The Blue Notebook A Novel

James A. Levine, Meera Simhan

eAudio - 2009

Dear [Listener],Every now and then, we come across a novel that moves us like no other, that seems like a miracle of the imagination, and that haunts us long after the book is closed. James Levine’s The Blue Notebook is that kind of book. It is the story of Batuk, an Indian girl who is taken to Mumbai from the countryside and sold into prostitution by her father; the blue notebook is her diary, in which she recalls her early childhood, records her life on the Common Street, and makes up beautiful and fantastic tales.How did Levine, a British-born doctor at the Mayo Clinic, manage to conjure the voice of a fifteen-year-old female Indian prostitute? It all began, he told me, when, as part of his medical research, he was interviewing homeles...s children on a street in Mumbai known as the Street of Cages, where child prostitutes work. The powerful image of a young prostitute engaged in the act of writing haunted him, and he himself began to write.The Blue... more