Literature about Pinochet’s military dictatorship tends to focus on its victims. Writers such as Alejandro Zambra, Nona Fernández and Lina Meruane have all produced works about growing up in Chile under Pinochet and the human rights abuses that defined his reign. Gonzalo C. Garcia’s second novel Telenovela stands out by turning the spotlight on to a dysfunctional family complicit in the violence.
Following a promotion, Lucho moves his wife Ramona and son Pablo from San Fernando to Santiago where he is to manage press releases for a national inventory, though the move north soon becomes a reminder that “every success is marked by the quiet ambush of failures”.
Lucho’s poetic aspirations were dampened by his domineering father. Now a state asset willing to turn a blind eye for the nation’s future, his earlier attempts at poetry interrupt his narrative. “Poetry is … memory … rebel[ling] against the day,” whereas maintaining the national inventory of a suppressive dictatorship ignores language’s expansive potential. By reducing news of “people … thrown into the sea from helicopters. Torture. Electric shocks to genitals … using dogs to rape” to rumours, Lucho makes language a tool for forgetting.
Ramona’s life is also dominated by thwarted ambition. Having abandoned an acting career for a family she is now alienated from, she struggles to get her life back on track after a depressive episode. Scripts from a telenovela she failed to cast in and other dreams interrupt her reality.
Son Pablo’s story is by far the lightest, focusing on his musical dreams and a burgeoning romance with a bandmate. The novel’s contention that ‘you inevitably end up becoming your parents’ casts a shadow though; the tabs and chord sheets that fill his chapters threaten to be revisited with regret.
Telenovela’s context gives cause for optimism. Set just before Pinochet’s 17-year rule was put to an end by a presidential referendum, Garcia’s leads are so acclimatised to Pinochet’s rule that the possibility of its end proves as fanciful as the daydreaming that fills these pages. Concluding on the cusp of a breakthrough, Telenovela is a convincing portrait of the darkest period in Chile’s modern history, which, by homing in on those on the wrong side of history, reflects the subtle weaponry of silence and language.
