ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
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Letters From Latin America: February 14, 2022
Reviews of fiction by Nona Fernandez, short stories by Caio Fernando Abreu and poetry by Martin Rangel
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
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.
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LEO BOIX reviews two powerful Latin American novels in which myth and crime fiction expose the deadly consequences of patriarchy, clandestine abortion and state violence
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Kate Clark pays tribute to Ricardo, whose life spanned the hopes of Allende’s Chile, the horrors of military dictatorship and decades of campaigning for justice in exile
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin