Two Books about India

I recently read Pulitzer Price winning Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and reread Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, winner of the 1997 Booker Prize.  Both books are brilliantly written, yet tell stories of two very different Indias. Roy’s novel is set in Kerala, in the south of India, while Boo’s narrative nonfiction is set in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport.   Roy mixes part magical realism, part Bhagavad Gita, and her own story telling into a heady concoction of some of the most beautiful, riveting narrative I’ve ever read.  To say Boo’s book is a reporting of the facts belies her serious talent; I didn’t look at any reviews prior to reading this book and until the very end of the book I thought this was a piece of fiction, the story was so artfully told.  When I read that this was a work of nonfiction, I was even more impressed with her writing skills, and immediately distressed to know that all of the unbelievable horrors reported were in fact true.

Roy’s book feels in turn magical and other-worldly, yet is also filled with such an oppressive sense of doom from the first page that it is difficult to stop reading. Her use of an invented inter-language between the two antagonist children is especially artful. I’ve always been a sucker for great novels with children as main characters, and she is one of the best at capturing the magical yet anguished views of the world these children witness.  She has spun a tale on the powerful themes of love, betrayal, hatred, and guilt quite remarkably.  It is a masterpiece, and I hope to read it a third time.  Roy has chosen to write only one novel, and we are the poorer for it.  I’m hoping she will change her mind.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers took Boo 3 years to research, and it shows in the rich, intertwined stories of the lives of the people in this community.  She chronicles their hopes, their losses, and their daily trials with both a novelist’s pen and a reporter’s penchant for detail.  It is a book that gives us insight into the lives of people living in very different circumstances from most of us, yet she is able to describe such universal themes as hope, jealousy, and fear with both humor and insight so that each of the people come to life with full dimension. It is a book that fully exposes India’s greatest challenge, its great number of people living in absolute poverty, and makes them impossible to forget.