Weaving together the story of her mother's illness with story of her country and of the cosmos itself, Fernández braids astronomy and astrology, neuroscience and memory, family history and national history into this autobiographical essay.
Fernández’s mind roams over a stunning array of topics: her mother’s epileptic spells, which cause her to black out; the lives of stars and 'stellar memory'; Pinochet’s Caravan of Death ... Throughout, Fernández’s focus is on the connections between lost memories, black holes and history’s 'ghosts.'
The image of these two space probes roaming across the galaxy provides a glimpse of the flight path of this ambitious, often dazzling memoir ... The author’s oscillation between the personal and the political, the familial and the national, is achieved through a kind of cosmic interdisciplinarity. Astronomy; astrology; astrophysics; neuroscience — each of these is incorporated into a dizzying but sublime poetics that holds Voyager together.
Her dogged insistence that we focus on the individual unsettles the ease with which we lose sight of individual grief when discussing widespread violence ... Fernández’s attention to individual acts of resistance, like her grandmother’s, suggests that preserving memories is one way to fight back. Voyager is Fernández’s effort to do that, a written “space-time capsule” she can send to the future, because there is much we need to remember.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
