Staff Pick: Francis Reynolds
August 11, 2009
Ferenc Barnás’s The Ninth is a novel of poverty and all the humiliations that come with it. The story’s narrator, the ninth child of a poor Catholic family scraping together an existence in 1960s Hungary, wears his track suit to church, goes for long stretches without showers, and wakes before the sun rises to mold plastic beads for rosaries his father sells illegally to churches along the rail line. His older siblings left school to work in factories with their mother and for much of the novel the narrator sleeps with his brothers and sisters three to a bed. But his family keeps their eyes on the future: they expect the sacrifices they make today to be rewarded by their slow gains, by the intensity of their joys heard-earned, and the book beautifully portrays this optimism.
But what of those without even the hope of moving up? What about when gaping inequality cuts off the haves even further from the have-nots, making the chasm that much harder to bridge? In the current issue of the excellent journalism quarterly Dispatches, Mort Rosenblum compares his travels to the poorer parts of India with time spent in Campbell, Ohio. In the former, he meets people making ends meet with meager resources and the help of extended community networks, while in the latter he finds a rust-belt town of trash-strewn lots and charred buildings still struggling with the void left by the steel industry. In the US, your family is officially poor if you earn less than twenty-seven thousand dollars a year. If you live in a country the World Bank says is “developing,” you are poor if you live on less than a dollar and twenty-five cents a day. Yet there’s more to poverty than just money: access to education and healthcare, the strength of community or family all factor in to what makes a life rich or otherwise. “Americans cut adrift from society can be miserably poor with a thousand times more income” than their global counterparts, Rosenblum writes. “Between most Indian slums and the back streets of Campbell, it is clear enough which is poorer. It is also clear which is more miserable. ” While the contextualization Dispatches provides goes far in explaining how we arrived at the current state of global poverty, The Ninth explores the feelings that accompany dearth, and therefore makes it all the more tangible.
Francis Reynolds is an intern at Guernica.
http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/1211/staff_pick_francis_reynolds_3/