The Chilean playwright and fiction writer Nona Fernández's Space Invaders, translated into English by the masterful Natasha Wimmer and nominated for a National Book Award, is as addictive as its video game namesake. Fernández writes in short chapters, rarely more than three pages, and each one slides by quickly, but lingers like a dream. The effect is that of being haunted ... an unsettling, compelling portrait of childhood in dire political times, and of the lasting impact of historical trauma ... [the] dreaminess, combined with Fernández's unsparing and unsentimental handling of the Pinochet dictatorship's crimes against its citizens, gives Space Invaders a certain kinship with Roberto Bolaño's short novels By Night in Chile and Distant Star. But for readers of Chilean literature, its most intriguing resemblance is to Alejandro Zambra's story collection My Documents, which was published in Chile a year after Space Invaders, but translated into English four years earlier. Like Fernández, Zambra filters coming-of-age stories set in the Pinochet regime's waning years through the development of technologyHer use of those games, particularly of Space Invaders, is excellent. She beautifully de-familiarizes the classic alien-shooting idea, emphasizing its strange, pixelated violence.

...a convincing depiction of totalitarianism made all the more chilling because author Nona Fernandez refrains from needless overdramatization, instead using the everydayness of surprise—what was there before, what is now no longer, what is lost, what disappears silently—to show how the crime of political oppression is internalized, day by day, by the collective: the people being slowly brutalized and dehumanized ... There is a wonderful fogginess to Fernandez’s gorgeous prose, in this novella translated faultlessly by Natasha Wimmer, whose experience translating the works of Roberto Bolaño and understanding of Latin America’s traumatic history with dictatorships aid her in rendering clarity without removing the elements that help Space Invaders do so much, so quickly: the feeling of dread, the anxiety of the unknown, the arbitrariness of new rules unspoken as the children try to make sense of their lives and their roles in a newly repressive society, their childhoods forever twisted, but also united, by the events around them, their young minds incapable of refraining from turning even the most violent cruelty into a game about the invasion of space.

Space Invaders is short—tiny, even ...That length and the intensity of the structure, which introduces so much in such a short span, is a bit like a dream itself. You come out of it, blinking, a little confused, a little scared, certainly devastated, but feeling like you’ve already forgotten the most important threads. The structure is brilliant, as it needs to be with such a difficult approach to narrative-building. There is incredible compression here, and at the same time the gaps between chapters and sections, the space between the days and years and the dreamers themselves, stretches wide. Fernández’s greatest achievement, though, is the shared voice between her characters.

To replicate child-like bewilderment rather than to simply retell it is an enviable feat—one that Nona Fernández masters in Space Invaders ... Fernández’s effective and purposeful confusion of Estrella’s memory distills the narrator’s idea of the truth down to nothing but raw, subjective emotion. Some of the most memorable accounts of this collective’s childhood are obvious mutations of reality, mutations which might more accurately convey the heightened emotions the children experience ... There is no ceiling to the high score; there is no cap to cruelty; there is no true end to that game; there is no escape from a scarring past. Space Invaders reveals how a child’s memory of a tragedy can accurately reflect the pain of the experience even when it does not necessarily reflect the truth.

A nimble tale told in letters and the shared recollections of now-distant childhood friends, Fernández’s book presents a devastating portrait of the trauma that a savage, rapacious government inflicted on a community and a country ... The story has a big, introspective ensemble cast, but its central character is an enigmatic presence ... Fernández’s use of vivid imagery evokes the oppressive nature of life in an authoritarian state.

The devastating beauty of Fernández’s prose is almost unbearable ... This multiform body is both a repository of comfort and an implicit rejection of the neoliberal individualism the dictatorship sought to install. As the narrative progresses, the resistant power of this body grows more apparent.

This standout debut from Chilean author Fernández dexterously tells the story of a group of Chilean friends haunted by the absence of their old classmate and friend, Estrella González, who left their school as they grew up during the Pinochet dictatorship ... Fernández’s masterstroke is her remarkable structure: the novella is related in fragments that drift and remain unreliable, which evokes the pervasive fear and uncertainty of life under Pinochet ... Fernández’s outstanding novel explores the nature of memory and dreams, and how after a certain point, they become indistinguishable.

Chilean actor and writer Fernández explores the dark years of the Pinochet dictatorship in this affecting portrait of childhood friendship ... Like compatriot Alia Trabucco Zerán’s recently published novel The Remainder, Fernández takes a sidelong, subtle approach to the grim realities of life in the Chile of her youth, episodes of which, she suggests, figure in her story. A slender story, impressively economical, that speaks volumes about lives torn by repression.