The Chilean writer Nona Fernandez listened to the spirit of one experienced ex-guerrilla to understand your motivations failed revolutionary dream. The result was Martiansa novel that he presented days ago in Guadalajara.
Included Journey inside the militantthe author provides insight into the lessons for fostering change and collective dreams in a fragmented present.
Fernández, winner of Mexico’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize and a finalist for the American National Book Award, spent four years interviewing Mauricio Hernández, the imprisoned guerrilla leader behind the 1986 attack on Augusto Pinochet and the execution in 1991 of Jaime Guzmán, a senator who was considered an ideologue of that dictatorship.
Hernández Norambuena, 1996 He escaped a maximum security prison in Chile in a cinematic escape involving a hijacked helicopterwas extradited from Brazil in 2019 and is serving a prison sentence in Chile.
Martians (Random House, 2025) It is a “strange and hybrid” novel which “drinks from reality but distorts it” to tell the dreams and loves of Hernández, but also his violent resistance to the military regime, which led to broken illusions and death.
“They were people who were prepared to give everything for a common dream.Sacrificing life, property, everything. And of course Mauricio is a Martian by this criterion. People with such beliefs are no longer understandable today,” says Fernández from Guadalajara.
The 54-year-old actress also regrets this in “tremendously fragmented, accelerated and atomized times” like the ones we live in “There is no room for the collective.”
“Maybe we even have good ideas, good intentions,” but There is neither the willingness nor the time to work together for something, he adds.
The author recalls that Hernández, during his active years as Commander Ramiro of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic FrontShe sympathized with his fight against the “brutal” Pinochet dictatorship.
But 35 years after his end, Fernández Urges to “use more creative ways to reach agreement” to bring about social change.
“It happened too much death and too much blood to continue to remember that the solution to problems always lies in who shoots first. “We have to imagine a future and work for it,” he emphasizes.
Martians He also reflects on the outcome of the Latin American revolutionary dream.
“Mauricio is a reflection of that. He has been incarcerated in a maximum security prison for more than a quarter of a century. “It speaks for itself about what happened to it, about the evolution of the revolution,” Fernández says.
“The book also takes this view, What can we learn from this?what we can update, what didn’t work, what could work,” he concludes.
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