Truth in Journalism

Truth isn't just stranger than fiction; it's far more powerful and moving. At least that's how I felt after reading Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity. Boo, formerly a Washington Post journalist and now a New Yorker staff writer, lives part of each year in Mumbai with her Indian husband. Determined to present a portrait of slum life more nuanced than that of “Slumdog Millionaire”, she spent three years in Annawadi, a squatter settlement of three thousand people crammed into and around 335 huts, located next to a lake of sewage in the shadow of the Mumbai airport and vast luxury hotels.

Boo might have chosen to write a book packed with sociological statistics and economic analysis, but instead she does something far more effective; she simply tells a story. Or rather, she lets the people she comes to know tell their own stories. She focuses on Abdul, a teenaged boy who supports his family of eleven as a garbage trader (a position which places him higher on the economic ladder than the scavengers who bring him their goods), and Asha, a thirty-nine-year-old mother whose ambition is simple: “For the overcity people who wished to exploit Annawadi, and the undercity people who wished to survive it, she wanted to be the woman-to-see”. Working within a system of byzantine politics and rampant corruption she attempts to build a better life for her daughter. A single impulsive act has a profound effect on both of these families.

Boo's book reads so much like a novel (reminded me of Dickens) that I kept having to remind myself that these were real people. Please don't be put off by the subject matter. I'm sure you will find this book as compelling, powerful; and inspiring as I did.

PS: You might enjoy this Fresh Air interview with the author.

Three From a Master

Anita Desai has been an acclaimed fiction writer for nearly fifty years, and I'm embarrassed to say that the only Desai book I have ever read is by her daughter Kiran (“The Inheritance of Loss”). So her latest book of three novellas – The Artist of Disappearance – seemed a good place to start.

The three stories, all set in India, have no characters or settings in common, but they deal in different ways with the same theme – the survival of art in a world where traditional and modern cultures clash. In each story a member of the modern community is exposed to art (and in two cases an artist) from a more rural or traditional milieu, and is forced to make decisions about its fate.

Desai lets these stories unfold slowly, painting the fascinating landscapes of rural India as she subtly fills in her characters' complexities. I liked all three stories but I was especially moved by “Translator Translated” in which a mediocre university professor finds new richness in her life when she translates a work by an obscure author she admires, but then must face the consequences when her ambition distorts her judgment.

Desai asks hard questions and gives no simple answers. Her prose is lucid, understated and a pleasure to read.

Read Any Good Sagas Lately?

Saga – not a word I use very often. The dictionary defines it as “a form of the novel in which the members or generations of a family or social group are chronicled in a long and leisurely narrative”. Originally they were Icelandic tales of heroic deeds and Viking voyages. Modern examples would include The Forsythe Saga by John Galsworthy, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, maybe even Jean Auel's Earth's Children Series.

Sea of Poppies is the first book of Amitav Ghosh's three book saga set in nineteenth century India in 1838, just prior to the Opium Wars. In the first two sections, “Land” and “River”, Ghosh assembles a cast of characters from all strata of society and threads their stories together so that in the third part, “Sea”, all are aboard, either as crew or passengers, the former slave ship Ibis as it leaves Calcutta to deliver coolies (indentured servants) to British plantations on Mauritius. 

Ghosh wraps a lot into one book. It's an historical novel, with detailed descriptions of opium processing and trade, a Dickensian tale with a cast of quirky characters, a romantic drama painted on a broad canvas, and has a lexicon all its own. On every page there were at least five words I didn't know, either because they were part of the local patois or of the vocabulary of nineteenth century sailing ships. What's a zemindary, a bandobast. a budgerow, a lascar? But somehow the meanings become clear as you keep reading, and you are swept along with the characters as they hurtle towards their destinies.

And here I must confess that, in my ongoing efforts to read as little as possible about a book before I read the book itself, I had not learned that this book was the first of a trilogy. So as the pages turned and the end neared, I couldn't figure out how Ghosh was going to resolve all the story lines. I had just about concluded that on the last page the ship would sink and all on board would perish when I finally read the back cover blurb - “the first of an epic trilogy”. And by the time I reached that last page, I would gladly have picked up book two immediately if it were available.

The Changing India

“The White Tiger”, Aravind Adiga’s first novel, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. The story begins as a letter to a Chinese premier, Wen Jiabio, who is coming to visit Bangalore, India, the present home of the protagonist, Balram Halwai. Balram proceeds to tell the Premier his life story through a series of emails written over a period of seven nights. Mr. Adiga has created a narrator with an incredibly new and exciting voice. Balram is a naïve, witty, charming but suspect narrator. Balram, the self proclaimed White Tiger, tells the Premier he is a successful “entrepreneur”, a self made man, living in Bangalore. The letters tell the amazing tale of a poor boy from a village in the “Darkness” who decides to better himself by becoming a driver to a family of rich landlords. How he accomplishes this feat is told with charming, sarcastic wit.

Early in the story we find that Balram decides he must murder his employer to escape the prison of poverty that surrounds the people of his caste. The novel is Balram’s self serving, self-analysis of all the events that lead him to murder his employer. On the one hand we sympathize with Balram and all the people who are the servants of the wealthy class in India. But the reader can’t help but feel, as this strange tale unfolds, that they are in the presence of a sociopath.

“The White Tiger” is a remarkable story, written with compelling prose, about the present social inequalities of the classes in India. It has been compared to Richard Wright’s “Native Son”, which took place in Chicago in the 1940’s. “The White Tiger” is a grim look at the class system of India and may have a great social impact on the new developing India.