Carlos Labbé Wrote the Soccer Novel Nobody Knew They Wanted
I remember reading somewhere that the best football writing isn't really about football at all — it's about the collective longing for something that cannot be individually owned, the brief and slightly terrifying sense that eleven men can temporarily become one thing. That formulation makes a certain kind of sense in the grandstands of northern Europe, where the crowd is a presence you feel in your chest before you hear it. Carlos Labbé, it seems, has been thinking about the same thing, and he has added psychic powers.
The Murmuration — originally published in Spanish as La parvá in 2015, now in Will Vanderhyden's English translation — is set around the 1962 World Cup semifinal between Chile and Brazil, a match that took place fifteen years before Labbé was born in a country that was still in the process of deciding what it wanted to be. He uses that historical pressure point the way a novelist uses a room at the end of a corridor: you sense what's in there before you arrive.
The narrative structure moves between a collective first person — the team, the nation, the crowd as organism — and individual viewpoints that keep interrupting, insisting on their particularity. The longest section employs what one reviewer called maximalist prose, with extensive play-by-play detail, the kind of writing that makes you feel the weight of eighty thousand people wanting the same thing at the same moment. And then there is the psychic commentator: a figure who can direct swarms of creatures toward the crowd, inducing what Labbé describes as collective ecstasy, the blossoming of national identity through sports. It is not a metaphor. It is, within the logic of the novel, simply what happens.
There is something in this that recalls Knut Hamsun's early fiction — not in subject but in method: the obsessive attention to states of feeling that language cannot quite contain, the insistence that the emotional body of a crowd is as real and as worth examining as any individual psychology. El Aleph, Borges's story of the point in space that contains all other points simultaneously, feels like one ancestor of this novel: Labbé is doing something related but wilder, more interested in the feeling of being many things at once inside a stadium, inside a country, inside a year that will end badly.
The shadow of 1973 — the coup, the stadium as prison — falls over the book without being named. That is, perhaps, where the discipline of the novel is most visible: Labbé knows what he is not saying, and the silence is precise.
Is it a football novel? Yes, in the way that Moby-Dick is a novel about fishing. Which is to say: completely, and not at all.
