“Only a writer of Emiliano Monge’s caliber could write this exceptional novel. If he had previously already placed himself at the head of contemporary fiction, with Los vivos he achieves a radical rift in the way of writing about our turbulent present.”

“As always with Monge, time converts to language, characters convert to language, the density of the plot converts to language to ultimately traverse it as if it was the only possible literary experience. (...) The important thing in this book is to name the absence, and remember that everything depends on the anguish of form, of a compromise with language that is linked to its own brutality that is necessarily made evident by the four categories that the four chapters in the book form: memory, forgetting, solitude, and madness.”

“Above all else, Los vivos (Alfaguara) is an atmosphere: one that is oppressive and appears like a limbo where men and women live in a state of waiting that is prolonged to the point of nausea. It is also a challenge. What kind of reality is one in which there are the same amount of disappeared people as ones who have appeared? Or is it, perhaps, a version of hell thriving here on Earth? We do not know, because Emiliano Monge moves as a novelist—who knows about ambiguities and chiaroscuros—and not as a preacher for some cause. (...) If literature interrogates the present to obtain a few conjectures—mere attempts—about our human condition, Emiliano Monge has known how to respond, and he has done so with flying colors. By investigating the most heartbreaking—and, perhaps, unnameable, since they come from the experience of others—meanings of loss, given that Los vivos speaks of absence, he calls us to imagine a disconcerting paradox, a world turned upside down that is no less disjointed than the one we inhabit. What if the return of those who have disappeared, who never completely leave, brings an unprecedented manifestation of pain?”