Nona Fernandez - The Twilight Zone
5 ⭐
Genre: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Translated Fiction, Latin American Literature
Translated by: Natasha Wimmer
Original Title: La Dimension Desconocida
Original Language: Spanish
Pages: 232
Format: Paperback Proof
Publisher: Daunt Books Publishing
Date Published: 7th July 2022
Huge Thank You to Daunt Books Publishing for a proof copy.
Book Blurb:
It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández’s mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man’s face on the magazine’s cover with the words “I Tortured People.” His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fernández follows the “man who tortured people” to places that archives can’t reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel’s title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime.
How do crimes vanish in plain sight? How does one resist a repressive regime? And who gets to shape the truths we live by and take for granted? The Twilight Zone pulls us into the dark portals of the past, reminding us that the work of the writer in the face of historical erasure is to imagine so deeply that these absences can be, for a time, spectacularly illuminated.
My Review:
This book is set in Chile during
the Pinochet regime. In this book, a military officer comes to a local magazine
editor and confesses torturing and killing people. His confession goes live and
the military officer disappears. For the narrator of the book, this magazine article
is all she remembers, even though more than 25 years after the article has been
released have now passed. The narrator encounters the military officer once
again, whilst working on a documentary about Pinochet’s regime about 25 years
after it all happened. She wants to meet the man she calls a torturer. She
wants to know why he did what he did and why he confessed all these years ago.
She talks through his famous victims and their stories, one by one, comparing
them with some of the episodes of the Twilight Zone TV show.
I loved how beautifully written
this book was and how perfectly different ways of writing come together in this
book. The narrator uses her own personal memories and life alongside poetry,
letters, episodes of the Twilight Zone and political narratives together and
merges them so well to show the terrors and horror that people lived through
during the Pinochet regime.
I learned so much from this book
about Chile’s history, which I didn’t know much about before. It was also a new
leap for me into Chile’s literature, with which I am not as familiar as I would
like to be. I also connected so much with the narrator of this book. At points, I felt like I was the one experiencing everything that the narrator is experiencing
in this book and that’s how powerful the
writing is.
Overall: Again, I adored this book. I love Fernandez's
writing. It is so beautiful and she merges words and different references so
well together. It is a good introduction to a part of Chile’s history from the
perspective of people who lived through it and who suffered the most, instead it
being from the point of view of the historians. Honestly, I will be re-reading
this book and recommending it to everyone. I hope I get to read more of her
writing soon, too.
https://dauntbookspublishing.co.uk/authors/nona-fernandez
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