Josser: The Secret Life of a Circus Girl - Hardcover

Nell Stroud

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316848395 ISBN 13: 9780316848398

Publisher: LITTLE BROWN, 1999

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Nell Stroud was born in Oxford in 1973. She studied English Literature at the university before leaving to join the circus. This is her first book.

From Library Journal:

In 1991, after her mother suffered a catastrophic head injury, the 18-year-old Stroud joined a series of traveling circuses in America, England, and Germany and embarked on an archetypal journey that lasted, on and off, until 1998. She thus became a "josser," in circus slang, an outsider who enters this curiously private and familial world but is neither born nor bred into it. This bittersweet journal of the circus and its life, traditions, and habits is a singularly beautiful and haunting work. In an alternately sparse and lyrical style, the Oxford-educated Stroud documents the arduous life, increasingly insurmountable financial odds, hostility from public interest groups, relationships with both animals and people, and the artistic and personal joys shared among this most eccentric and unique tribe. Her ability to turn this private and arcane domain inside out and reveal its secrets is superb. What Toni Bentley (Winter Season, LJ 8/82) did for ballerinas and Ken Dryden (The Game, LJ 6/15/83) did for hockey goalies, Stroud does stunningly for circus artists. An early season favorite for all the best nonfiction book lists.DBarry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: LITTLE BROWN
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0316848395
• ISBN 13: 9780316848398
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 318