Fern�Ández is such a creative writer. Highly recommend. ( )

Great book. Based on actual events.

It's a treatment of the political repression in Chile under Pinochet.

But it's reimagined as though were an episode of the old American sci-fi series, "The Twilight Zone", shown in Chile where the author watched it on television in her childhood in the 1970s.

As a sidenote, televisions were one of the futuristic designs of goods mass-produced in materials such as plastics and fibreglass by the "Popular Unity" coaliton government of Salvador Allende, which was ousted in Pinochet's military coup.

Allende had attempted to raise the standard of living of the Chilean people, nationalising industry, and trying to bring it under workers' control. To help in this, he'd hired a cigar-smoking and whisky-drinking British management consultant called Stafford Beer.

They planned to build a "cybernetic" system, a bit like a human body with organs operating without always being under conscious control of the brain, with a mainframe computer in the nerve centre (modelled on a British wartime Ops room), and telex machines set up in factories.

Beer even had a plan to set up "algedonic" meters in the public's television sets, so they could vote on how happy, or unhappy, they were with any particular political proposal. ("Algedonic" from two words, "algos" meaning pain, and "hedos" meaning pleasure.)

So, a bit had happened by the time of the events depicted in this novel.

It needs a preface, really. But to give some more background, this quote is from the 2018 preface to the edition of another book, How To Read Donald Duck:Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, first published in Chile in 1971, and burnt by the Pinochet regime:

"...military conspirators and their civilian masters in the oligarchy had been financed and aided by the American government and the C.I.A...Nixon and Kissinger had destabilized the Allende experiment... The revolutionaries were dead or in hiding or banished, and the Chicago Boys were unleashed on Chile, a laboratory for the Milton Friedmanesque experiments that were soon to take over England and the United States itself in the Thatcher and Reagan eras..."(p.vii)

A couple of excerpts from The Twilight Zone itself:

"she [the author's mother] returned to work while I [the author] was left in the middle of those long seventies afternoons, The Twilight Zone [TV show] marking the moment when the sun began to set.
A space traveler has to make an emergency landing on an unknown planet a million miles from home. His spaceship is out of commission. His right arm is broken, his forehead cut and bleeding. Colonel Cook, voyager across the ocean of space, will never fly the smouldering wreck of his ship again. He survived the crash, but his lonely journey has just begun. Hurting and afraid, he sends messages home pleading for someone to rescue him, though that appears to be impossible. His people can't come for him and he'll be left all alone, on a small planet in space, his very own twilight zone. "(p. 40)

"My mother knew none of this when she told us what she'd seen that morning, a few hours before. It took me years to connect her story to the one I read in the testimony of the man who tortured people. While we were having lunch that day, eating the casserole or stew my grandmother had made, Carlos Contreras Maluje [a pharmacist and city councilman] was probably getting beaten in a cell on Calle Dieciocho, a few blocks from my old house. While we were helping ourselves to gelatin and drowning in condensed milk, a dessert we loved, Carlos Contreras Maluje was probably sending telepathic messages to his family and friends, asking someone to come and rescue him from the small, lonely planet where he had landed. That place where he was stranded, afraid and in pain, with no ship to take him back to his home above the Maluje Pharmacy in Conception. "(p. 43)

And even the torturers get the same treatment themselves from the Pinochet regime as they've given others when they mess up:

"His body turned up in the river riddled with seventeen bullet holes, his fingers severed at the first joint, his spinal column snapped, and his genitals exploded."(p.84) ( )

This is one of those odd novels that use fiction to explore history. When this is done poorly I hate it--when it is done well, it is masterful.

The narrator is a Chilean journalist (who happens to have the same surname as the author--are some of the journalist's memories actually the author's?) who is fascinated by Andres Antonio Valenzuela Morales, a real member of the Chilean Air Force Intelligence who tortured people. In 1984 he spilled all to a journalist.

The narrator studies his confessions, visits museums, memorials, places he went. She reads articles and imagines what she was doing at the time, as a child.

And throughout the novel she relates the entire experience--of Chile in the 70s/80s, of this agent confessing and fleeing to Europe, continuing to provide information and identifying those he can, of people pretending nothing was happening next door or in the street or across the street when they knew exactly what was happening--with the TV show The Twilight Zone. How the strangest things can happen, and how things may be exactly how they seem--or they may be the opposite.

It sounds crazy, but it works.

In many ways this reminds me of [book:The Shape of the Ruins|38256287]. It is completely different, but the way actual history is examined through the narration is also very similar. I also spend a lot of time on Wikipedia while reading both of these books, learning more of the background. ( )

Nona Fernández weaves a story about the "man who tortured people" at the behest of the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet in the mid-80s. Eventually, he is convinced to provide evidence against the regime and has to hide from those seeking to silence him to repress the truth. The story of his exodus from Chile and exile in France keeps the reader's interest, and again helps deflect from all of the disappeared people. Integrating some of the wildly strange episodes of Rod Serling's iconic television show, Fernández also manages to keep the story from being overly morbid. ( )

En plena dictadura chilena, un angustiado hombre llega a las oficinas de una revista de oposición. Es un agente de la policía secreta. Quiero hablar, dice, y una periodista prende su grabadora para escuchar un testimonio que abrirá las puertas de una dimensión hasta entonces desconocida. Siguiendo la hebra de esta escena real, Nona Fernández activa los mecanismos de la imaginación para acceder a aquellos rincones donde la memoria y los archivos no han podido llegar. Confrontando su propia experiencia con los relatos del hombre que torturaba, la narradora entra en las vidas de los protagonistas de ese testimonio ominoso: la de un padre que es detenido en una micro mientras lleva a sus hijos al colegio y la de un niño que cambia de nombres y de vidas hasta ser testigo de una masacre, entre otras.