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Books Review Letters From Latin America: February 14, 2022

Reviews of fiction by Nona Fernandez, short stories by Caio Fernando Abreu and poetry by Martin Rangel

IN THE aftermath of the bloody coup d’etat of September 1973 by general Augusto Pinochet against Chile’s democratically elected government of president Salvador Allende nearly 40,000 people were illegally detained and/or tortured in Chile and more than 3,000 were murdered or disappeared.

Chilean author Nona Fernandez’s masterful The Twilight Zone (Daunt Book Originals, £9.99) is a devastating attempt at giving voice to those victims of Pinochet’s regime.

Fernandez employs Rod Serling’s influential television series The Twilight Zone as one of the novel’s thematic nuclei. The book is divided into four sections or “zones,” where each character ends up dealing with often disturbing or unusual events. In each case, the experience is described as entering “the Twilight Zone,” often with a surprise ending or a point.

The book begins with Andres Valenzuela Morales, a corporal in the air force and self-confessed torturer of political prisoners, who went public with his story in 1984. He is shown contacting a reporter of the magazine Cauce to tell his story of the events, including the abductions, tortures and mass killings in which he participated. Fernandez weaves the story of the “man who tortured people” with those who were victims of the dictatorship and who finally entered that menacing Twilight Zone.

“The spell remained intact. His face loomed again, and like a rat I was ready to follow wherever his testimony led. I pored over every word. Twenty-five years later my hazy map was gradually coming into focus,” writes the narrator, as she starts to piece together all the parts of the puzzle.

Fernandez — who was born two years before the US-backed coup to depose Allende — revisits her childhood in a fictional exploration of the violence, horror and repression that plagued her nation for nearly two decades. She writes in the vein of other writers who explored their respective nation’s dark and hidden histories. From her fellow countryman Ariel Dorfman and Horacio Castellanos Moya from El Salvador to Miguel Bonasso from Argentina and Nobel prize-winning Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias.

The Twilight Zone, dextrously translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, is as mesmerising as it is haunting — it braves Chile’s bloody past by refusing to forget the murdered, the raped, the tortured and the disappeared.

It reveals the torturer’s voice, recreating each of his atrocities from the victims’ point of view. As the narrator explains: “I believe that evil is directly proportional to idiocy. I believe that that the territory you roamed in anguish before you disappeared is ruled by idiots. It isn’t true that criminals are masterminds. It takes a vast amount of stupidity to assemble the parts of such grotesque, absurd, and cruel machinery. Pure brutality disguised as a master plan. Small people, with small minds, who don’t understand the abyss of the other. They lack the language or tools for it. Empathy and compassion require a clear mind.” A must read.

Moldy Strawberries (archipelago books, £13.99) is a collection of 18 short stories by Caio Fernando Abreu, one of the most influential and irreverent Brazilian writers of the 1970s and 1980s. During the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-85), his homoerotic writing was heavily censored and he was placed on a wanted list. Abre found refuge in the literary counterculture, eventually going into self-exile in Europe.

The collection explores many of Abreu’s most important themes, from the Aids epidemic in Brazil to the stifling dictatorship. His writing is at times delirious, arresting and revolutionary, often using fragmentation and the language of dreams to describe the world around him.

Among the most beautiful and highly political stories is Fat Tuesday, where Abreu describes a gay encounter between two men who meet at a club in Brazil and end up having sex on the beach, a story of the senses with a devastating end. “We pulled away a little, just to look at how beautiful our naked masculine bodies looked stretched on the sand beside each other, gleaming with phosphorescence from the waves. Planktons, he said, they glow when they make love. And we glowed.”

In 1994, while living in France, Abreu tested positive for HIV. He died two years later in his hometown of Porto Alegre at the age of 47. This luminous collection of stories shows him to be one of the most compelling writers of the continent at times of oppression.

Mexican poet Martin Rangel challenges convention by writing poetry that is as profane as it is perceptive. He’s also known for his rap, electronic compositions and spoken word performances. Sometimes I write poems and sometimes I write poems (Broken Sleep Books, £8,99), is a stunning collection of poems beautifully rendered into English by Lawrence Schimel. Rangel’s collection is full of energy, clarity and musicality, often dealing with themes of language, artistic creation and the complexities of the modern world.

Among my favourite poems are I translate to steal, sometimes i write poems and sometimes i write poems and mayakovsky and i — the latter with some of the most stunningly beautiful lines: “there is no year that passes / which doesn’t make me think / of poverty and the way / in which it brings me closer / to eternity while / it moves me further / from the world / I shall live off hunger / the bullets that plow my country / from border to border / they can never pierce me.”

An sublime collection from one of most exciting writers of Mexico.

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