Welcome to our weekly Books Digest where we round-up what you should, and shouldn’t, be reading. This week features John Connell, Saumya Roy and Threa Almontaser.
For more books take a look through our Books Digest Archive.
The Running Book: A Journey through Memory, Landscape and History by John Connell (Pan MacMillan), £8.99.
Bill Bowkett
Like many during the pandemic, I have taken up jogging as a way to keep active. So, I was intrigued to see, as an amateur, what perspective I could draw from John Connell’s The Running Book. To my surprise, Connell’s book about the “joys and pleasures of running” is far from being a specialist read for competitive racers.
For the most part, it’s an accessible read – told in 42 chapters during the 42-kilometres route around his hometown in rural Ireland. Connell is in his element when he is contemplating Irish history through his usual post-colonial perusal. “When I run through Longford, I run over the remains of 75,000 ghosts,” he writes on An Gorta Mór (The Great Famine).
Connell’s historical account, and his ability to tie it to his homeland, are effective. Although in a section on the Moat of Farrell, Connell claims that Oliver Cromwell’s settlement of Ireland was the “first real modern acts of ethnic cleansing in Europe”. What about instances like the Alhambra Decree in Spain – when Jews were expelled for not converting to Catholicism – which occurred a century earlier?
My biggest quip with the book, like my running, is pacing. Because the book covers such a broad range of topics – from previous runs he has done in cities like Rome to the actual run itself – keeping up with the narrative can be a challenging and unpredictable endeavour. When you reach the conclusion, it feels abrupt; there is no sense of elation or relatability that you normally find with runs. Connell’s descriptive language of his own surroundings is a brilliant concept, but it needed a sharper sense of direction in what it aimed to achieve.
Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings by Saumya Roy (Profile Books), £16.99.
Olivia Gavoyannis
Beyond the gleaming high-rises of Mumbai, the eighth richest city in the world, lies the Deonar dumping ground. The site was set up in 1927 and some of the rubbish mountains now rise as high as twenty-floor apartment blocks. As Saumya Roy writes in her new book, Mountain Tales: “Everything that gave meaning to the Mumbaikars’ lives – from broken cellphones, to high-heeled shoes and gangrenous and dismembered human limbs – ended up here”.
A journalist and activist living in Mumbai, Roy does a brilliant job of explaining the turbulent history of Deonar and evoking the mystical landscape created by its vast, smouldering piles of discarded things. But it is her treatment of the everyday struggles of the waste pickers that live in and around the garbage mountains that make this book so memorable. Roy tells the tale of this small, forgotten community through the coming-of-age story of Farzana, a teenage girl who – like family and friends around her – is drawn to the aspirational pull of the seething mass of rubbish and its promise of abandoned riches.
The life she lives on the mountains is a fragile one, plagued by toxic fumes, rampant fires and the continued efforts of the courts to clamp down on the city’s determined waste pickers. But amid the sorrow of loss and hardship, Roy captures moments of pure joy too; there are giggly food fights, a budding teenage romance and intense family bonds.
Roy’s compassionate portrait of Farzana and her shifting fortunes is a powerful indictment of the careless environmental destruction and insatiable human consumption that impacts those living on the fringes of gleaming cities around the world. As Roy writes in the introduction, “the story that follows is of Deonar’s mountainous township of trash and of the lives lived in its long shadow, but it is also a story of elsewhere”.
The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser (Pan Macmillan), £10.99.
Nicholas Opfermann
The Wild Fox of Yemen is a Walt Whitman Award-winning collection of poetry by Threa Almontaser. With her autobiographical and emotional lines, the American describes the cultural quandaries of a female Muslim coming to age in New York, blessed with the inherited nostalgia of distant, foreign traditions and identity. A child of Yemeni émigrés, Almontaser wonderfully crafts folkloric phrases, evoking traditions of Yemen that reflect the familial roots that define her and paint, with intense imagery, the richness of her Middle-Eastern ancestry’s most sacred characteristics: “Yemeni’s honeyed blood, thicker and sweeter than any.”
Almontaser’s focus on language, both English and Arabic, creates a powerful reflection of her cultural make-up. ‘Recognized Language’, one of the poems in this collection, recalls her mother tongue and the dilution of her vocabulary since childhood. Lamenting the loss of understanding and connection to Arabic, she flits from one tongue to the other, printing mainly in English with additions of Arabic Abjad and honorific Salawat as a memorial to her blended identity. The theme of cultural traditions is lent Arabic words as if the translation would not suffice, resulting in exotic verse that feels precise, legitimate, dreamlike and imaginary.
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