Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Daunt Books Publishing)
This was a slim book that caught my eye the last time I was exploring the Travel Writing section of Daunt Books looking for different books for my Read the World project, and I'm so pleased that it did.
It is deceptively short as the story is really haunting me, far more than many much longer novels do!
The description which caught my attention reads:
Preoccupied by uneasy memories and visions, a group of friends look back on their childhood. Their thoughts and dreams circle one old classmate: Estrella González Jepsen, who one day simply disappeared. Estrella’s father, it transpires, was a ranking government officer implicated in the Pinochet regime. The question of what became of Estrella haunts her former friends. They catch glimpses of her braids, hear echoes of her voice, read old letters. They recall regimented school assemblies, nationalistic class performances and a trip to the beach. Growing up, they were old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them but powerless to resist or confront it. They could control only the stories they told one another and the ghostly green bullets they fired in their favourite video game.
At first I wasn't at all sure what was happening, the chapters are quite short, dream like, and repetitive but I quickly realised that was the point of the book - these were children at the time of the Pinochet regime and they themselves didn't understand what was happening and even as adults their memories are fragmented and unreliable.
There is some violence in the book, but what made it stand out for more was the way the threat and fear of the era wove its way through the book and became far more telling than any political history of Chile could have been.
This is definitely one of my standout reads from the past few months, and a real sign that novellas can be far more powerful than many opuses and that in the English speaking world we should start to embrace the form.
