Behind the Beautiful Forevers
by Katherine Boo
Summary
Behind the Beautiful Forevers is Katherine Boo's account of life in Annawadi, a half acre slum wedged between the luxury hotels and the international airport of booming Mumbai, and it is one of the greatest feats of immersion journalism ever published. Boo spent more than three years in Annawadi, with translators, video, and thousands of pages of public records, following its residents through the sewage lake economics of the undercity: Abdul, the reticent teenage garbage sorter whose eye for recyclable trash has lifted his family almost to the slum's ceiling; Asha, the ambitious kindergarten teacher working the corruption ladder toward slumlord; her daughter Manju, trying to become the slum's first woman college graduate; and Fatima, the one legged neighbor whose self immolation, and her dying accusation against Abdul's family, drops the Husains into the Indian justice system, a machine in which police, doctors, and courts all charge for the truth. Boo writes it as pure narrative, no first person, no lectures, every scene and thought documented, and the restraint gives the book its enormous moral force: the global market's promises, the undercity's hope and treachery, and the corruption tax on the poor are all rendered as the texture of particular lives. The title comes from the wall of ads for Italianate floor tile, beautiful forever, beautiful forever, that screens Annawadi from the airport road. The book won the 2012 National Book Award for Nonfiction, was a Pulitzer finalist, and the New York Times later ranked it among the century's best books.
Historical Context & Significance
Boo had won a Pulitzer at the Washington Post for exposing abuse in group homes, and she brought that documentary discipline to India, where her husband's country confronted her, as she wrote, with the question of how ordinary low income people, not the extraordinary, actually get by in the global boom; Annawadi, in the airport's shadow, was globalization's doorstep. Published in 2012, the book cut against both India shining triumphalism and slum exoticism, and its method, years of presence plus paper trail, became the modern benchmark for reporting on poverty. David Hare's stage adaptation played the National Theatre in 2014, and journalism schools now teach the book as craft, the standing example of how far reporting can go while keeping the reporter off the page.