Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In a stunning exploration of memory and complicity, award-winning actress and playwright Nona Fernández (Space Invaders, 2019) takes the reader to Chile and explores the Pinochet dictatorship through a member of the secret police and his confession. The narrator, a documentary filmmaker, was first introduced to the central figure after he appeared on the cover of a magazine, having admitted to torturing people. But what happened next? Part historical exploration, part imagined scenario for what went on behind the scenes, this is a multilayered novel that weaves the narrator's own dark obsession with this this tragic time with questions that haunt all of us about the things that we can never know. From graphic torture scenes to moments of quiet reflection on who stays silent and who speaks up, this is a propulsive novel. Aware of the intensity of the story and its dark themes, Fernández is careful to pull readers in without overwhelming them. Instead, readers won't be able to put down this powerful translated work, whatever they did or did not know about Chile and Pinochet before entering The Twilight Zone.
Library Journal Review
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
