The Twilight Zone

A Novel

By: Nona Fernandez, Natasha Wimmer - translator

Narrated by: Raquel Beattie

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.

©2016 Nona Fernandez; English translation copyright 2021 by Natasha Wimmer (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

A good but dark listen

This book was good. However, it was not new to me. I've read a lot about this period in this country, so I've learned a lot about the topics at hand. For those who haven't, it would be a worthwhile listen.

good

titles and I will be a good day at work and I will be a good day at work