Ellen Bryson (1) (1949–)

I give author Bryson props for an interesting premise - life inside P.T. Barnum's American Museum, as seen through the eyes of the title character, billed as The World's Thinnest Man. And clearly Bryson has researched her topic with care. (However, see "An Aside" below for some errors.)

That said, I found Bartholomew Fortuno's story less than compelling. Bryson has written from the first-person viewpoint of Fortuno, and it's hard to warm to his prissy and often superior narrative voice. Bryson's descriptive passages are clunky at times and the characters of Fortuno's fellow Curiosities at the Museum feel cursory and underdeveloped.

The plot is fairly straightforward: a mysterious new female Curiosity, Iell Adams, arrives at the American Museum and Fortuno becomes embroiled, heart and mind, in finding out more about her. Fortuno spends a lot of the book hurrying to assignations with Iell (as well as Barnum, Mrs. Barnum and others), but is usually summarily dismissed before anything really happens. By the fifth or sixth time this occurred, I'd lost interest, as I'd already figured out the big mystery about Iell. I almost stopped reading several times as the book grew more and more tedious, but I finished it just to make sure I was right about the Big Plot Reveal (and I was).

(An Aside: In spite of Bryson's research, she made two errors I found irritating.

1) Her characters are constantly writing with quills, which had been largely replaced by mass-produced steel pens by the early 1860s.

2) Fortuno has a pet in the form of a caged white-breasted nuthatch which "sings like an angel." Unfortunately, white-breasted nuthatches don't really "sing" - their birdsong is a single note repeated quickly - more of a bleating sound than a song.

Quibbles, to be sure, but both these points would have been easy to research. God is in the details, you know.)… (mere)

Come one, come all, step right up and pay your nickel to meet the freaks in Ellen Bryson's book "The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno: A Novel" wherein she brings alive the world of P.T. Barnum's American Museum through the eyes of the title character Bartholomew 'Barthy’ Fortuno A.K.A. The World's Thinnest Man. The book opens with the birds-eye view of its protagonist observing the bustle of post-Civil War New York City from his perch on the fourth floor of the American Museum where he had resided for nearly a decade remarking, “In fact, whenever possible, I avoided leaving Barnum’s Museum at all. A man like me had no business in the wider world. Let the outside world come to me and pay to do it.” Like a special bird Fortuno is happy to sing for his supper in a gilded cage, yet moments later he will observe the arrival of a stranger whose presence will ignite the transformative events of the story. Most of Bryson’s central characters are members of Barnum’s cast of human curiosities including a fat lady, a strong man and a giantess. All of them work and reside at Barnum’s American Museum which was a catch-all cultural center covering interests high and low, part-circus, part-theatre, and part-museum, being both educational and full of hokum. In addition to the famous showman Phineas Taylor Barnum, real-life people featured in the story include his wife Charity Barnum and the famed Civil War photographer Mathew Brady. Bryson creates a mood of magical realism in the opening half of her novel, only to turn prosaic in the concluding sections, which momentarily disappoints. This reality and truthfulness is ultimately consistent with the treatment of her characters, whose uniqueness becomes a central theme of the story. In the end Bryson’s prose, which is anything but prosaic itself, illuminates the very concept of what makes a person unique.… (mere)

This book didn't go over so well for me. I was drawn to and loved the timeframe (directly following Lincoln's assassination), and I liked getting some insight into Barnum's museum, but as a whole, the story line was mundane. The characters were a little peculiar, as one would expect in the atmosphere of "freaks and oddities," but there was no depth to anybody. All-in-all, my experience at the museum was somewhat disappointing, but I must give it props for depicting the time period in an interesting way. I learned a few things, and I like that. (2.75/5)

Originally posted on: Thoughts of Joy… (mere)