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.
The essays in Fernández’s collection cover a lot of ground ... But with the recurring images, thoughtful structure, and the compelling connections between science and history and more, Voyager has one fundamental message: to hold the past is what makes us human.
Nona Fernández spurns the conventions of the form, opting instead for a wider, more visionary lens ... Fernández periodically grants the reader brief moments of reprieve from the horror at the story’s center through imaginative detours that explore the possibilities of what could have been ... Fernández fights against the temptation to forget, bearing witness to the felt presence of old atrocities that continue to reverberate across the landscape. Despite the military’s efforts to conceal evidence of the crimes by exhuming the remains from this site and transferring them to another secret location, she shows us that hidden horrors, vanished as though into black holes or space-time parentheses, never cease to haunt us.
... roving memoir ... Fernández documents the history of her homeland and aids her ailing mother (whose epilepsy diagnosis brought additional complications), all while musing on the intricacies of the universe. The result is a moving reflection that’s scientific, cerebral, and spiritual.
