★ 01/25/2021
Chilean author Fernández’s second novel to be translated into English (after Space Invaders) powerfully evokes the brutality of Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year military dictatorship and is based on the life of one of his security policemen. The unnamed 40-something narrator grew up during Pinochet’s reign, and as an adult her documentary and script writing work have led her to repeatedly encounter intelligence agent Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, who in 1984 made a bombshell confession that he systematically tortured and murdered political dissidents. Now, 30 years after Morales’s flight from Chile, he’s returned to give testimony for the court, and the narrator becomes obsessed with him. For her, Morales illuminates what she calls the “twilight zone” of a repressive regime, where people disappear regularly and feeble excuses for absences are accepted. While the narrator grew up largely unscathed, she’s haunted by the stories of torture she read in magazines, and as her research takes her down a dark tunnel of history and memory, she imagines how the intervening years have treated Morales. Fernández keenly reconstructs one of his victim’s final moments and Morales’s eventual escape to France after his confession. This disturbing story of a repentant man makes for a gripping psychological game of cat and mouse. (Mar.)
The Twilight Zone is wildly innovative, a major contribution to literature.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Fernández has found an answer to an urgent question: making art is inadequate always, but powerful nonetheless.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine
“There is an incantatory quality to Nona Fernández’s The Twilight Zone, a feeling of walking, as though under a spell, and then accidentally tripping into the murky unknown."—The Paris Review
“Nona Fernández has developed a reputation for composing unsettling portraits of life during Chile’s brutal military dictatorship, with stories that venture beyond the stiff and incomplete histories recorded by truth and reconciliation commissions.”—Vulture
“Blending fact and fiction, Fernández offers a social autopsy of the era.”—BOMB Magazine
“A stunning exploration of memory and complicity. . . . Part historical exploration, part imagined scenario for what went on behind the scenes, [The Twilight Zone] is a multilayered novel. . . . Readers won't be able to put down this powerful translated work.”—Aryssa Damron, Booklist
“Fernández’s conversational, essayistic narration guides the reader sure-footedly through a minefield of political absurdity, shining a blacklight on doublespeak and empty political theatre.”—Harvard Review of Books
“This disturbing story of a repentant man makes for a gripping psychological game of cat and mouse.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Gripping and rivetingly intense narrative involving Pinochet’s repressive rule in 1970s–80s Chile, Fernández uses flashbacks and imagination to weave together three interrelated, nonlinear threads through which flow present, past, and future.”—Library Journal, starred review
“In The Twilight Zone, Fernández shows why the emotional toll of the Pinochet dictatorship has yet to subside, why any country that denies the crimes its police forces have committed remains a country stewing with dishonesty.”—Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew
“Nona Fernández helps us glimpse the horrible reality of torture—and the even more terrifying way it becomes routine—in luminous prose of great intelligence and obsessive sincerity.”—Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season
★ 01/01/2021
In this gripping and rivetingly intense narrative involving Pinochet's repressive rule in 1970s-80s Chile, Fernández (Space Invaders) uses flashbacks and imagination to weave together three interrelated, nonlinear threads through which flow present, past, and future. The main story line focuses on the real-life Andrés Valenzuela Morales, who, 10 years into the dictatorship, confessed to a journalist his role in torturing victims of the regime, his subsequent clandestine existence to avoid retaliation, and his eventual escape to France. A second stream is the series of scenarios showing a handful of documented cases of kidnappings, interrogations, tortures, executions, and eventual disappearances in Chile and the futile quest for justice from victims' families. The final thread revolves around the narrator/writer as she—and Chile—confront the past. More than pure fabrication, this documentary novel fictionalizes people and events by using testimony and literary license to convey the story. The twilight zone of the title metamorphizes the dark side of these events, which would seem fantastical if they weren't so painfully real. VERDICT Fernández, 2017 winner of the prestigious Sor Juana de la Cruz Prize, delivers an emotional punch that never loses its strength, provoking responses ranging from anger to disbelief to sadness.—Lawrence Olszewski, formerly with OCLC
★ 2020-11-27
Chilean actor and novelist Fernández continues her project of lifting the veil on the dark years of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.
As in Fernández’s previous novel, Space Invaders (2019)—note the two pop-culture titles—the story moves about in great leaps from decade to decade. It opens in 1984, when a man enters the Santiago office of a magazine and asks to speak to the author of a story that centers on him. “Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, Soldier First Class, ID #39432, district of La Ligua,” wants to speak about what he has done on behalf of the regime, “about making people disappear.” He has a dossier running page after page, giving names, recounting how they were tortured, his victims now denizens of “some parallel reality” that suggests to the narrator an extended episode of the old creature-feature series The Twilight Zone. A quarter-century passes, and now the narrator encounters the killer again, this time as she is writing a television series about the era, one of the characters based on him. He recounts watching the protest marches by the mothers of los desaparecidos, who hoist poster-sized photographs of their loved ones: “They don’t realize that I know where that person is,” he says, “I know what happened to him.” Enumerating the victims is a process that absorbs both characters, moving between past and present, when the state-sponsored murderer escapes to rural France: “Will he be able to change the shadows of things to come? He wants to believe he will, that he has the right to a change of skin.” Fernández’s story has shades of the cat-and-mouse mystery, her touchstones emblems of mass global culture: episodes of The Twilight Zone, to be sure, but also old movies and, of course, the video games of the era: “On the same television screen where we used to play Space Invaders, we now saw the national police agents responsible for the murders.”
Fernández is emerging as a major voice in South American letters, and this slender but rich story shows why.
