Friday, March 7, 2014

Boo 50-100

I’m slowly falling into a trance with the writing style that Katherine Boo is using. I haven’t quite wrapped my head around how she makes is sound like nothing she is saying comes from her mouth. Even now, I use first person and I struggle when I try to be a third person. It seems impossible to write an entire book in that style. Aside from Boo's writing style, a lot of drama happens in this section of Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Fatima makes it apparent that she is desperate for attention and is willing to do anything to get her way. She goes as far as setting herself on fire to get attention. She ends up in the hospital and soon after dies from the wounds. I have to wonder how much of that is a story that Katherine Boo heard, or something she actually encountered. How much of the whole book is stories or things she encountered?
Earlier in this section, on the theme of violence, while Manju is teaching a class, a young boy, Devo, runs into her class having just been hit by a taxi. Bleeding from the head, his mother follows him with blows to the injury. She says, “No car will kill you, no god will save you, you went in the road, roaming loose like that, and now you will die in my hands” (64). Manju manages to calm her down and they unexpectedly begin class again, playing heads shoulders knees and toes, in the blood on Devo’s wounds on the floor.

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