Sonia Faleiro
Autore di Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars
Opere di Sonia Faleiro
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Informazioni generali
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- India
- Luogo di nascita
- Goa, India
- Luogo di residenza
- San Francisco, California, USA
Bombay, India
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK - Attività lavorative
- reporter
author - Premi e riconoscimenti
- Karmaveer Puraskar for Social Justice (2011), CNN Young Journalist of the Year (2005)
- Agente
- The Wylie Agency
- Breve biografia
- Sonia Faleiro is an award-winning reporter and writer. She is the author of a book of fiction, The Girl (Viking, 2006) and a contributor to numerous anthologies including AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India (Random House, 2008).
Beautiful Thing is her first work of non-fiction and is based on five years of research in the secretive world of Bombay's dance bars. Critics in India hailed Beautiful Thing as 'a brilliant, unforgettable book by a writer who is one of the best of her generation'. The Sunday Times called it ‘a tour de force of reportage, whose depth, insight and resonance make it the equal of the best fiction’ while The Observer praised it as a ‘brilliant investigative foray into the dance bars of Bombay.
Beautiful Thing is available in the Indian Subcontinent, Australia and New Zealand, the UK and the Netherlands, and is forthcoming in the US (March 2012, Grove) as well as in translation in several Indian and European languages.
It is an Observer, Guardian, and Economist Book of the Year, Time Out Subcontinental Book of the Year, and The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2011.
Sonia was born in Goa, studied in Edinburgh, worked in Bombay, and now lives in San Francisco.
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Statistiche
- Opere
- 4
- Opere correlate
- 4
- Utenti
- 248
- Popolarità
- #92,014
- Voto
- 3.7
- Recensioni
- 19
- ISBN
- 32
- Lingue
- 5
The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro is about the case of two teenaged girls from Uttar Pradesh, India that were found dead shortly after they went missing. The author, herself from India, provides us with shocking insights on the course of events that took place. Shocking, because to our western sensitivities, the cast-oriented beliefs and structures of the villagers, the modus operandi of the police and overall, their indifference, the botched postmortem examinations, in a word the circumstances are simply incomprehensible.
The 2014 Uttar Pradesh killing has completely gone by me but after browsing the net I was quickly confronted with pictures of two girls dressed in colorful sarongs hanging from a tree. Needless to say, my initial reaction was sadness, then an all-consuming anger for in the aftermath of the New Delhi bus rape, suspicion pointed to something similar horrendous. However, as I read on and the narrative progresses this becomes increasingly unlikely.
In the end, the exact circumstances of the tragic deaths remain a mystery. Be that as it may, by the author’s careful analysis of situation and event progression, the reader is able to infer a terrible truth unspoken; the tacit truth of a crime perpetrated not by a score of criminals but by a whole nation and its cultural history conspiring against two innocent girls on the cusp of adulthood.
Sonia Faleiro describes the characters objectively but with great subjective insight. Naturally, the girls’ family is in the limelight of her literary scrutiny. We get to know all the necessary information to comprehend how family members, neighbors and village elders relate to each other in rural India.
In addition, the author, known for several other non-fiction books of quality about her native land India, has perfected an amalgam of great true crime prose with clever literary techniques and devices that make the reader think, reflect and ultimately come to his/her own conclusions.
Reading this book, your beliefs and perceptions of progress and human development flip like a pancake at the International Pancake House – if you allow it that is. And you certainly should, for the ability to confront yourself with perceptions and points of views foreign to your own is the precursor not only to change but also to empathy.
This work of non-fiction goes beyond the terrible deaths of the two teenagers; it is also a portrait of village life in rural India with the complexities of the Hindu society in mind written straight from “the horse’s mouth.”
In the West we only now start to understand the cost of freedom without strength.
But what if you don’t have any freedom at all – like these two poor girls from whom an obsolete, encrusted and most of all callously unfair society extracted the ultimate price. Heartrending and infinitely sad.… (altro)