoyed the novel although at times found the prose so dense with detail and so slow in action that I would scan over sections waiting for something to happen, in particular the descriptions of the big cats. But like a war novel, it captures the essence of long periods of inactivity and sudden bursts of action, usually violent and dangerous. As realistic documentation of the rougher side of circus life Hoagland's Cat Man is a timeless classic.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Breaking the rule of "If you can't say something nice....".,
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Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Cat Man: A Novel (Paperback)
I really got sucked in by the description Amazon wrote; the book itself is a waste of time and money. It is horribly written, proceeds at a snail's pace, has little or no action, limited vocabulary, and hopefully I didn't leave out any of the good things.
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