Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2021
192 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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.
BookBrowse Review
"Merging fact and fiction, Fernández explores memory and complicity. Driven by historical accuracy, the novel's psychological insight and unflinching detail capture the lingering impact of Pinochet's brutal rule over Chile, but the heavy subject matter and meandering focus can hamper the book's emotional resonance." - Callum McLaughlin
Other Reviews
"Chilean author Fernández's second novel to be translated into English powerfully evokes the brutality of Augusto Pinochet's 17-year military dictatorship, based on a historical perpetrator of torture...This disturbing story of a repentant man makes for a gripping psychological game of cat and mouse." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Fernández is emerging as a major voice in South American letters, and this slender but rich story shows why." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[G]ripping and rivetingly intense...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." - Library Journal (starred review)
"In The Twilight Zone, Fernández shows why the emotional toll of the Pinochet dictatorship has yet to subside, why any country that denies the crimes its police forces have committed remains a country stewing with dishonesty." - Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew
"Nona Fernández helps us glimpse the horrible reality of torture―and the even more terrifying way it becomes routine―in luminous prose of great intelligence and obsessive sincerity." - Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season
This information about The Twilight Zone was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nona Fernández was born in Santiago, Chile. She is an actress and writer, and has published two plays, a collection of short stories, and six novels, including Space Invaders and The Twilight Zone, which was awarded the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.
Natasha Wimmer is a translator who has worked on Roberto Bolaño's 2666, for which she was awarded the PEN Translation prize in 2009, and The Savage Detectives. She lives in New York.
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The House on Biscayne Bay
by Chanel Cleeton
As death stalks a gothic mansion in Miami, the lives of two women intertwine as the past and present collide.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
