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Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Behind a huge sign promising a floor tile's transformative appeal (Beautiful Forever!) is the slum of Annawadi, India. Actually to call it a slum is to exaggerate its promise (just like the floor tile). It's a "makeshift settlement" of families fresh from the rural areas of India looking for their future--and picking garbage, digging stones from the road, or doing any other of the lowest of low jobs in the meantime.
The author focusses on a particular family and details their tenuous existence in a narrative story that reads like fiction. Will the family members survive? Thrive against all odds? Where does their hope come from? Where does the corruption of hope come from? What will be the future of India's growing capital democracy? Questions are raised and the listener will struggle with the answers.
The narrator's accent adds reality to the reading. Highly recommended.
Recommended by Lee O'Brien
COMMENTS
Never in a million years did I think I would like a book like this - it's just not what I read. However after hearing a lot of buzz about it I figured, well it's short so even if I don't like it I haven't invested too much time. I checked out the audiobook... I was sucked in from the first chapter! The stories captured by Katherine Boo while spending several years in Annawadi were so multifaceted it was almost hard to believe that it was non-fiction. I cannot recall the last time I read a book that contained heartbreak, hope, corruption, love, murder and humor. By the end of the book, rather than seeing these "characters" as poor slum dwellers, you see them as people.