Space Invaders: A Novel

This is amazing writing. What’s not there looms larger than what is.

It’s a coincidence that just a week or so ago I reviewed a book, 77 by Guillermo Saccomanno, about the dictatorship in Argentina and here we have a book about the same situation in neighboring Chile around the same time – late 1970’s through 1990.This is a very short book, a novella, by a woman who grew up during this time (b. 1971). Because it’s so short I won’t go into much of additional summary at risk of giving more of the story away, although it’s not a book you read for its plot.Here’s a paraphrased blurb:A dreamlike evocation of a generation that grew up in the shadow of Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1980s Chile. It’s the story of a group of childhood friends who, too young to understand what is going on as children, in adulthood become preoccupied by uneasy memories, dreams and visions of one of their female classmates. They read old letters she sent that eventually, mysteriously, stopped arriving and she disappeared. Growing up, these friends were old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them but were powerless in the face of it. They could control only the stories they told one another and the ghostly green bullets they fired in the video game they played obsessively (the title).Under the dictatorship they recall regimented school assemblies and a nationalistic curriculum that made much of Chile’s old wars with Peru and Bolivia. Even the patron saint hanging in their classroom, the Virgen del Carmen, has a connection to the military. As adults they see friends’ fathers and uncles being indicted on television for murder and torture.Like the Argentina story I mentioned above, the book’s main theme is also like The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, about the drug wars in Colombia. All three books share a main theme of how violence and terror shaped a generation.The author, also an actress, has written a half-dozen novels as well as short stories and plays. From what I can tell very little of her work has been translated into English.

Estoy estudiando inglés y es una historia adecuada para mi nivel

Viene en inglés y yo lo quiero en español