'Space Invaders' Maps Pixelated Battles Onto Real-Life Conflict
The characters in Nona Fernández' new book are coming of age during Chile's brutal military dictatorship — and for them, video games are a useful framework for understanding the dangers all around.
The Chilean playwright and fiction writer Nona Fernández's , translated into English by the masterful Natasha Wimmer and nominated for a National Book Award, is as addictive as its video game namesake. Fernández writes in short chapters, rarely more than three pages, and each one slides by quickly, but lingers like a dream. The effect is that of being haunted — which is fitting, given that her collective narrators, a group of primary-school classmates who came of age during Augusto Pinochet's 1973-1989 military dictatorship, are
