![]() ![]() The journalist Katherine Boo, who wrote about a Mumbai slum in her National Book Award-winning “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” and has reported on poverty and disability, often speaks of the “earned fact” - the research necessary before making a claim. The caveat is to do this work of representation responsibly, and well. As the novelist Hari Kunzru has argued, imagining ourselves into other lives and other subjectives is an act of ethical urgency. I’m of the persuasion that fiction necessarily, even rather beautifully, requires imagining an “other” of some kind. Shouldn’t the story matter, her effort to individuate people portrayed as a “faceless brown mass” (her words)? In the book’s afterword, she agonizes about not being the right person to write the book (“I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it”) but decides that she has a moral obligation to the story. Why should this matter? you might ask (or Cummins might protest). One from the eyebrow, one from the lip, another at the nose, one from the cheek.” Yes, of course. It’s as if seven fishermen have cast their hooks into her from different directions and they’re all pulling at once. Lydia’s expression “is one Luca has never seen before, and he fears it might be permanent. I found myself flinching as I read, not from the perils the characters face, but from the mauling the English language receives. Then there are the real masterpieces, where the writing grows so lumpy and strange it sounds like nonsense poetry. There are perplexing bird analogies (the beautiful sisters look at Lydia, “their expressions ranging like a quarrel of sparrows” “Mami’s cry, a shrill, corporeal thing, it bubbles out of her like a fully formed bird and it flies, but Mami doesn’t”). Like a government furlough, God has deferred her nonessential agencies”). There are the strained similes (when Lydia finds she is unable to pray, “she believes it’s a divine kindness. There is subtext announced at booming volume. There are so many instances and varieties of awkward syntax I developed a taxonomy. There is a fair amount of action in the book - chases, disguises, one thuddingly obvious betrayal - but if you’re at all sensitive to language, your eye and ear will snag on the sentences. She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option.” All her life she’s pitied those poor people. And that simple fact, among all the other severe new realities of her life, knocks the breath clean out of her lungs. She decides to disguise herself and Luca as migrants and escape to America, until she realizes this is no disguise: “She and Luca are actual migrants. When Sebastián publishes an exposé, the kingpin rewards him by slaughtering his family. ![]() Of course he does everything follows as predictably as possible. This stranger turns out to be the kingpin. Her life was quiet, content and enlivened recently by a new friendship with a patron, an older man, devastatingly suave (or so we’re meant to believe), who shared her taste in books. Los Jardineros, as they call themselves, have a taste for baroque punishments and are helmed by a charismatic kingpin. Lydia’s husband, Sebastián, slain on the patio, was a reporter who once fearlessly pursued stories about the cartel, which controlled Acapulco. ![]()
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