Recently finished reading
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo. I finished this book over one long day between airports, and there’s irony in that. It’s a story of the tragedies and small triumphs of real lives in a squatters’ slum next to the Mumbai airport. The people who live in this slum, Annawadi, largely wrest a living from the refuse of the travelers there and at the nearby luxury hotels, but the travelers themselves never see them. If they do, there can be no meaningful help or understanding of lives between them. Attempts at charity are diverted by levels upon levels of kickbacks and shakedowns. But the immediacy of the portraits—the would-be idealists Abdul and Manju; the aspiring slumlord Asha; Kalu, the gentle thief—make the book as immediate and easy to enter as a Victorian novel; and it is as full of event and terror as one, too. I recommend it as strongly as possible, although since it is written by a white Westerner, I am following up on the criticisms of it as well. (They have not been sharp on that account—Boo is absolutely on her game, both as a writer and a journalist.)
The Corner That Held Them, Sylvia Townsend Warner. This midcentury novel was recently reissued. It’s a sprawling history of an imaginary convent in medieval England, largely centered (insofar as it is) on the years during and after the Black Death. If you loved Kristin Lavransdatter, you will love this, but if you loved Kristin Lavransdatter, you are either an outlier, a trad-Cath, or Norwegian. I’m an outlier. I love books that set a place and wander within and without it, like Lark Rise to Candleford. As with that book and its sequels, there is no single plotline in Warner’s novel, but there are storylines and recurring characters that thread in and out. It’s masterful and hypnotic; it is even calming when the events and the human natures on display aren’t completely grim—which they generally are. A major complaint about this book is that it just ends, leaving you wondering what on earth would have become of the characters. But this isn’t because some accident befell Warner. It is as deliberate, sudden, and surprising as the beginning of the novel, which is bloody and not at all what you would expect from the founding of a convent.
The Man From the Train, Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James. This father-and-daughter team set out to prove that a rash of family axe murders in 1910s small-town America—Music Man times, as they point out—were the work of a single man, a drifter responsible for massacres from Villisca, Iowa to Kaifeck, Bavaria. Neither of the authors are criminologists, but the Jameses do convincingly argue that one serial killer was responsible for a number of family murders throughout the South and Midwest. Can it be proven that the man is who they say he is? Never at this remove. That left me a bit frustrated at the exercise, to say nothing of the prose, which is a little too jokey sometimes even for a My Favorite Murder listener like me. Still, it’s a good look into the intersection of policing history and social conditions that made it possible for a serial killer to get away with so much at that time.
