Margins
The Twilight Zone book cover
The Twilight Zone
2016
First Published
4.18
Average Rating
232
Number of Pages

An engrossing, incantatory novel about the legacy of historical crimes by the author of Space Invaders 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.

Avg Rating
4.18
Number of Ratings
4,214
5 STARS
42%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
15%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
1%
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Author

Nona Fernández
Nona Fernández
Author · 10 books

Patricia Paola Fernández Silanes (Santiago, 1971), más conocida como Nona Fernández, es una actriz, escritora, guionista y feminista chilena. Hija única de madre soltera, Nona Fernández creció en un barrio de avenida Matta cercano al mercado persa Bíobío. Como actriz, fundó la compañía Merri Melodys, participó en montajes de muchas obras teatrales y ganó como mejor actriz un concurso del Centro Chileno-Norteamericano de Cultura. Sus cuentos aparecieron primero en diversas antologías de concursos, y su primer libro de relatos salió a luz el año 2000: El cielo. Dos años más tarde publicó su premiada novela Mapocho.

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The Twilight Zone