Reviews

• A glimpse into a very different world

  A story of hardships beyond all we could possibly imagine, it made me reassess my own perceived troubles and recognise my privileged life.. Not an easy read, but an important one.

• <b>Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity</b> was a simply wonderful work of narrative non fiction and I am not the least bit surprised it won numerous awards. Author Katherine Boo is a Pulitzer Prize winner and it was evident she knew this topic intimately. Her Author's Note explains the amount of research undertaken in writing this book. Over the course of several years, from 2007 through until 2011, Katherine Boo (with the assistance of various translators) worked tirelessly gathering information in an effort to understand what it was to live in the Annawadi slums. She gathered photo's, audio and videotape footage, interviewed residents, obtained official records, listened and observed. In so doing she was able to capture the people of the slums incredibly well. Almost every sentence contained a nugget of information that pulled me up short causing me to mull over the meaning and to wonder at how these people survived their lives. Of course, as per the title, very many did not survive. As I was reading I struggled to reconcile the lives of these Indian slum dwellers against the lives of the Indian people I've worked alongside for many years. The inequality between the wealthy of India and the subjects of this book seems significant. It was, in part, this inequality that Katherine Boo set out to portray. Though the writing was smooth and flowed magnificently the content made for difficult reading. These were not fictitious characters but real people and many of their experiences ranged from horrible to downright incomprehensible to me. I was taken aback by the lying and the corruption and the way these things were simply accepted as a normal part of life. The indiscriminate justice system infuriated me yet this too seemed to be accepted amongst Annawadians. This book made me thankful for my own life. It opened my eyes to the significant difficulties of Indian slum life. It's a book I would recommend every person to read and though I've now read it I feel I'm very likely to return to these pages again and am confident Katherine Boo's words will linger in my mind for many years yet. For a short book it sure packed a punch.

• Gostei bastante. Nos mostra uma realidade da qual muitas vezes não temos nenhuma ideia sobre.

• I must confess I picked this book up with some trepidation. The subtitle - "Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum" - and the cover (of my copy), a young boy sprinting up steps into bright sunlight, made me think it might be another of those. You know, those. The post-Slumdog reportage. "Yes, conditions in Indian slums are appalling. But wait! Look at the way the children run and play! The sights, the smells! The way they can still laugh, in the face of such hardship. The way they just get on with the life they've got!" (What else are they supposed to do?) "So life-affirming!" The hope of it all! "Slumdog" is a good film. And a lot of the reportage is also good, and if it's not it's generally well-meaning. But I find it all a bit discomfiting. It's human to believe in hope, but it seems to me that, as Westerners, focussing on the small hopes that slum-dwellers have might be a convenient way of deflecting our own guilt that people have to live this way. (And the likes of Amitabh Bachchan castigating "Slumdog" for focussing on a small part of Indian life might be an Indian way of doing the same thing). I thought this book might be more of the same. It wasn't. Boo is no polemicist. She's a true journalist, and she tells this story with a journalistic dispassion, making it all the more affecting. (She has a novelist's eye, though; at times, the prose is breathtaking.) The stories are set in a small slum, rather than one of the giant cities-within-a-city like Dharavi; a wise choice, as she manages to paint a picture of a whole community, almost like a small village. There are a lot of characters to keep up with, and at times it's downright confusing. But even this makes sense. After all, urban India is a confusing place, teeming with people. Despite the wonderful writing, there were times when I felt I could not go on. When I read about the disease and the filth and children being bitten by rats as they slept. The fungus "like butterfly wings" that grows on feet in the monsoon season. The exploitation and corruption, the abuse of slum-dwellers by the authorities, the abuse of slum children by their own families. The unsolved murders and streets-sweepers left to die on the pavements, the infanticide and the many suicides. And the hope - what there is of it - is almost the worst. That a family, pursued by a rotten judicial system, might not go to prison for a crime they did not commit. That one slum-dweller might, just possibly, scramble over others and into a very slightly less hardscrabble life. I cried again and again. I became very angry. Occasionally, I laughed out loud. At times I was so scared for the characters that I felt ill with it. And when I had finished, I thought about them all for a long time, and wondered what they are doing now, the ones that survived. Because, of course, there's no story-book ending. Jamal does not win his millions. He doesn't get his Latika. The story might end, but life in the slum staggers and claws and bites and struggles on. The people of the slum do questionable things - sometimes terrible things - to survive. But I think there is hope. They also do good things. That people forced to live like this could ever be decent, live by any kind of moral code, gives one hope of a sort.

• Having been to India and been able to immerse myself a bit (compared to the author) into the lives of people there, I can only say BRAVO for Katherine Boo. Her descriptions are painstakingly-rendered and truthful, her characters utterly real (because they are/were real!!!). Often times journalists who attempt to create a novel from real-life experiences, fail miserably. The book ends up being neither fact nor fiction. Katherine Boo has accomplished the difficult feat of presenting truth as truth, and in a captivating, engaging way. Her commitment to cultural sensitivity is most admirable.

• Buon libro. Nell'ultimo capitolo l'autrice descrive il lavoro che ha fatto negli slum di Mumbay, le storie che racconta sono di personaggi veri coi loro nomi, un impegno durato più di tre anni a intervistare, confrontare, esaminare documenti, vivere la realtà indiana. Le sue esperienze precedenti erano trai i poveri e gli emarginati di Washington e New York, poi il matrimonio con un indiano l'ha portata a voler vivere la realtà delle shanty town dell'India. Si legge con partecipazione ma senza il coinvolgimento traditore degli scrittori alla De Amicis; l'autrice suscita e mantiene vivo l'interesse a seguire la vita di questi gruppi di famiglie, persone, ragazzini, indù e mussulmani, senza bisogno di emozioni empatiche e commozioni indotte da immagini e parole di commiserazione e dolore. Per chi si appresti a recarsi in India è un must assoluto, ti apre alla conoscenza della realtà del Paese, politica, giudiziaria, sociale, religiosa e non per questo è una guida turistica. Non vi farà piangere, ma vi consentirà di conoscere.

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