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Monday, October 11, 2021

The Twilight Zone (2021) by Nona Fernández


Book Review
The Twilight Zone (2021)
by Nona Fernández

    The Twilight Zone, written by Chilean author Nona Fernandez, is a finalist for this years National Book Award for Translated Fiction.  Fernandez is one of two Chilean authors on National Book Award shortlist, the other being Benjamin Labutut, nominated for When We Cease to Understand the World.  Unlike Labutut's book, The Twilight Zone is actually about Chile, specifically the aftermath of the post-Allende anti-Communist dictatorship, which paired mid 20th century Fascist style police-state repression against Leftists with a thorough implementation  of international-trade friendly neo-liberal economics as advance by University of Chicago Professor Milton Friedman and his acolytes. 

    Where does all that leave Fernandez? Her book is squarely in the post-reconciliation genre of recovery literature that finds kinship with 2015 Nobel Winner Svetlana Alexivech.  Fernandez is, after all, free to publish The Twilight Zone inside Chile, something that couldn't be said for many Spanish language writers in the 20th and 21st century. Chile is also an important enough literary market to get her a translation deal in the United States, where Graywolf Press, the well-regard indie, put the translation out. 

  There is great power in Fernandez's musings about the vagaries of vile human rights abuses and the consequences (or lack thereof) to those who perpetrate them.  The focus of this book is a member of the Chilean police who comes forward about the abuses committed by the Government against his people.  The Twilight Zone consists of the narrator coming to terms this man's existence and his status as a valued witness.  

    It's funny- I can't think of any Nazi's who turned "state's evidence" in the Nuremberg trials, although I suppose there must have been engagement with the non-Nazi parts of the German military.  The whole institutionalization of post-atrocity "forgiveness" possesses a macabre quality, which, I think is the point of calling the book The Twilight Zone.  It strikes me that this could very much be a winner of the National Book Award for Translated Fiction this year.

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