Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, suffering from a fever and fearing that he is dying, recalls the most important events in his life, from Paris in 1943 to Chile under General Pinochet.

It's 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People." His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to...