Nona FernándezRezensionen

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 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.

Fern�Ández is such a creative writer. Highly recommend.

Chilean Childhoods
Review of the Daunt Books paperback (June 2022) translated by [author:Natasha Wimmer|723942] from the Spanish language original [book:Space Invaders|18770438] (2013)

This book invites us to work on memory. Not an easy job for children who grew up facing the incessant attack of invaders from space. Nobody wants to remember nightmares. But, inevitably, as it is said towards the end of this text, we are submerged there. We don't know how to wake up. This book helps us do just that job. Remember to get out of that dream with no apparent way out. One life, another and another, in a cyclical massacre with no possibility of an end. Escape from that bad dream to which we are subjected.
Our own story.
Learn to wake up. - A translated excerpt from the Epilogue by Jaime Pinos to the Spanish language edition (not included in the English translation editions).

This recent UK edition of Nona Fernández's Space Invaders (orig. 2013) does not improve on the original 2019 US edition of the same translation as published by Graywolf Press. Again, no Introduction of Afterword is provided for context, which to me seems a real requirement for an historical fiction based on events ranging from 50 to 30 years ago. So it is another case of researching and then writing your own Afterword or Interpretation (in your mind perhaps). Even the original Spanish language edition contained an Epilogue, although it was more of an appreciation and an encouragement to exorcism than a background history.

So unless you already have a thorough knowledge of recent Chilean history, you will likely have to look up the Military Dictatorship of Chile (1973-1990) and Human Rights Violations in Pinochet's Chile in general, and the Caso Degollados (Spanish: Slit-Throat Case) in particular.

Fernández's titular use of the early video game Space Invaders is a recurring metaphor for the incessant persecution of people under the Pincochet's regime from what seems like countless waves of attackers. The author presents this from the point of view of children growing up under the dictatorship, which she did herself, having been born in 1971. There is the impression that some of the characters may be based on her own childhood friends e.g. one named Maldonado is thanked in the acknowledgements. Most of that background remains a mystery however.

I found myself confused at times by various aspects, mixing up the father with the uncle etc. The main character whose fate haunts the dreams of her childhood friends is described in the synopsis with the name of Estrella González Jepsen, but midway in a reproduced letter says her middle name is Marisella. You then deduce that her name must have been Estrella Marisella González with a later married name of Jepsen. So it is the synopsis leading you astray... Anyway, various aspects just didn't satisfy me about the presentation of this translation. Not the original author's fault though.

I read Space Invaders as the August 2022 selection from the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month (BotM) club. Subscriptions to the BotM support the annual Republic of Consciousness Prize for small independent publishers.

Trivia
I accessed the original Spanish language edition through Scribd. If you want to check my translation the original excerpt quoted above reads as:

Este libro nos invita al trabajo de la memoria. Un trabajo nada fácil para los niños que crecieron enfrentando el ataque incesante de los invasores del espacio. Nadie quiere recordar las pesadillas. Pero, inevitablemente, como se dice hacia el final de este texto, Ahí estamos sumergidos. No sabemos despertar. Este libro nos ayuda justamente a hacer ese trabajo. Recordar para salir de ese sueño sin salida aparente. Una vida, otra y otra más, en una matanza cíclica sin posibilidad de fin. Escapar de ese mal sueño al que estamos sometidos.
Nuestra propia historia.
Aprender a despertar.

Great book. Based on actual events.

It's a treatment of the political repression in Chile under Pinochet.

But it's reimagined as though were an episode of the old American sci-fi series, "The Twilight Zone", shown in Chile where the author watched it on television in her childhood in the 1970s.

As a sidenote, televisions were one of the futuristic designs of goods mass-produced in materials such as plastics and fibreglass by the "Popular Unity" coaliton government of Salvador Allende, which was ousted in Pinochet's military coup.

Allende had attempted to raise the standard of living of the Chilean people, nationalising industry, and trying to bring it under workers' control. To help in this, he'd hired a cigar-smoking and whisky-drinking British management consultant called Stafford Beer.

They planned to build a "cybernetic" system, a bit like a human body with organs operating without always being under conscious control of the brain, with a mainframe computer in the nerve centre (modelled on a British wartime Ops room), and telex machines set up in factories.

Beer even had a plan to set up "algedonic" meters in the public's television sets, so they could vote on how happy, or unhappy, they were with any particular political proposal. ("Algedonic" from two words, "algos" meaning pain, and "hedos" meaning pleasure.)

So, a bit had happened by the time of the events depicted in this novel.

It needs a preface, really. But to give some more background, this quote is from the 2018 preface to the edition of another book, How To Read Donald Duck:Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, first published in Chile in 1971, and burnt by the Pinochet regime:

"...military conspirators and their civilian masters in the oligarchy had been financed and aided by the American government and the C.I.A...Nixon and Kissinger had destabilized the Allende experiment... The revolutionaries were dead or in hiding or banished, and the Chicago Boys were unleashed on Chile, a laboratory for the Milton Friedmanesque experiments that were soon to take over England and the United States itself in the Thatcher and Reagan eras..."(p.vii)

A couple of excerpts from The Twilight Zone itself:

"she [the author's mother] returned to work while I [the author] was left in the middle of those long seventies afternoons, The Twilight Zone [TV show] marking the moment when the sun began to set.
A space traveler has to make an emergency landing on an unknown planet a million miles from home. His spaceship is out of commission. His right arm is broken, his forehead cut and bleeding. Colonel Cook, voyager across the ocean of space, will never fly the smouldering wreck of his ship again. He survived the crash, but his lonely journey has just begun. Hurting and afraid, he sends messages home pleading for someone to rescue him, though that appears to be impossible. His people can't come for him and he'll be left all alone, on a small planet in space, his very own twilight zone. "(p. 40)

"My mother knew none of this when she told us what she'd seen that morning, a few hours before. It took me years to connect her story to the one I read in the testimony of the man who tortured people. While we were having lunch that day, eating the casserole or stew my grandmother had made, Carlos Contreras Maluje [a pharmacist and city councilman] was probably getting beaten in a cell on Calle Dieciocho, a few blocks from my old house. While we were helping ourselves to gelatin and drowning in condensed milk, a dessert we loved, Carlos Contreras Maluje was probably sending telepathic messages to his family and friends, asking someone to come and rescue him from the small, lonely planet where he had landed. That place where he was stranded, afraid and in pain, with no ship to take him back to his home above the Maluje Pharmacy in Conception. "(p. 43)

And even the torturers get the same treatment themselves from the Pinochet regime as they've given others when they mess up:

"His body turned up in the river riddled with seventeen bullet holes, his fingers severed at the first joint, his spinal column snapped, and his genitals exploded."(p.84)

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 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.

Nona Fernández weaves a story about the "man who tortured people" at the behest of the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet in the mid-80s. Eventually, he is convinced to provide evidence against the regime and has to hide from those seeking to silence him to repress the truth. The story of his exodus from Chile and exile in France keeps the reader's interest, and again helps deflect from all of the disappeared people. Integrating some of the wildly strange episodes of Rod Serling's iconic television show, Fernández also manages to keep the story from being overly morbid.

Brilliant, dreamlike... and way too short.

This short novel is quite interesting, though I am not sure I completely understand it. Set mostly in 1980s Chile, it focuses on a few middle school pupils who deal with the trauma of growing up under Pinochet, surrounded by murder, terror, protests, and being friends with one girl whose father is in the National Guard.

This is a short novella about the collective dreams of adults remembering their childhood in Chili during Pinochet's regime. The memories center on one of their classmates named Estella who one day had to leave school and never came back.

Some memories are ordinary, some are sad, angry, and confused. Some memories are violent and terrifying. All seem to revolve around Estrella. She was a mysterious jewel in a strange world and the memories of Chili revolve around the memories of her.

Existe una Historia, con mayúscula, que ha construido —fabricado— aquello que entendemos por “identidad nacional”. Es la historia que hemos escuchado en nuestros colegios, que compartimos como un referente común y que, en definitiva, forma parte de un inconsciente colectivo al que recurrimos cada vez que es necesario trazar la línea identitaria de “lo chileno”. Mapocho trabaja con la construcción de ese discurso y lo devela parcial, ficticio y homogenizador. Toma sus íconos y los desarticula, resignifica o, simple y llanamente, aniquila. No se trata, por supuesto, de negar que haya existido una historia empírica, sino de cuestionar una escritura que, por más que intente borrarlo, tiene un autor y unos condicionamientos que la configuran desde su formación misma.

En plena dictadura chilena, un angustiado hombre llega a las oficinas de una revista de oposición. Es un agente de la policía secreta. Quiero hablar, dice, y una periodista prende su grabadora para escuchar un testimonio que abrirá las puertas de una dimensión hasta entonces desconocida. Siguiendo la hebra de esta escena real, Nona Fernández activa los mecanismos de la imaginación para acceder a aquellos rincones donde la memoria y los archivos no han podido llegar. Confrontando su propia experiencia con los relatos del hombre que torturaba, la narradora entra en las vidas de los protagonistas de ese testimonio ominoso: la de un padre que es detenido en una micro mientras lleva a sus hijos al colegio y la de un niño que cambia de nombres y de vidas hasta ser testigo de una masacre, entre otras.

A novella, short by definition, but despite this I found this book to be very powerful. I'm always amazed when an author can say so much with so few words. This is not a straightforward story, and it's told in a dreamlike fashion. In fact, dreaming itself is a big part of this novella.

A group of school children, children whose school uniforms must always be worn perfectly. Who walk in lines, their hand on the shoulder of the student in front, so as to keep perfect distances from each other. Perfection and order is demanded. This is Chile under Pinochet, and these children are trying to find a way to understand what they see, but can't comprehend. They play space invaders where they capture and watch the invaders in this make believe world. Then a school girl disappears, doesn't return to school. They each remember different things, dream of her and wonder what has happened. As they grow older they understand much more and wish they didn't, because unlike the space invaders world, in the real one they are powerless.

The author does a great job with pacing in this story. The tension rises incrementally as one reads and the dreams and fears continue.

"We are the most important piece in a game, but we still don't know what game it is."

"No one is exactly sure when it happened, but we all remember that coffins and funerals and wreaths where suddenly everywhere and there was no escaping them, because it had all become something like a bad dream. Maybe it had always been that way and we were only realizing it."

Mapocho è il fiume nero che bagna Santiago del Cile; e fa da sfondo a questo particolare racconto di Nona Fernandez che racconta attraverso gli occhi di una donna, la bionda, del fratello, l’Indio, e delle vicende della madre un Cile inedito. Lo scenario è quello di Pinochet, o meglio delle dittature, di tutte le dittature, con i loro limiti, i loro miserrimi abusi, le loro meschinerie. L’inusualità del racconto sta nello stile, a tratti onirico, del racconto, un tratto narrativo singolare che rende Mapocho un gran romanzo. La storia della famiglia della bionda è il frammento di un mondo universale, fatto di rabbia e sudore, di amore e dolore. L’indio, la sua sessualità, la sua irrefrenabile voglia di vivere, come i dolori della madre della bionda sono il perfetto contorno alla partita di calcio che non si terrà nel campo di Santiago, per divieto delle pubbliche autorità. E l’infrazione al divieto rappresenta il cuore pulsante di questo bel romanzo.½

Je vous avais parlé il y a quelques mois des éditions Zinnia. Je suis retournée voir ce qu’il y avait de nouveau dans leur catalogue et je suis tombée sur ce livre, que j’ai lu en électronique (même si leurs éditions papiers sont magnifiques, je le répète).

L’histoire commence lorsqu’une femme trouve dans des poubelles éparpillées au milieu de la rue une photographie où elle reconnaît son père Fuenzalida qu’elle n’a pas vu depuis qu’elle était petite. En effet, Fuenzalida a à cette époque-là une vie compliquée. Il a un garçon avec une première femme qu’il a quitté pour aller avec une seconde, avec qui il a aussi un garçon (j’ai eu l’impression qu’il s’appelait comme le premier, prénom de son père, ce qui m’a beaucoup choqué mais je n’en suis pas sûre car à un moment dans le texte, c’est seulement le deuxième qui a le prénom du père). Quand cela n’est plus allé avec la seconde femme, il a été avec la mère de la narratrice, avec qui il a donc eu la narratrice, mais entre temps il est retournée avec la seconde femme. La narratrice est donc la fille « cachée » de cet homme, même si caché n’est pas le bon moment car il vient la voir très régulièrement.

Depuis, la narratrice a quand même fait sa vie. Elle écrit des feuilletons pour la télévision. Elle a eu un petit garçon, Cosme, avec un homme, Max, avec qui depuis elle est séparée. Cependant, et malgré une rupture un peu méchante, elle a laissé au père un droit de visite un week-end par moi, occasion pour laquelle Cosme se rend dans la nouvelle famille de son père, composée de Marlene et de jumelles.

Un jour, son ex-mari l’appelle en lui expliquant que son fils dort mais ne se réveille pas. Après une période de flottement, ils vont à l’hôpital où ils apprennent que Cosme a un hématome au cerveau et qu’il faut opérer.

Les réminiscences des moments que la narratrice a passé avec son père, l’opération de son fils, la vie son père lors de la dictature chilienne sont racontés pêle-mêle dans ce roman. À tout cela s’ajoute les épisodes d’un feuilleton qui passe à la télévision pendant que la famille attend à l’hôpital, feuilleton qui a été écrit par la narratrice et qui rappelle étrangement son histoire familiale (et ce qu’elle aimerait aussi).

Les parties que j’ai le plus aimé sont celles sur la vie du père sous la dictature chilienne mais aussi la vie d’auteure de feuilleton de la narratrice (j’ai rigolé en lisant le passage où elle donne tous ces trucs pour écrire un bon feuilleton).

La narration est très construite entre les différentes périodes. En y réfléchissant, j’ai trouvé que la construction était plutôt habile. On a l’impression de suivre un feuilleton télé avec plein de personnages, de ne pas trop savoir où on va. Finalement, l’auteur disperse des indices, des éléments qui font écho d’une situation à une autre pour justement lier les deux événements.

J’ai beaucoup apprécié l’écriture que j’ai trouvé très visuelle (l’auteur écrit aussi des feuilletons dans la vraie vie). On éprouve peu de difficultés à se figurer les personnages (ils ne sont pas que des pensées mais bien des êtres de chair et d’os). De plus, le livre s’ancre dans le réel. Il n’y a pas de facilités romanesques.

En résumé, j’ai trouvé que c’était plutôt un bon moment de lecture-détente.½

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