The living (Random House) It is a story about forced disappearanceabout the dead, the living and those who cannot return and who inhabit a strange place that could be Mexico, however, the novel is much more complicated than that.
The writer Emiliano Monge (Mexico City, 1978) speaks exclusively with MILLENNIUM about your book which he confesses he wrote with a lot of pain but also with love and which he considers reflects the terrible reality that is happening in our country and what he has in his brain.
How complicated was the process? The living?
It has been the most complex writing process I have ever faced. For a decade I wanted to write about the disappearance, I searched and asked myself things, but many times I thought that maybe I was not going to write it, but I was interested, until I understood that it was a novel about the appearance and a novel about the disappeared, to tell the story of the disappearance and it was painful to write it, although at the same time, it has a lot of love.
From what place did you want to tell it?
I didn’t want to make a story that was made up of singular stories. That is to say, I did not want to transfer an experience directly to the book, I did not want to create this literature that is fashionable and that is the literature without literature that fills the bookstores. I wanted to find the point from which to talk about what it generates and not about what disappearance is, about that emptiness, that uncertainty, that loneliness, that absence and the rupture of time.
What is the non-place where everything happens in our country?
You say well, it’s a kind of no-place, you don’t know if it’s limbo… I don’t know either. It is a place that was created, that appeared and part of the novel’s question, which is what happens to that hole that is generated when someone disappears? but also in the lives of those around them: family members, friends, lovers, partners, of someone who is in a condition of disappearance and I was interested in that black hole that is not only something that is missing, but something that sucks, that It continues to suck things from those who stay here and where no one can look. Science, history, philosophy or politics cannot be seen; but art and literature can try, they can try to be our senses there.
And you also play with time
I think we are in a third space and time is the other element that brings a brutal rarification there, because time makes sense if we are alive or it makes sense if we are dead. But it makes no sense if we are neither alive nor dead. What happens with time? How does it not happen or how does it happen? How does it open in different vectors or is it a single vector? That’s like the other thing that also happens in the novel.
How to distance yourself from a topic like this?
What kept my interest in writing was the issue of language, that each word is a challenge and that it will then be a challenge for the reader. Literature usually distances itself from events over time. And here, I didn’t have that, because this is happening every day, how do we know, so how do we put distance? Well, with language.
Is that why you name your characters like Vestigia, Hincapié, Cienvenida, child?
I had the chance to talk to a lot of people who have a missing relative or acquaintance and all those testimonies marked the shape of the book. I didn’t want to tell the story of this or that person, but I did want that to be present in the novel. There is a circularity in these testimonies and one often hears very similar stories such as the story of the boy Mario, the story of the boy Pedro, the story of the girl Marta. It is giving up giving them individuality, generating a lot of luck in each person. And then, furthermore, the name that is given to them, Vestigia or Hincapié, has to do with illuminating more than individuality or identity, illuminating the character of the characters, one’s stubbornness, the inability to break with one’s past or with what there are vestiges of what they believe there was, but they don’t even remember well.
Why do you write it in short sentences, everything very compact, very condensed?
When you talk to victims of violence, in general, there is a point at which the conversation breaks down and the person who is telling you the testimony breaks off and talks and talks. But with the victims of this type of violence, of disappearance, that point does not exist, it never comes. Testimony is always besieged by silence, because there is an enormous risk of saying something you don’t want to say and it being broken. So, that form of language is a bit what the structure of the novel has, it is very concise speaking, everything is very short and everything is very pigeonholed by silence, the ecosystem in which everything is happening.
In The living Different characters appear and at times the reader will wonder if they are alive or dead in a strange place, in a thick land contaminated by pain and hope.
Do you feel the pain of disappearances?
I wanted it to feel like being in a foggy space in which things appear and disappear. I wanted the book to feel like something fragile, like something that can also break even though one is inside that vapor that is emanating from the things that are and those that are not.
Does everything have to do with grief?
Of course, if we talk about there being no past in disappearance, there is no future either, because there is no, among other things, the possibility of mourning, which is a human right. And the two things that we should all have access to is to tell our own story and to mourn our dead and they are the two things that disappearance cancels, that’s what it’s about a little bit and if you think about it, mourning is at the heart of literature and art, as it is at the heart of culture from the beginning.
Despite the darkness in the novel, is there light, Emiliano?
Disappearances have become more commonplace at much more outrageous levels. It is enough to go to the store for some chips and not return, it is brutal, it is a reality of life, it is absurd, precarious and very brutal. But in all that other place, let’s say it is marked by that fog, by that darkness, but there also had to be coordinates of light and those traces or echoes of light… it is love.
What does it mean for your career? I live themyes?
It’s a novel and I don’t even know if it’s good or bad, I don’t know if it’s better than the others. But it is true that it left me with a very fucking pain, very hard, but at the same time it left me with a peace, a different tranquility and I feel, I sense, that when I get to be an old man it is the book that I will not be ashamed of. I think that The living He’s smarter than me, I think books are like exobrains of writers, I don’t know how something like that happens, but it’s what I feel and, maybe, that’s what gives me peace of mind.
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