It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. Our narrator was a child when she first saw this man’s face on a magazine cover with the words ‘I Tortured People’; his complicity in the worst crimes of the regime has haunted her ever since.
Through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Nona Fernández follows ‘the man who tortured people’ to places archives can’t reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin and the eponymous TV show of the novel’s title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime.
