"The Twilight Zone" is a National Book Award finalist novel about the turbulent and sometimes surreal recent history of Chilean politics told through a narrator who lived through it as a girl, a young women and an adult in the 1970s through current times. She uses many elements of pop culture from those 50 years, including the central metaphor of the Twilight Zone TV show brought bizarre and darkly ironic stories into our living rooms and embedded themselves into our consciousness. The story's anchor is an interview read by the narrator of a self-confessed killer and torturer who implicated himself in many of the dark deeds that occurred during the long period of oppression under the Pinochet regime. The killer, usually referred to as "the man who tortured people", had a crisis of conscience and provided evidence of the killings, kidnappings, disappearances, etc. that sometimes had links to the narrator's life (a classmate murdered, familiarity with some of the henchmen, etc.). The novel is translated by Natasha Wimmer, who also translated Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detective" and "2666". It's a harrowing and depressing story, but the strangeness of Chile's rebuilding is perfectly reflected in the Twilight Zone metaphor and it's well worth reading.
For a review of the book from the NY Times, click here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/books/review/nona-fernandez-twilight-zone.html
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