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 "corrections," 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.
The latest from one of Granta's best Spanish-language novelists shows the struggle between private and official biographies, and the fleeting nature of collective happiness.
" . . [W]hat we encounter in
Loquela is a skillful unmaking—complete with diary excerpts, missives from beyond the grave and an invented barn-burning manifesto on a literary movement, 'Corporalism,' which seeks to breathe life into the 'corpse' of literature—that manages to offer new ways of thinking about what the novel can do."—Laird Hunt,
L.A. Times"[
Loquela] is drenched in the spirit of experimentality, dry and absurd humor, strangeness and intrigue."—Simone Wolff,
Bookslut "Begins to fuck with your head from its very first word."—Toby Litt
"
Navidad & Matanza could be the hallucinogenic amalgamation of a César Aira plot with setting and characters conceived by Bolaño if written using Oulipo-style constraints. . . . With ample imagination and commanding style,
Navidad & Matanza certainly marks Labbé as a young author from whom we ought to anticipate great, fascinating things to come."—Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books
"Labbé deliberately distorts conventional narrative forms to create a challenging but engaging text."—
New York Journal of Books"Not for the casual reader, the book reveals its meaning in tiny shock waves that dissipate almost as quickly as they appear, an effect that will appeal to the right reader."—
Publishers Weekly
