Mark Sutton

speaker

695 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2018 last heard Jul 2020

Mark Sutton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Bookshelf · New books by Garth Greenwell, Isabel Allende and Jeanine Cummins · 24 Jan 2020 podcast

Well, it's not that someone who's a murderer couldn't love books.

In the way that Lydia kind of did.

Even once she found out who he was, they remained as kind of book buddies almost and they would meet in the bookshop and talk.

Well, they try a number of ways to make the journey to the US border, having ultimately concluded that that is their only path to safety because of the reach of the cartels.

But so that they can't be traced, they end up going on...

what is called la bestia which is the the freight rail system uh so there's no apparently passenger rail in mexico something i didn't know there used to be but uh this book says there is no longer but there is a freight rail system and so migrants run alongside a train and leap aboard them you know in the kind of hobo you know woody guthrie way but they don't slow down and the rate of uh

injury and death to these migrants leaping up on and off these trains is huge.

And there's one bit in the book where they talk about what you can expect.

I think a priest kind of tells them and he says, you know, this percentage of you, he's talking to a bunch of migrants, this percentage of you will get killed, this percentage of you will get caught, this percentage of you will find your way to the cartels and all of you will be robbed.

there's a hundred percent of you and uh the the sort of the danger at every step of the way on this train journey is something but it also as i mentioned before the breathless quality of it is the fact that the characters lydia and luca cannot stop moving for one moment they know if they stop for more than a night really anywhere there's a chance that someone will see them someone will catch up with them so at every moment they have to be moving as quickly as possible

And we do get a few gruesome incidents throughout the book of where the characters witness terrible things happening to other migrants getting on or off La Bestia as they attempt to make their own journey.

Because Janine Cummins, the author, has said specifically one of her main goals with this was to try and move –

these people beyond statistics because we, you know, especially the migrant caravans that we hear coming up from countries like Honduras.

And she says that as an American, she felt maybe it was easy for some people to cease to see the humanity and the individual stories in each individual person who was making this journey.

And the book is an attempt to give a voice and a humanity to each individual.

Yeah, very much so.

And there's a few references throughout to Trump and the wall and things like that.

If anything, I would say when the book gets slightly polemical, it's less successful, not because what she's saying doesn't have value, but it's politics that humans are human and to be treated as such is a broad and easily agreeable point.

The book has been compared a little bit to The Grapes of Wrath by a few people.

And I think it comes up a little bit short, personally, in that comparison.

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