Nona Fernández

In 1984, a fictitious member of the Chilean air force walks into a dissident news office asking to speak to an activist reporter. He wishes to testify to all the atrocities that he has witnessed and participated in. The story is published under the headline, "I Tortured People." The novel then moves back and forth in time between the narrator, a woman who produces documentaries on human rights abuses, and the torturer and his victims. By depicting both the events as they happened and how show more they are being portrayed in the present, the author highlights the way memory is manipulated and exploited on both a national and individual level.

I found the use of pop culture references to things such as 1984, The Twilight Zone, and the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire to be an interesting although unnecessary conceit in which to frame the novel. Much more disconcerting to me were the parallels between the novel and current events in the United States. Although published in 2016, the disappearances, use of military in civil life, double-speak, persecution of the press, and political pomp and pageantry made for grim parallels to Trump's second term.

Although I missed some of the historical references, I appreciated this novel for the creative way in which it approached the Pinochet dictatorship and its continued effect on Chilean life and memory. A finalist for the National Book Award, The Twilight Zone is a difficult read due to its content, but a fascinating one. show less

It is impossible to write about how much I loved this book.

One of those books that, despite its tiny size, was doing SO MUCH that I felt like I needed time for my thoughts to settle for me to write about it, yet with time I lost some of the details of the SO MUCH in this book, and it ended up feeling MORE impossible to write about, not less.

Okay. So it starts with Fernandez's mother developing a fainting problem. But almost immediately it is also about memory, and brain scans, and show more constellations, and Chile's troubled political history, and mythology, and deserts, and Amnesty International, and the Voyager recordings, and what it means to be a person, and the stories we tell about ourselves as individuals and as a society, but also the stories that are suppressed, and what that costs and to whom, and what it takes to reckon with those losses.

I was enraptured by all that was woven together here and how it enfolded. show less

The narrator says that when she was a child she was told that if she was naughty, an old man (woman?) would shove her in a sack and steal her. But instead of being scared into good behavior, she wanted to see what was in the sack – diving deep into the bottom.

So in 1984 when a magazine cover pictured Andres Antonio Valenzuela Morales with the headline “I Tortured People” the narrator dove deep into the dark sack.

The Man Who Tortured People worked for the Pinochet regime – first show more helping the secret police capture the unfortunate accused and then being promoted to torture itself – after a day of which he would return home to his wife and family.

Thousands of ‘enemies of the regime’ including former Allende supporters, those whose politics were to to the left of the dictatorship and trade unionists disappeared to be killed or tortured. They disappeared into another dimension – much like the 5th dimension warping the boundaries of normalality in the popular American TV show The Twilight Zone.

How would I rate it? The author definitely achieved her goal. The writing and the Twilight Zone references make this memorable. It really illuminated the brutal Pinochet regime for me in a way that I’ll remember for a long time.

And yet, would I ever reread it? No. It’s after all a very painful tale of human suffering without a hopeful note except that Chile moved onward. I just can’t look in the bottom of the sack. show less

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 show more 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. show less