“Colossal”

“Emiliano Monge reappears with a novel of unmanageable beauty (...) Tejer la oscuridad (Literatura Random House) is the fabric of an apocalyptic future, and also the weaving of a reinvention of the past. It is the anticipation and rubble and weathering, the arrow of time shot backwards.”

“Monge’s works of fiction are the exact metaphors for the craziness of the world.”

“Combining pre-Columbian cosmology and indigenous resistance with the braided ropes of Donna Haraway or Ted Chiang’s quantum experiments, Monge is able to create a post-colonial, feminist, and futurist book that sounds ancient and biblical at the same time. A sort of bible of tomorrow.”

“The synopsis of Tejer la oscuridad (Literatura Random House, 2020) categorizes it as a dystopia. An apocalypse has happened: the oceans have dried up and a horrible war has decimated the human race. A group of children in an orphanage creates a book of shared memories and manages to escape the surrounding war. The book we read is partially their “village book,” the story of their exodus and of their descendants, but also the story of how they slowly create their own culture and language. In its pages, we see the questioning of their own characters when considering what should be remembered and what should not, and we see their view of the world change as they leave war behind. We could argue about whether it is a dystopian story or not, but I think this novel is much closer to science fiction, to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin—who Monge pays homage to at various points—than to the realistic novels about drug violence or the autofiction written by many Mexican authors in recent years. (...) The technique in this novel is what I admire the most. Monge manages very subtle changes with his narrators—points of view that increasingly go deeper into their own realities, describing things that already seem strange, creating a surrealist environment of voices that talk to themselves (...) Ambitious science fiction written by a Mexican author, and I think we need more books like this.”

“Once again, Emiliano Monge stretches the limits of language (...) a nightmare set in the near future in which language plays an essential role.”