Emiliano Monge Libri

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?