In Spite of the Prose

...Once inside, however, he had no sooner taken a step before his commendable enthusiasm deserted him...

...Seized by the spectacle, he stopped in his tracks, transfixed...

...And it provides some fascinating inside looks into areas usually beyond the knowledge of non-Indians or indeed higher-caste natives—for example, the complex web of exploitation the rickshaw-wallah plies his trade in, and the macabre commerce in fetuses and skeletons of poor people through which the Indian underworld supplies anatomy schools of the West with specimens...

...The leading characters in the book are a Polish priest and a young American doctor, who find their way into the slum and live there for periods of time...

...But it does show that even at the bottom of the abyss people do not cease to be human, that mutual aid— as Kropotkin argued long ago—is a rooted human instinct, and that kindness flourishes best where the need for it is greatest...

...It reveals how India's religious and ceremonial traditions survive among its poorest people, giving life a myth and a meaning that is often lost in Western urban societies...

...There are many people whose search for salvation leads them to help their neighbors, so that misfortune is amazingly counteracted by a sense of cooperation that frequently blunts the edge of individual want...

...Lapierre writes from first-hand observation...

...Working in collaboration with Larry Collins, Lapierre has already made a kind of name for himself as the writer of breathlessly exuberant best-selling reconstructions of recent historic events...

...The City of Joy is an account of life in a typical Calcutta slum, one of those sections of wasteland occupied by the destitute who flock to the city from all parts of India...

...Anyone who has spent time in India and has had to seek out a parcel in such an establishment will barely recognize, in Lapierre's telling, the mere tediousness of the experience: "A crumbling old building, with a staircase that stank of urine and filled with a confusion of silhouettes in dhotis wandering about, theCalcutta customs office was a classic shrine to bureaucracy...

...The slum reflects the divisions of India, yet poverty proves a great unifier...

...Their efforts would have been pointless, though, if they had not been welcomed by slum-dwellers anxious to develop at least the rudiments of medical and social services, the infrastructure of mutual aid...

...No doubt assisted by his translator, Lapierre writes in an outdated kind of exaggerative journalese: A fresh or original image is never offered if a well-worn cliche can be found...

...It offers no easy hope, no prospect that the great mass of 300 million destitute people in urban slums and forlorn villages who form the base of the Indian pyramid will in any foreseeable future emerge from their appalling poverty...

...What Stephan saw was the vast array of moldering chits and documents that fills every Indian office—a sight calculated to depress and bewilder, but hardly to "transfix...

...What he presents is—to all appearances—a semi-fictional account of life in the City of Joy (a fairly accurate translation, incidentally, of the Indian name of the place, Anand Nagar...

...One of these, Freedom at Midnight, took modern India as its province in a sensational and often superficial account of the events leading up to the country's liberation in 1947...

...Take his passage describing a visit to an Indian customs house by a leading figure in the book...

...Now he offers his own panorama of a Calcutta bustee, or slum, that is as crammed with grotesque detail as one of Hieronymus Bosch's landscapes of Hell...

...Similar narratives abound, as do descriptive passages of the deepest purple...

...Brandishing like a talisman the notice for his parcel of medicine, Stephan Kovalski swept into the first office...

...Every Indian religion is represented, including Christianity and Buddhism, and the various communities are largely self-contained, as they would be elsewhere in India...

...He actually lived in a slum and came to know many of its inhabitants before he started writing...

...Although the story that follows is indeed one of frustration, Lapierre attempts to turn this banal encounter with the babu world into a conflict between the paladins of light and the armies of darkness...

...They stay there as long as they are tolerated, crowded into tiny shacks put together from flattened tin cans and scraps of wood...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock If ever a volume seemed a candidate for George Orwell's category of the "good bad book,'' where content somehow overcomes all the deficiencies of form, surely it is Dominique Lapierre's The City of Joy...

...The sad thing is that Lapierre has so many interesting things to tell us, he does not need to perpetrate verbal atrocities to attract our attention...

...Most eke out a marginal existence as beggars, ragpickers, rickshaw-pullers, and underpaid sweatshop workers, while some keep themselves by providing services for fellow slum-dwellers...

...Let me deal first with the negative side of The City of Joy...

...It demonstrates how in the most abject setting (as most of Calcutta seems to the visitor from the outside) ancient patterns of communal solidarity and new conceptions of social service can combine to keep up spirits, even when bodies are underfed...

...There are also more sharply differentiated groups, such as the colony of several hundred lepers who occupy one corner of the slum, and the little secretive group of Hijras, or eunuchs dressed like women...

...In this sense the book is inspiring...

...Discounting the bad prose and the inclination to wring every scrap of sensation out of each situation and incident, The City of Joy is a remarkable document...