The 3 best books by Emiliano Monge

There is the Mexican writers thing. Because if we recently recovered for this space to Alvaro Enrigue, we focus today on one of his gifted students, considering him in some way to be a decade younger and sometimes tune into that search for literary avant-gardes of our days.

Although it is true that Monge's is a more recognizable novel in its forms, focused to a greater extent on a meridian background, acceptable from the first punch.

Yes, I said punch because there are novels that hit. They are usually realistic stories that awaken those drugged consciences. Because it's one thing to watch television while the heinous reality is on the news. A very different matter is reading, with that deeper access to the words read, the readings processed on our hard drive for better or for worse. But above all to be freer by feeling things again as they should be felt in their entirety.

So, if we are willing to read any of Monge's works, let us know that we are going to be splashed by that realism made into the action of real life, without overacting, beyond the fact that the tragic or the magical may end up overwhelming us.

Top 3 recommended novels by Emiliano Monge

Not count everything

Nothing is more realistic and as if taken from fiction than one's own experiences or the legacy of one's own family. Then there is the issue of not telling everything, as if assuming that we always leave things out that could make any fiction or even any reality implausible.

But… to be honest, who is the handsome guy who writes his biography as it was? How does what has been experienced reach the next generations of a family? Not even in the best of cases will memory remain faithful to the facts, not even the senses captured what happened in the exact determination of it.

So the fairest thing is to know that no, everything is not going to be told. Of course, it is more than enough and sincere to get down to it. Literature will then only deal with beautifying and even mythologizing. This is a story about the need to escape from others and from oneself, about abandonment, love and machismo, about what is said, what is insinuated and what is left silent, about lies and different forms of violence. that we face.

Not count everything, a non-fiction novel, presents the Monge saga, at the same time that it tells the history of the country they inhabited. The grandfather, Carlos Monge McKey, of Irish descent, fakes his own death, blowing up his brother-in-law's quarry. The father, Carlos Monge Sánchez, breaks with his family and with his own history to go to Guerrero, where, turned into a guerrilla, he will fight alongside Genaro Vázquez.

The son, Emiliano Monge García, will be born sick and will spend his first years hospitalized, which is why he will be considered the weak one in his family and for which he will build a world of fictions that will become more and more complex over the years and of which Afterwards he will no longer be able to escape, except by escaping from everything. Not count everything it is the genealogy of a triple flight, the reminder that a rout can also be a family.

Not count everything

The scorched lands

As in the origin of time. The human being stalked by predators, hidden at night in the face of atavistic fears. The point is that the feeling is the same, the notion of life exposed to the fatality of what is even worse, the craving of others, the hatred of others.

Deep in the jungle and at night, several floodlights are lit and a group of immigrants is surprised and attacked by another group of men and women, prey to the homeland in which they live and to their own stories. This is how this starts road novel that crosses a nation where human beings are reduced to merchandise, where violence is the scene in which all the stories happen and where Emiliano Monge once again distills the essences of a Latin America wild. A holocaust of the 21st century, but also a love story: that of Estela and Epitafio, leaders of the gang of kidnappers. A story of extremely high stylistic voltage and frenetic pace, where fiction and reality - testimonies of immigrants give shape to the choruses of the novel - weave a moving, disturbing and memorable mosaic.

Through the protagonists and the mass of immigrants, whose individuality is gradually crumbling, the horror and loneliness are exposed, but also the loyalty and hope that fight in the heart of the human being.

The scorched lands

The deepest surface

The human being in front of the mirror of his objective and subjective being. What we would like to be and what we are. What we think and what they think of us. What oppresses us and our desire for freedom ...

Emiliano Monge always presents a narrative without contemplation or consideration. The rawness of his stories serves to reveal the truths and miseries of our civilization. This selection of stories helps the reader find the abyss, what remains when we abandon ourselves to evil out of habit, under a patina of social good from which, in the end, no one derives any benefit. The deeper surface it is a bestiary of man as a wolf of himself: from the arid intimacy of family terror to the voracity of a lynching, physical or media, anger and erosion are the sovereigns here. As if the characters were pawns of a vaporous but total will, personal destiny and social evolution act in these stories as an anonymous force that orders everything. That is to say: it dissolves everything.

With a relentless style, Emiliano Monge builds precise atmospheres of oppression. From the first words of each story, a lurking vagueness is hinted at, a void that expands fiercely until it brings the microuniverses to their final dissolution. Black holes of irony open everywhere, but in this case humor does not offer relief or a way out, but rather deepens the corrosion. Characters - and readers - discover themselves suspecting that perhaps they have never been here, in this thin depth that we call the world, and in the end there is no other consolation than that of disbandment.

The deepest surface
5/5 - (11 votes)

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