Emiliano Monge Livres

“This dark, sprawling novel is the English language debut of Emiliano Monge, a Mexican writer who is often compared to the US literary superstar Cormac McCarthy. Written in a tone that evokes McCarthy’s unrelenting classic Blood Meridian, the novel tells the story of Germán Alcántara Carnero, a dangerous campesino fighting to survive in rural 20th century Mexico, and also a metaphor for the spiraling violence of contemporary Mexican society.” —Culture Trip Set on a desolate, unnamed mesa, Emiliano Monge’s The Arid Sky distills the essence of a Latin America ruthlessly hollowed out by uncontainable violence. This is an unsparing yet magnificent land, whose only constants are loneliness, hatred, loyalty, and the struggle to return some small measure of meaning to life. Thundering and inventive, The Arid Sky narrates the signature moments in the life of Germán Alcantara Carnero: a man who is both exaltedly, viscerally real and is an ageless, nameless being capable of embodying entire eras, cultures, and conflicts. Monge’s roadmap—an escape across borders, the disappearance of a young girl, the confrontation between a father and his son, the birth of a sick child, and murder—takes readers on a journey to the core of humankind that posits a challenge of the kind only great literature can pose.

From one of Mexico's most important writers, a fictionalised memoir about three men who are driven to escape the confines of their traditional lives and roles. In 1958, Carlos Monge McKey sneaks out of his home in the middle of the night to fake his own death. He does not return for four years. A decade later, his son, Carlos Monge Sánchez, deserts his family too, joining a guerrilla army of Mexican revolutionaries. Their stories are unspooled by grandson and son Emiliano, a writer, who also chooses to escape reality, by creating fictions to run away from the truth. What Goes Unsaidis an extraordinary memoir that delves into the fractured relationships between fathers and sons, grandfathers and grandsons; that disinters the ugly notions of masculinity and machismo that all men carry with them -- especially in a patriarchal culture like Mexico. It is the story of three men, who -- each in his own way -- flee their homes and families in an attempt to free themselves.

In the desolate wastelands between the sierra and the jungle, under an all-seeing, unforgiving sun, a single day unfolds as relentlessly as those that have gone before. People are trafficked and brutalised, illegal migrants are cheated of their money, their dreams, their very names, even as countless others scrabble to cross the border, trying to reach a land they call El Paraíso. In this grim inferno, a fierce love has blossomed -- one that was born in pain and cruelty, and one that will live or die on this day. Estela and Epitafio too were trafficked, they grew together in the brutal orphanage, fell in love, but were ripped apart. They have played an ugly role in the very system that abused them, and done the bidding of the brutal old priest for too long. They have traded in migrants, put children to work as slaves, hacked off limbs and lives without a thought, though they have never forgotten the memory of their own shackles. Like the immigrants whose hopes they extinguish, they long to be free; free to be together and alone. Here in an unnamed land that could be a Mexico reimagined by Breughel and Dante, on the border between purgatory and inferno, where Paradise is the mouth of hell and cruelty the only currency, lives are spent, bartered and indentured for it. Must all be bankrupt among the lost?

No contar todo es la genealogía de una triple huida, el recordatorio de que una desbandada también puede ser una familia. Nos presenta la saga de los Monge, al mismo tiempo que cuenta la historia del país que habitaron. El abuelo, Carlos Monge McKey, descendiente de irlandeses, finge su propia muerte, haciendo estallar la cantera de su cuñado. El padre, Carlos Monge Sánchez, rompe con su familia y con su propia historia para irse a Guerrero, donde, convertido en guerrillero, luchará al lado de Genaro Vázquez. El hijo, Emiliano Monge García, nacerá enfermo y vivirá sus primeros años hospitalizado, por lo que será considerado como el débil de su familia y por lo cual erigirá un mundo de ficciones que con los años se irá haciendo más y más complejo y del que después ya no podrá escapar, más que escapando de todo. No contar todo es la genealogía de una triple huida, el recordatorio de que una desbandada también puede ser una familia. Ésta es una historia sobre la necesidad de escapar de los demás y de uno mismo, sobre el abandono, el amor y los machismos, sobre aquello que se dice, aquello que se insinúa y aquello que se calla, sobre la mentira y las diferentes violencias que enfrentamos.