...the butterfly effect of the harrowingly interrelated global economy described in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo's first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers...narrative nonfiction work catalogs a period of three years, beginning before the global market crash of 2008, of the Husain family, supported by a teenage trash-buyer named Abdul, and others who scrape together a living in a slum called Annawadi...depicts a modern India in the throes of embracing the Western-spun dream of unchecked capitalism and the upward mobility that supposedly comes with it... The great irony exposed within the book's finely wrought pages, however, is the lie of equality in the new age of global markets, particularly when it comes to the extremely poor ...a richly detailed tapestry of tragedy and triumph told by a seemingly omniscient narrator with an attention to detail that reads like fiction while in possession of the urgent humanity of nonfiction.
A Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of a MacArthur 'Genius' award, Boo spent more than three years exhaustively researching Behind the Beautiful Forevers, interviewing residents, visiting jails and courts, and poring over thousands of pages of public records ...this bravura work of nonfiction reads more like a novel for the gratifying completeness of its characters and the journey they travel over the course of several months in 2008, centering on the shocking death of a female resident of the slum and a young man who is falsely accused of her murder ... Hunger, disease, hazardous jobs and continual threats that the slum will be razed add to sense of impermanence and powerlessness for Annawadi denizens ... Boo brings us inside their world... Boo's writing skills are such that she can render even a dirty slum lovely, and on a deeper level, extract sublime irony from a seemingly straightforward news story.
... she[Boo] listens closely and intelligently. But the most unusual is that she teases them — or lets them tease themselves. You can feel the richness of her affection in her ironic appreciation of their oddities ... Boo, who never uses the word I and usually sticks closely to her subjects’ points of view, limits her own interpretations to a short author’s note at the end of the book ... As Boo follows them around, we see how much they are able to make of their limited and sometimes downright lousy options — and we also see the kind of daily binds that make it so difficult, when you start at the bottom, to get economic purchase ... Boo has never put forward policy suggestions or articulated political ideals, but in her American reporting she has considered the effects of specific policy initiatives on the lives of the people she writes about.
For Katherine Boo, working on this intimate account of life in Annawadi was slow, uncertain and painful in a variety of ways ... Her own absence from the encounters with her biographees, the complete and unflagging access to their thoughts and speech, the decision to adopt the novelistic approach – perhaps these, and not the depressing nature of writing about a microcosm of abject poverty within a booming India, are the greatest risks Boo takes ... a novelist's intelligence, with a shrewd eye for vanity, and an understanding that everything is informed by compromise – keeps her tale from losing its grounding in reality ... Boo, in letting go of her story, in dwelling with it relatively briefly in her book's 250 pages (in contrast to the years she spent with the slum-dwellers), allows it to resonate with us as a small classic of contemporary writing.
That Beautiful is an unforgettable true story, meticulously researched with unblinking honesty, will make Boo’s next awards well deserved ... Throughout such careful documentation, the one element missing – very much to her credit – is Boo herself. Beautiful is by no means a personal memoir; it is not a socioeconomic study on poverty or a political treatise on widespread corruption ...pure, astonishing reportage with as un-biased a lens as possible trained on specific individuals in a clearly delineated section of ever-changing Mumbai ... Boo’s presence as the silent reporter remains so discreet that she virtually disappears as you journey deeper and deeper, unable to turn away.
To accomplish this writing, Boo has performed a feat of access and candid reportage that amounts to a devotion ... Boo has dissected, as if with scalpel and forceps, the stabilizing anatomy of corruption, how greed and need...govern the survival of all in the village, especially anyone industrious, anyone who reaches for education or comes up with a scheme to make a bit of money ...Boo has sculpted her reporting and language and ingenious structuring of the revelation of events...to bring us onto the streets and into the tense minds of her characters, though their lives are far from most Western readers' experience, in their difficult corner of urban brutality.
If you are Katherine Boo, the author of the exceptional Behind the Beautiful Forevers, you also have the compassion and steel to spend three years writing about residents of a Mumbai slum, and to do so without appearing to blink ... The interconnectedness of inhabitants to one another is at once inescapable and fragile, the things that keep people together as easily as killing them ... Boo, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a staff writer for The New Yorker, is surpassingly good at slipping inside the skins of those she chronicles. She does this by way of an exquisite ear... With Behind the Beautiful Forevers, her first book, Boo puts herself on the podium with the best writers of the genre, Krakauer and Orlean, Langewiesche and Larson.
But instead of using it as a backdrop, her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, makes the metaphor the story. Why, she wonders, is this juxtaposition of wealth and poverty considered a moral problem and not a practical one? How does it persist? ... In search of an answer, Ms Boo spent nearly four years visiting Annawadi, a small slum surrounded by imposing five-star hotels near Mumbai's international terminal ...Ms Boo explores poverty, corruption and the hope of upward mobility that globalisation brings ...a staggering work of reporting and storytelling ... But it is when she explores the theme of hope that Ms Boo answers her question about how such economic disparities are sustainable. Ambition in the slums is undercut by rivalry; aspirations are met with local resentment.
She wanted to observe poverty in the midst of breakneck globalization, but it was her indelible portrait of the residents of Annawadi, not her policy musings, that kept me reading ... Boo took more than three years and three translators to chronicle the day-to-day struggles of people who 'were neither mythic nor pathetic' ... Like most of Boo's work, Behind the Beautiful Forevers reads like fiction, and sometimes you'll wish it were ... A slumdog's urge to foster priceless beauty in an everything-has-a-price world is an unexpected revelation. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is littered with such moments, and Boo lets her readers witness the blossoms poking through the dung.
