Bøger af Carlos Labbé

On the eve of the 1962 World Cup in Chile, a retired sports commentator with a secret ability to influence living beings with his voice encounters one of the directors of the Chilean national team—a feminist with a covert agenda—on an overnight train ride to Santiago. The director convinces the commentator to return to broadcasting in order to call Chile's matches and to utilize his unique vocal power to determine their outcomes. Later, when Chile is facing off against Brazil in the semifinal match, the plan diverges from one of conventional victory and the narrative bifurcates, simultaneously tracking the action on the field and a startling sequence of events that is unfolding in one of the stadium’s luxury boxes, and what initially looks like a story of intrigue and action and an exploration of class warfare, representation, and social justice, emerges as a novel that enacts the notion that art can only transcend through collective creative action.  Within the world of Carlos Labbé’s fiction, this novel can be understood as a continuation and broadening of the political project signaled in his early work and a doubling-down on the formal playfulness and elusive sensibility that characterizes all of his fiction. Popular forms and genres (from science fiction and journalism in Navidad & Matanza, to detective fiction in Loquela, to pop music and protest movements in Spiritual Choreographies) have always been integral to Labbé's oeuvre, and with The Murmuration he engages the world of professional soccer, making his most direct appeal to the masses yet.

By blinking his eyes and moving his pupils, a paraplegic man-the onetime vocalist in a famous rock band-composes a kind of anti-biography that is corrected and expanded upon by an unknown editor. Alternating between the vocalist's impressionistic recollections and the editor's "e;corrections,"e; an asynchronous story emerges, evoking the vocalist's childhood in southern Chile and telling of the rise and fall of the band that he grew up to lead, while hinting at a multiplicity of other narrative possibilities.

"e;[Labbe] wreaks havoc on narrative rules from the start and keeps doing it."e;BookforumLoquela, Carlos Labbe's fourth novel and second to be translated into English, is a narrative chameleon, a shape-shifting exploration of fiction's possibilities.At a basic level, this book is like a hybrid of Julio Cortzar and Paul Auster: a distorted detective novel, a love story, and a radical statement about narrative art. Behind the silence that unites and separates Carlos and Elisa, behind the game that estranges the albino girls, Alicia and Violeta, from the best summer afternoons, behind the destiny of Neutriaa city that disappears with childhood and returns with desireand behind a literary move-ment that might be the ultimate vanguard while at the same time the greatest falsification, questions arise concerning who truly writes for whom in a novelthe author or the reader.Through an array of voices, overlapping story-lines, a kaleidoscope of literary references, and a delirious prose, Labbe carves out a space for himself among such form-defying Latin American greats as Diamela Eltit, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Jorge Luis Borges.Carlos Labbe, one of Granta's "e;Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists,"e; was born in Chile and is the author of a collection of short stories and six novels, one of which, Navidad & Matanza, is available in English from Open Letter. In addition to his writings, he is a musician, and has released three albums.Will Vanderhyden received an MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester.

A genre-bending novel about two missing children, a fear-inducing drug called "hadón," and seven scientists collaborating on a novel-game.