The Twilight Zone (La dimensión desconocida)
Nona Fernández, Natasha Wimmer (translation)An engrossing, incantatory novel about the legacy of historical crimes
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 & finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández’s mesmerizing & 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 & his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood & career as a writer & 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, & 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.
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Nona Fernández was born in Santiago, Chile. She is an actress & writer, & has published two plays, a collection of short stories, & six novels, including Space Invaders.
Natasha Wimmer is the translator of nine books by Roberto Bolaño, including The Savage Detectives & 2666. Her most recent translations is Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue.