A review by kalmanovich
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail by Óscar Martínez

adventurous dark informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

 The Beast is a fascinating book that centers around years of travel up and down the migrant trails of South and Central America. There was a lot to love about this work - the foremost for myself being that it is composed almost exclusively of descriptions of in person interviews and conversations with everyone Martinez could get behind his notepad. Whatever writing wasn’t based on a conversation being had was providing either the occasional author’s remark or context in the form of expert testimony, statistics, or callback to an earlier conversation. Writing as a journalist, and not an author, Martinez generally removed himself from the story, writing based on interviews from all actors and providing little political commentary. I liked that about this book - while I’ve seen a few reviews lament this stance, I find that the focus on the perspective of the migrant (or any interviewee) added significantly to the narrative. From my experience reading The Beast, most of the book’s flaws come from the fact that this book was not meant to be a book at all, but rather a collection of independent essays, stories, and journals. 
Because of this, the pacing wasn’t ideal, with long chapters in the middle with repetitive content, and what felt like much shorter descriptions of lives on either end of the trip. Most of the book was organized by stage in a migrants journey, the plot moving upwards through Central America, full of stories about both the trail and individually notable towns and locations. With this, it would have been nice to see a map that tracked where exactly on the journey the reader was, and where we could have expect to go moving forward. My last stylistic comment on this book is that the writing itself wasn’t immediately gripping, but my theory is that this comes from the fact that translating any sort of narrative form is difficult (The Beast was initially written in Spanish). 
In terms of content and substance, Martinez did a stunning job. The entire novel is deeply holistic, with interviews coming from all angles: migrants, those adjacent to organized crime, the authorities, non-travelling civilians, to name a few. If any form of representation was lacking, it was that of women, who were only interviewed on (I believe) two occasions - once to discuss the sex work industries along the trail and once to explain the border situation. The interviewee in the second instance was a border guard. Women had more physical descriptions in their introductions than did men - but do with this information what you will. 
I really do recommend reading The Beast, perhaps with the goal of learning from individual chapters, rather than on the basis of reading a whole book. Very cool! 
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