The Pinochet years continue to inspire Chilean writers and Space Invaders (2013, tr: Natasha Wimmer, 2019) by Nona Fernández is one further addition to that canon. Here it’s a short fragmentary work that explores a group’s memories of the time they were schoolchildren in the mid-80s and one of their friends, Estrella, was withdrawn from school and never seen again.

As it’s a group’s memories, much of the writing is in the first person plural but individual characters also get their say (“sometimes we think it’s a memory creeping into our dreams…”) as each person’s experience of the missing girl is, like their interactions, different. Thus the book is somewhat feverish, drifting in and out of singular and collective moments.

The Space Invaders of the title is a recurring theme throughout, be that as imagining the kids at school arranged in formation to salute the raising of the Chilean flag. Or, as their education and awareness of the world increases, their propensity for resistance and revolution, forming wave after wave of attack for a regime that must eventually fall. Even the book’s structure is given over to the arcade classic with its three lives and the inevitable ‘Game Over’.

The history is indisputable, its characters real people, its nature biographical, and yet a disturbing air of unreliability sweeps through the pages as if capturing the whispers and haziness of a childhood under military dictatorship. What facts there are still generate questions for those that lived through such times many years later such is the intersection of the notorious and their innocence.

In reading ‘Space Invaders’ I was reminded of Ricardo Romero’s oblique The President’s Room (2015, tr: Charlotte Coombe, 2017: Charco Press), a book focused on neighbouring Argentina’s regime, both for its brevity, and its metaphorical and dreamlike addressing of a dictatorship’s enduring presence in young lives. And both, like the eponymous game, are addictive page turners haunted by national history. That is to say the past invades a space in a collective consciousness.