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Unlike many journalists Katherine Boo aspires to invisibility. She hates publicity and talks about herself with about as much ease as someone trying to wriggle from a thicket — stopping, pausing, retracing her sentences and looking for a better way out. In her new book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” the word “I” doesn’t appear until an author’s note on page 247, and by then it’s a little jarring.
One result is that “Beautiful Forevers,”a nonfiction account of the 3,000 or so people who live in Annawadi, a “sumpy plug of slum” on the outskirts of the Mumbai airport, reads almost like a novel: a true-life version of “Slumdog Millionaire” without the Bollywood ending. The characters include various thieves and Dumpster divers; the neighborhood ward boss and her prized daughter, who is earning a college degree by rote, memorizing word for word the plots of “Mrs. Dalloway” and “The Way of the World”; and a man who makes a living of sorts by racing a carriage drawn by horses painted to look like zebras. The plot turns on a seemingly petty feud in which a disgruntled woman sets herself on fire and then blames her neighbors, two of whom wind up jail, where they are brazenly extorted by a legal system that thrives on corruption.
Katherine Boo on Her Book 'Behind the Beautiful Forevers' - NYTimes.com
Article Source: The New York Times
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For as long as she has been a writer, Ms. Boo has only wanted to write about the poor and the disadvantaged. In 2000, while at The Washington Post, she won a Pulitzer Prize for a series about the mistreatment of the mentally retarded in the Washington area. “I think I grew up with a healthy respect for volatility, all the things you can’t control,” she said. “And I became aware of the ways in which people who write about the disadvantaged often underestimate its psychological contours, the uncertainty — economic or whatever.”
Another thing that makes her uncomfortable is policy wonkery, and by design “Beautiful Forevers,” a book as depressing as it is memorable, has no summing-up chapter full of recommendations. “I respect the division of labor,” she said. “My job is to lay it out clearly, not to give my policy prescriptions.” She added: “Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what’s happening to people who have none.”
Started reading this yesterday, and already, I am moved to tears. A must read.
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#1 - Thu Feb 9, 2012 8:13 AM ESTBoo, always a champion par excellence of social justice, leaves us often with a crumb or more of hope.
Clipping to Books
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