Author photo - Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
By CHARLES McGRATH - New York Times --Published: February 8, 2012
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.
Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The New York Times who has written extensively about India, wrote in an e-mail message that “Beautiful Forevers” is “the best piece of reporting to come out of India in a half century at least” and compared it to another groundbreaking book about poverty, George Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier.”
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