RaveThe London Magazine...a fierce love story ... Monge’s narrative plants the reader in this dirty and tumultuous foreign land in a way that is artistically and cleverly shackling... [an] accomplished translation by Frank Wynne, who serves the barbaric fluency of the text very well ... It is a dog-eat-dog world, and bears striking resemblance to the anarchic Dante’s inferno, which seems to be a key influence on Monge’s narrative ... mimics the Joycean tendency to mash words together...Monge’s characters are often comically nicknamed, such as shewhoadoresepitafio and, my personal favourite, ionlyhearwhatiwant. Together these influences give a layered impression to Monge’s narrative, and contributes to an exciting period for Mexican fiction ... Overall, the triumph of Among the Lost is its depiction of human suffering ... Monge exposes these truths in stories that are not easy to shirk away from, with remarkable linguistic skill. An important read.
