Migrants are “nameless,” the Mexican author Emiliano Monge writes in Among the Lost, his second novel translated into English. Migrants are also these things: voiceless, godless, soulless, bodiless, timeless, shadowless. And more, or, perhaps more precisely, less: In this dark, Boschian portrait of human trafficking, the victims at its center are perpetually being erased, occupying the narrative as inhuman figures, fungible pieces or corpses.
Yet it also wouldn’t be inaccurate to describe Among the Lost as a love story, if a black-humored one. Two traffickers, Epitafio and Estela, are ferrying about five dozen migrants north through an unnamed country. They drive separate trucks and constantly miss each other’s calls, which leads to cascading frustrations. (They are supposed to be coordinating with paid-off soldiers to clear their human cargo through checkpoints, but, as the saying goes, man plans and God laughs — a sinister cackle in this case.) Monge describes Estela as “the woman who loves Epitafio” and vice versa, implying that there was once a point where the two shared a capacity for romance — or might again, if they could only locate each other and get out of this racket. “I’m done with all this … I want the two of us to be together … All I want is to be with you!” cried Epitafio (or, rather “HewholovesEstela”) at one point. But opportunities for reconnection or escape, it’s clear, have long since passed.
In their place is an ever-encroaching sense of loss and death, encapsulated most obviously in the characters’ names: Epitafio (epitaph), Estela (headstone), Estela’s late sister Cementaria, Epitafio’s assistant Sepelio (burial), a migrant who’s force-marched into brutal fights named Mausoleo. It’s also inherent in the plot, which follows the caravan on its wayward, violent path, and in the language Monge uses to describe their collective fate, which has the tone of a tall tale where everybody is an antihero. “Mausoleo lifts the machete, raises it in offering to the darkness, and then brings it down on the neck and shoulder of the young man … split like a log falling to the axe.”
Woven into many of the sentences are fragments from Dante’s Divine Comedy, the better to underscore the hellishness: “the great sorrowful terrain in which they find themselves,” “the swarm of fleas or flies or gadflies come to prey on things and on men,” “those who no longer expect anything of heaven now their God has forsaken them.” And interspersed between passages are verbatim quotations from testimonies of Latin American migrants recalling their experiences in Mexico. They are brief dossiers of violation and fear:
“That one raped me. Laid me face down and raped me while the others chatted …”
“This is what God had done to me … I hated Him, I hated my parents and my homeland.”
“We no longer had the strength to tremble … We did not have the strength to feel … There was no reason now to think, to speak, no reason left to weep.”
Among the Lost is, in short, a lot, and in some cases too much by the standards of a conventional novel. Estela is often little more than a harridan, barking orders at her minions and bemoaning her fate; suggestions of past abuses from a shady priest make her no less one-note. Epitafio is disproportionately obsessed with bloodsport for somebody trying to move the migrants along, recruiting the towering Mausoleo for gratuitous rampages that have the feel of Grand Guignol theater. Soldiers, scavengers, and other characters fade in and out of the narrative to underscore the humiliations of this trek in one form or another, but always to sound the same message that a cycle is being repeated: “The past is always waiting up ahead,” as one character thinks.
Yet as a rhetorical exercise, the effect is atmospheric and chilling. The book thrives less on its plot and its characterizations than on Monge’s determination to break apart the familiarity — and shake readers out — of a migrant narrative largely shaped by politics and statistics. Monge is an experimentalist: He’s part of a group of Spanish-language authors participating in Dublin’s Bloomsday celebrations, and his first English translation, last year’s The Arid Sky, was a powerful, time-folding tale of violence in a small desert town. There, too, all plots led not just toward death but annihilation: “The black billowing thread of smoke reached skywards, a tongue mute and never-ending, twisting back and around itself.”
Monge’s divergent take on form puts him in line with past generations of Latin American shape-shifting authors — Márquez, Cortázar, and Bolaño most notably. But Among the Lost is also part of a current wave of writers like Yuri Herrera, Edmundo Paz Soldan, and (especially) Valeria Luiselli, who’ve leveraged the tactics of the Modernists for new purposes a century on. The layering of different kinds of narratives, the skepticism about narrative, the play between interiority and exteriority are all part of Among the Lost’s territory. Monge’s migrant stories stake out a place between reality and mythology, and translator Frank Wynne is right to point out that Monge’s story “takes place in a mythic landscape” where “the particular is universal, the allegorical all too brutally real.”
So if the story feels destabilizing, that’s by design. It’s the product of living in a place where its occupants are nameless, voiceless, bodiless — a state of un-nature, of un-compassion. At one point, Monge refers to Epitafio as “Hewhoisdeafofmind,” a person who has shut down his humanity for the sake of human trafficking. Monge is hopeful — skeptical, but hopeful — that others still can hear.
[Published June 4, 2019 by Scribe. 368 pages, $17.00 paperback]