This novel is not about extraterrestrial beings but about Mauricio Hernández Norambuena, who could be described, paraphrasing Bolaño, as one of the last revolutionaries of the Latin American “flowery wars”. Marciano takes Nona Fernández’s gamble to the extreme, as she has audaciously crossed memory and imagination to understand the recent history of Chile, immersing herself in areas that seem to go beyond earthly limits, where space and time are not so clear. The narrator visits Hernández in the prison where he is serving a long sentence to ask him questions, summoning several characters in a remarkable weave of voices to understand what his story was like: that of someone who, while cultivating inextinguishable loves and friendships, stirred up resistance to the dictatorship, was rifle in hand in the assassination attempt on Pinochet, and later, already in a democracy, ended up with lost illusions, deaths, prisons, and escapes. An electrifying novel that lands in the mind of a complex character to understand him in all his intensity and contradiction.

 

505 pages – Original Language: Spanish (Penguin Random House 2025) – Foreign Rights: World English (Graywolf Press, 2027)