Electric light first illuminated the main square of Santiago in 1883 and the narrator’s grandmother recalls the grandiose event of the ceremony that brought artificial light to Chile, she was there she said. But she was born in 1908… From this false memory, Fernandez explores family history, but also that of a country shaped by union leaders forced into exile, wooden horses, a typewriter, an eye in a pool blood, candles and the body of a president who made of death in office is mandate. Chilean Electric is a cryptography and an illumination that starting with the country’s literal darkness, sheds light in an impressionistic, lyrical style on the dark history of the disappeared, the murdered, the hanged. It is also the continuation of one of the most important personal projects of contemporary literature in Spanish. A kind of luminous Morse whose ultimate intent is to do away with the shadows for all of us.

 

100 pages – Original language: Spanish (Alquímia, 2015, Santiago de Chile) – Foreign Editions: Spanish/Audio (Audible, 2019) Spanish/World excl. Chile (Minúscula, 2018), German (Septime Verlag, 2016), Italian (Edicola, 2017)

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