Without intending to, I've been reading lots of books this summer in which poverty is a major character, or at least an important element in the story. Some of these books are nonfiction so I kind of knew what I was getting into. But some are fiction and I had no idea I'd be encountering detailed descriptions of hunger and deprivation. Some of these books I would recommend; others I would not.
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Barbara Demick)
I know (knew) nothing about North Korea before I read this book. It's the true story of how a handful of North Koreans managed to escape from this repressive country, and the reader learns much about the famine and starvation that has plagued the country ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. Among the many vivid images is an account of how starving citizens would head outside in the very early morning looking for grass shoots that had popped up overnight. This was considered breakfast.
The Clergyman's Daughter (George Orwell)
I'm slowly working my way through George Orwell's "other" novels -- meaning those other than the ones many readers know well: 1984 and Animal Farm. This novel is set in the UK in the mid-1930s. Part of the plot involves a period of amnesia for the main character who finds herself wandering around the countryside searching for food, which often means eating rotting apples she finds in orchards, and wrapping herself in newspapers at night in a mostly unsuccessful attempt to ward off the cold.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Katherine Boo)
This book, written by an LA Times reporter who spent several years living in Mumbai, India, tells the horrific story of improverished trash scavengers who live in improvised cities near the international airport in Mumbai. It's hard to capture the level of poverty so let me just quote a line or two:
...85 percent of the workers were part of the informal, unorganized economy. A few residents trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner. A few ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake's edge. And these individuals, miserable souls, thereby made an inestimable contribution to their neighbors. They gave those slum dwellers who didn't fry rats and eat weeds a felt sense of their upward mobility.
...[they lived in] a hut on the camp's stenchiest lane, where the feral pigs gorged on rotten hotel food. The house was ten feet long, six feet wide, filthy, lightless, and crammed with firewood for cooking.
...[a resident] saw that he'd have to become a better scavenger. This entailed not dwelling on the obvious: that his profession could wreck a body in a very short time. Scrapes from dumpster-diving pocked and became infected. Where skin broke, maggots got in. Lice colonized hair, gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die.
I couldn't finish this book. It literally turned my stomach. I have a very high tolerance for depressing real-life narratives, but this book was simply too much for me. It seems to be a popular book club selection, but I can't recommend it.
Girl in Translation (Jean Kwok)
This debut novel very closely follows the author's true story of immigrating to New York from Shanghai with her mother in (I think) the 1980s. They manage to survive by working in a barely legal clothing sweatshop in lower Manhattan, and living in a hovel in Brooklyn with no heat, often no electricity, and thousands of roaches, rats, and mice. While it's an uplifting account of the main character's success in overcoming poverty, it's hard to read the descriptions of all those multi-footed house-mates. And again the main characters have to eat some of the most awful foods to stay alive.
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (Chris Hedges)
This is a nonfiction account of pockets of poverty in the United States, specifically an Indian reservation in South Dakota; Camden, NJ; a small town on the border of Kentucky and West Virginia; and a rural migrant-farmer community north of Miami. I only read part of this library book but only because it was due and I couldn't renew it. So I'll get back to it eventually. The part I read was about the South Dakota Indian reservation and wow was that eye-opening. And sad. Here are a few passages:
Whiteclay, Nebraska, an unincorporated village that exists for only a block and a half
before vanishing into the flatlands of the surrounding prairie, has only five or six permanent residents. It exists to sell beer and malt liquor.
Whiteclay’s primary business venture brings in an estimated $3 million a year in revenue. Whiteclay’s clients, however, are some of the poorest people in the country. They are Native Americans from the Pine Ridge reservation that is less than 200 feet away, just over the state line in South Dakota. … Alcoholism on Pine Ridge, although the sale of liquor is banned on the reservation, is estimated to be as high as eighty percent.
The fury of self-destruction sweeps across Pine Ridge like the Black Plague. Whiteclay is the modern-day version of the old Indian agencies. It is where Indians surrender. It is where they hand over their self-esteem and autonomy and wait passively in line for a bag of flour, a piece of lard, a few blankets, and the firewater that blunts the pain of what many have become.
Families, wracked by alcoholism, poverty, despair, and domestic violence, living lives in which tenderness and security are grabbed in desperate snatches, disintegrate swiftly under the onslaught of the reservation. The violence imposed on Indian culture has become internalized. Despair and pain of this magnitude lead to lives dedicated to self-immolation. The agony is expressed in self-defeating and self-destructive urges that shred what is left of dignity and hope.
Depressed yet?
I've moved on to other books with either more humor or less reality: Our Gang by Philip Roth (dated but fun and easy), Every Day is Mother's Day by Hilary Mantel (great read and weird as cat sh*t; Hilary Mantel reminds me of Shirley Jackson), and Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns by Lauren Weisberger (big-time guilty pleasure). I'm reading Revenge because of something I said at the most recent meeting of my book group. (I always say something that I regret at these monthly get-togethers.) I was slightly critical of the writing in Girl in Translation. The author got an MFA in creative writing at Columbia University so I was primed for a book with, well, creativity. But I found the writing to be flat, overly simple, and a bit dull. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it didn't seem very creative. The other group members disagreed with me heartily, saying that they loved the story (so did I) and they thought it was so interesting (so did I) so what's not to like? To prove to myself that I'm not a book snob who only likes books with flashy, literary flourishes I got Revenge from the library. No fear of finding literary flourishes in this book!
