Review by New York Times Review
In "The Drowned and the Saved," Primo Levi describes an experience that fatally undermined many of his fellow condemned at Auschwitz. Entering the death camp, he had hoped, he wrote, "at least for the solidarity of one's companions in misfortune." Instead, there were "a thousand sealed-off monads, and between them a desperate covert and continuous struggle." This was what Levi called the "Gray Zone," where the "network of human relationships" "could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors," and where "the enemy was all around but also inside." It may seem grotesquely inappropriate to recall Levi's struggles for survival in a Nazi camp while thinking of the apparently self-reliant individualists of a slum called Annawadi near Mumbai's airport - the setting of Katherine Boo's extraordinary first book, which describes a few months in the life of a young garbage trader, Abdul, and his friends and family. After all, these plucky "slumdogs" may be - in at least one recent fantasy - India's next millionaires, part of the lucky 1 percent able to savor the five-star hotels that loom over Annawadi. Certainly, as noted by Boo - a staff writer at The New Yorker who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000, when she was a journalist at The Washington Post - they are not considered poor by "official" Indian benchmarks; they are "among roughly 100 million Indians freed from poverty since 1991," when the central government "embraced economic liberalization," "part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism," in which a self-propelling economic system is geared to reward motivated and resourceful individuals with personal wealth. Indeed, hope is a more common intoxicant in Annawadi than the discarded bottles of Eraz-ex (the Indian equivalent of Wite-Out) inhaled by Abdul's scavenger friends. The slum dwellers speak "of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past" Yet, as Boo details, "for every two people in Annawadi inching up, there was one in a catastrophic plunge." Many of the slum dwellers, including Abdul, gain their sense of upward mobility by contrasting their lot with that of their less fortunate neighbors, "miserable souls" who "trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner" or "ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake's edge." Migrants fleeing a crisis-ridden agricultural sector cause an oversupply of cheap labor in Mumbai, so the boy whose hand is sliced off by a shredding machine turns, "with his blood-spurting stump," to assure his boss that he won't report the accident. A 2-year-old girl drowns suspiciously in a pail, and a father empties a pot of boiling lentils over his sick baby. As Boo explains, "sickly children of both sexes were sometimes done away with, because of the ruinous cost of their care." "Young girls in the slums," she adds, "died all the time under dubious circumstances, since most slum families couldn't afford the sonograms that allowed wealthier families to dispose of their female liabilities before birth." Adults, too, drop like flies. One of Abdul's friends ends up as a corpse with his eyes gouged out. injured men bleed to death, unattended, by the road to the airport. Maggots breed in the infected sores of the scavengers Boo hangs out with. "Gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die." These continual human losses are taken mostly in a matter-of-fact way in Annawadi. For Abdul and his friends have "accepted the basic truths: that in a modernizing, increasingly prosperous city, their lives were embarrassments best confined to small spaces, and their deaths would matter not at all." Those deaths might even get the survivors into trouble. So when the one-legged Fatima, Abdul's querulous neighbor, sets herself on fire, a small crowd gathers but does nothing: "The adults drifted back to their dinners, while a few boys waited to see if Fatima's face would come off." Trying to take Fatima to the hospital, her husband finds himself shunned by autorickshaw drivers, who are worried about "the potential damage to seat covers." As for the nearby policemen, they embody pure terror in the eyes of Annawadians. They won't balk at raping a homeless girl, and would "gladly blow their noses in your last piece of bread." The police actually encourage Fatima to blame Abdul's family so that officers can extort money from them. A government officer threatens to collect false witness statements unless she is paid off. Neither India's hollowed-out democracy nor its mean-minded new capitalism, which cannot do without a helot class, seems able to relieve this social-Darwinist brutishness. Far from being a testimony to the audacity of hope, the dauntless human spirit and that kind of thing, Annawadi turns out to be a gray zone whose atomized residents want nothing more than, in Primo Levi's words, "to preserve and consolidate" their "established privilege vis-à-vis those without privilege." Even those who are relatively fortunate, Boo writes, "improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people." Describing this undercity blood sport, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" (the ironic title is taken from the "Beautiful Forever" advertisements for Italianate floor tiles that hide Annawadi from view) does not descend into a catalog of atrocity - one that a defensive Indian nationalist might dismiss as a drain inspector's report. The product of prolonged and risky self-exposure to Annawadi, the book's narrative stitches, with much skillfully unspoken analysis, some carefully researched individual lives. Its considerable literary power is also derived from Boo's soberly elegant prose, which only occasionally reaches for exuberant neologism ("Glimmerglass Hyatt") and bright metaphor ("Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas"). But "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" is, above all, a moral inquiry in the great tradition of Oscar Lewis and Michael Harrington. As Boo explains in an author's note, the spectacle of Mumbai's "profound and juxtaposed inequality" provoked a line of questioning: "What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government's economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? . . . Why don't more of our unequal societies implode?" Her eye is as shrewdly trained on the essential facts of politics and commerce as on the intimate, the familial and, indeed, the monstrously absurd: the college-going girl who struggles to figure out "Mrs. Dalloway" while her closest friend, about to be forced into an arranged marriage, consumes rat poison, and dies (though not before the doctors attending her extort 5,000 rupees, or $100, from her parents). You wonder, intermittently, about the book's omniscient narrator. Perhaps wisely, Boo has absented herself from her narrative. The story of how a white American journalist overcame the suspicion of her subjects (and the outright hostility of the police), or dealt with the many ethical conundrums created by close contact between the first and fourth worlds, belongs to another book. Instead of the faux-naïf explainer or the intrepid adventurer in Asian badlands, you get a reflective sensibility, subtly informing every page with previous experiences of deprivation and striving, and a gentle skepticism about ideological claims. Boo can see how democracy, routinely lauded in the West as India's great advantage over authoritarian China, can be turned into yet another insider network of patronage in which the powerful flourish: how periodic elections can be absorbed into "a national game of make-believe, in which many of India's old problems - poverty, disease, illiteracy, child labor - were being aggressively addressed," even as "exploitation of the weak by the less weak continued with minimal interference." She can also perceive why many welloff Indians have grown impatient with, even contemptuous of, democracy and, like their counterparts elsewhere, want to eliminate rather than enhance the socialwelfarist obligations of government. For these Indians, Boo points out, "private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way." Boo deftly steers clear of the many banal notions about corruption in India unleashed recently by a quasi-Gandhian protest movement supported by affluent Indians. She shows how corruption, far from being a malignant external growth, is integral to India's political, economic and social system. "Among powerful Indians," she writes, "the distribution of opportunity was typically an insider trade." And for the "poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained." FULLY inhabiting India's troubled present, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" can only hint at a less oppressive past - a "peaceful age" that to Abdul sounds like something out of myth, a time when "poor people had accepted the fates that their respective gods had written on their foreheads, and in turn treated one another more kindly." This may seem too romantic a picture of Oriental fatalism. It is true, nevertheless, that migrants from the rural hinterland, drawn to Mumbai for hundreds of years - as long as the city, as constructed by British free-traders and their native collaborators, has existed - were never as desolate and defenseless as they are now. So much of the city's most popular exports - cinema and music - originated in the past from the attempt by rural migrants to recreate, in the big alienating city, the traditions of their lost community. But unlike Mumbai's previous generation of migrants, Annawadians cannot have any soothing dreams of a return to village life and its communal solidarities. Boo makes this clear in a brisk digression to a rural region of western India where thousands of farmers, forced out of a subsistence economy into a globalized one, have killed themselves in the previous decade. Here, many citizens have not only "stopped believing the government's promises about improving their fortunes." As Boo explains: "Deprived of their land and historical livelihoods by large-scale corporate and government modernization projects, they'd helped revive a 40-yearold movement of Maoist revolutionaries. Employing land mines, rocket launchers, nail bombs and guns against capitalism and the Indian state, the guerrillas were now at work in roughly one-third of India's 627 districts." The Maoists seem a weirdly anachronistic intrusion in the "great success narrative of capitalism." But for them, as much as for the corporations and governments dispossessing the Indians in the countryside, life in the contemporary world has turned into a zero-sum game. Not surprisingly, Abdul's mother, too, has "raised her son for a modern age of ruthless competition. In this age, some people rose and some people fell, and ever since he was little, she'd made him understand that he had to rise." As Boo shows in wrenching detail, however, Abdul's training turns out to be incomplete. Falsely accused of murdering his neighbor, and fully exposed to a "malign" justice system, Abdul learns that "his mother hadn't prepared him for what it felt like, falling alone." The ostensible "rise" of India has attracted its share of literary and journalistic buccaneers in recent years. Unlike China (unlovably aloof, even menacing), India, with its eager English speakers and periodic elections, is easier to slot into a Western narrative of progress. Thus, most recent books about the country, un-selfconsciously suffused with the clichés of the age, speak of how free-market capitalism has ignited a general explosion of opportunity, fostering hope among the most destitute of Indians. Boo describes what happens when opportunity accrues to the already privileged in the age of globalization, governments remain dysfunctional and corrupt, and, with most citizens locked into a fantasy of personal wealth and consumption, hope, too, is privatized, sundered from any notions of collective well-being. In this sense, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" is not just about India's delusory new culture of aspiration. For as Boo writes, "what was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too" - in Nairobi and Santiago, Washington and New York. "In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament." "The poor," she explains further, "blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly." Meanwhile, only "the faintest ripple" is created "in the fabric of the society at large," for in places like Mumbai, "the gates of the rich . . . remained unbreached, . . . the poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace." In its own quiet way, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" disturbs this peace more effectively than many works of polemic and theory. Transcending its geographical setting, the book also provides a bracing antidote to the ideological opiates of recent decades - those that made the worldwide proliferation of gray zones appear part of a "great success narrative." 'For every two people in Annawadi inching up,' Boo writes, 'there was one in a catastrophic plunge.' Pankaj Mishra's new book, "From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia," will be published in August.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 5, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
While the distance between rich and poor is growing in the U.S., the gap between the haves and have-nots in India is staggering to behold. This first book by a New Yorker staff writer (and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post) jolts the reader's consciousness with the opposing realities of poverty and wealth in a searing visit to the Annawaldi settlement, a flimflam slum that has recently sprung up in the western suburbs of the gigantic city of Mumbai, perched tentatively along the modern highway leading to the airport and almost within a stone's throw of new, luxurious hotels. We first meet Abdul, whose daily grind is to collect trash and sell it; in doing so, he has lifted his large family above subsistence. Boo takes us all around the community, introducing us to a slew of disadvantaged individuals who, nevertheless, draw on their inner strength to not only face the dreary day but also ponder a day to come that will, perhaps, be a little brighter. Sympathetic yet objective and eloquently rendered.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A Mumbai slum offers rare insight into the lives and socioeconomic and political realities for some of the disadvantaged riding the coattails (or not) of India's economic miracle in this deeply researched and brilliantly written account by New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Boo. Divided into four parts, the narrative brings vividly to the page life as it is led today in Annawadi, a squalid and overcrowded migrant settlement of some 3,000 people squatting since 1991 on a half-acre of land owned by the Sahar International Airport. (Boo derives her title from a richly ironic real-world image: a brightly colored ad for floor tiles repeating "Beautiful Forever" across a wall shutting out Annawadi from the view of travelers leaving the airport.) Among her subjects is the fascinating Abdul, a sensitive and cautiously hopeful Muslim teenager tirelessly trading in the trash paid for by recycling firms. Crucially, Boo's commanding ability to convey an interior world comes balanced by concern for the structural realities of India's economic liberalization (begun the same year as Annawadi's settlement), and her account excels at integrating the party politics and policy strategies behind eruptions of deep-seated religious, caste, and gender divides. Boo's rigorous inquiry and transcendent prose leave an indelible impression of human beings behind the shibboleths of the New India. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Boo's (The New Yorker) first book. She takes a look at the stark lives of the inhabitants of Annawadi, a slum across from Mumbai's Sahar Airport, to reveal the wrenching inequality and urban poverty still endemic in India's democracy. Using recorded and videotaped conversations, interviews, documents, and the assistance of interlocutors, Boo profiles the lives of some of the slum dwellers from November 2007 to March 2011. There is Abdul, a young adult scavenger with a profitable trade in recyclables. The one-legged Fatima's home is divided from Abdul's by merely a sheet. Readers follow the treacherous paths of these and other lives. A fateful chain of events leads to a criminal case against Abdul and his family. Boo presents glimpses of the corrupt police who feed on those without political power or education. She claims she witnessed most of the events described in the book. VERDICT A tour de force, this book is powerful yet far from harrowing. Highly recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, 8/21/11.]-Ravi Shenoy, Naperville P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
New Yorker staff writer Boo creates an intimate, unforgettable portrait of India's urban poor. Mumbai's sparkling new airport and surrounding luxury hotels welcome visitors to the globalized, privatized, competitive India. Across the highway, on top of tons of garbage and next to a vast pool of sewage, lies the slum of Annawadi, one of many such places that house the millions of poor of Mumbai. For more than three years, Boo lived among and learned from the residents, observing their struggles and quarrels, listening to their dreams and despair, recording it all. She came away with a detailed portrait of individuals daring to aspire but too often denied a chance--their lives viewed as an embarrassment to the modernized wealthy. The author poignantly details these many lives: Abdul, a quiet buyer of recyclable trash who wished for nothing more than what he had; Zehrunisa, Abdul's mother, a Muslim matriarch among hostile Hindu neighbors; Asha, the ambitious slum leader who used her connections and body in a vain attempt to escape from Annawadi; Manju, her beautiful, intelligent daughter whose hopes laid in the new India of opportunity; Sunil, the master scavenger, a little boy who would not grow; Meena, who drank rat poison rather than become a teenage bride in a remote village; Kalu, the charming garbage thief who was murdered and left by the side of the road. Boo brilliantly brings to life the residents of Annawadi, allowing the reader to know them and admire the fierce intelligence that allows them to survive in a world not made for them. The best book yet written on India in the throes of a brutal transition.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
