![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Beautiful Review Saga
Mar. 16th, 2012 11:55 amHey,
So what with the recent spate of lawmakers being assholes towards women, I thought a bit of reading about the lives of sex workers in India might make for some uplifting reading.
It....did? Didn't?
The book was Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Clubs by Sonia Faleiro. This book generated a lot of buzz in the UK and I was anxious to check it out, but while it was interesting, it didn't quite meet expectations for me.
So Sonia is living in Bombay and she gets to know a number of women who dance in Dance Clubs. They're not strippers exactly and while they will have sex with their customers they very clearly don't consider themselves prostitutes. Like a lot of societies, India struggles with how it deals with sexuality. The problem is that crime, corruption, poverty and equality all come together to create a situation where sex-for-hire is despised even as it's endemic in the population.
Sonia gets to know one particular dancer named Leela, a 19 year old girl who was pimped out to the local police by her father when she was a child. The life has actually been fairly rewarding for her financially, although her traumas past and present keep draining her money away through a life of non-stop parties and consumerism. The book also follows a number of the people surrounding Leela, her best friend and fellow dancer, the bar owner/lover who employs her, the local group of trans women she hangs out with, her mother who shows up unexpectedly and well outstays her welcome, and various other folks.
It's interesting. It's also a little unsatisfying, but I can't quite quantify the reason. Maybe I wanted maps of the area for context? A few more high-level factual blocks to illuminate how Leela's problems are mirrored at large? The book ends on something of a cliff-hanger and I feel that a post-script could have been supplied? Just a little something.
Still, Ms. Faleiro does have an ear for voices and the people she follows have distinct ones. She doesn't shy away from using strings of Hindu words, but always supplies a translation or more than enough context that you never feel lost. It's an interesting book and there's probably a number of folks on my friend's list who might want to give it a read.
For those of my friends who read comics, I picked up issue one of Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples and I have to say it starts off like "Angel and Demon have a baby and are on the run from Heaven and Hell -- IN SPAAAAACE!" and then it really starts to rise above it's premise. I'm on-board for a few more issues anyway. Also, there are boobs, penises, and umbilical cords so...not really for kids.
later
Tom
So what with the recent spate of lawmakers being assholes towards women, I thought a bit of reading about the lives of sex workers in India might make for some uplifting reading.
It....did? Didn't?
The book was Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Clubs by Sonia Faleiro. This book generated a lot of buzz in the UK and I was anxious to check it out, but while it was interesting, it didn't quite meet expectations for me.
So Sonia is living in Bombay and she gets to know a number of women who dance in Dance Clubs. They're not strippers exactly and while they will have sex with their customers they very clearly don't consider themselves prostitutes. Like a lot of societies, India struggles with how it deals with sexuality. The problem is that crime, corruption, poverty and equality all come together to create a situation where sex-for-hire is despised even as it's endemic in the population.
Sonia gets to know one particular dancer named Leela, a 19 year old girl who was pimped out to the local police by her father when she was a child. The life has actually been fairly rewarding for her financially, although her traumas past and present keep draining her money away through a life of non-stop parties and consumerism. The book also follows a number of the people surrounding Leela, her best friend and fellow dancer, the bar owner/lover who employs her, the local group of trans women she hangs out with, her mother who shows up unexpectedly and well outstays her welcome, and various other folks.
It's interesting. It's also a little unsatisfying, but I can't quite quantify the reason. Maybe I wanted maps of the area for context? A few more high-level factual blocks to illuminate how Leela's problems are mirrored at large? The book ends on something of a cliff-hanger and I feel that a post-script could have been supplied? Just a little something.
Still, Ms. Faleiro does have an ear for voices and the people she follows have distinct ones. She doesn't shy away from using strings of Hindu words, but always supplies a translation or more than enough context that you never feel lost. It's an interesting book and there's probably a number of folks on my friend's list who might want to give it a read.
For those of my friends who read comics, I picked up issue one of Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples and I have to say it starts off like "Angel and Demon have a baby and are on the run from Heaven and Hell -- IN SPAAAAACE!" and then it really starts to rise above it's premise. I'm on-board for a few more issues anyway. Also, there are boobs, penises, and umbilical cords so...not really for kids.
later
Tom
