Loquela
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"[Labbé] wreaks havoc on narrative rules from the start and keeps doing it."—Bookforum
Loquela, Carlos Labbé'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 Cortázar 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 Neutria—a city that disappears with childhood and returns with desire—and behind a literary movement that might be the ultimate vanguard while at the same time the greatest falsification, questions arise concerning who truly writes for whom in a novel—the author or the reader.
Through an array of voices, overlapping storylines, a kaleidoscope of literary references, and a delirious prose, Labbé carves out a space for himself among such form-defying Latin American greats as Diamela Eltit, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Jorge Luis Borges.
Carlos Labbé, one of Granta's "Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists," 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The interplay between fiction, nonfiction, and the mysterious space between is the subject of Chilean writer Labb 's challenging novel. To begin with, the narrator is a frustrated young Santiago-based writer writing a novel about a man named Carlos ("actually just the opposite of me, I'm a coward. He's fearless, he acts"). The writer receives a mysterious letter from a murdered albino girl named Violeta Drago, a childhood friend of his cousin, Alicia. From Alicia, for whom he nurses a secret desire, he obtains Violeta's notebooks, wherein she had detailed an imaginary city called Neutria, a sordid secret life, and an enigmatic literary movement called Corporalism, whose total output is apparently a confined to a single work. Once the writer puts Carlos, his creation, on the case, it's hardly a surprise when hitherto fictional characters begin popping up in the real world. As complexities mount, the writer finds himself caught between three contingent realities that interrupt, overlap, and gradually reveal one another. If all of this sounds intimidatingly convoluted, it is by design. Labb is testing the boundaries of life and fiction, working explicitly in the tradition of Maurice Blanchot and Julio Cort zar, and against more complacent writers who "divide themselves into chapters." This novel is a deeply personal exploration of self and stranger, the book and the world, murderer and victim. Although perhaps ambitious to a fault, Labb has much to offer the reader willing to peer behind the curtain of language to the secret desires within.
