Set during the 1962 FIFA World Cup hosted by Chile, Carlos Labbé’s The Murmuration is an experimental high-wire act that uses the framework of soccer to comment on gender and class warfare, as well as rising consumerism, within the nation. Across three chapters, the author—already known for asynchronistic storytelling and genre flirtations in his novels Navidad & Matanza and Spiritual Choreographies—eschews traditional narrative expectations through paradox, shifting perspectives and tenses, and labyrinthine sentences. Within The Murmuration, specific details remain purposefully obscured, resulting in a story that feels similar to the recounting of a dream, and yet Labbé, channeled by the brilliant translator Will Vanderhyden, guides the audience with such self-assured madness that the slim novel, despite a few lulls, is hard to put down.

The story begins on a train between Temuco and Santiago on the eve of the World Cup opening ceremonies. The lone female director of the Chilean national team, who feels diminished by her male colleagues, sits in the dining car with a retired soccer commentator. The commentator possesses the ability to influence beings and situations with his voice—he demonstrates this by controlling the pattern of a swarm of fireflies outside the train—and the director works to convince him to come out of retirement and call the Chilean matches. When grilled as to why, the director speaks of solidifying national identity and worker awareness, as well as drawing attention to her own challenges as a woman in a sea of powerful men, before adding:

“With your narration, the Chilean team will bring the idea that there exists something like Chile to the imminence that our trans-Andean siblings achieved nearly a decade ago, to that state the Prussians attained with their idea of Germany. And when those fans have finally glimpsed the brink, the edge, instead of showing them how to keep climbing, you’ll push them over it, so they fall. We need to lose just when we’re about to win, so the certainty that our fulfillment was within reach and we let it go remains as if imprinted on our people.”

With the director’s offer on the table, chapter two cuts to the knockout round of the tournament, with Chile facing Brazil, the reigning champion. In this section, by far the longest of the novel, the prose is presented as the direct play-by-play broadcast delivered by the commentator, back for one final job. He speaks in a plural simple future tense, controlling the Chilean team and crowd with the collective “we’ll,” as he also checks in on the stadium’s luxury box to note the hobnobbing of team directors and FIFA bigwigs. Among the elite in the box, the commentator addresses a female “you”—assumed to be the director from chapter one, though never confirmed, as her face remains hidden from the announcer station’s view—who refuses the advances of several male colleagues, takes a mysterious phone call, and slips a substance into the drinks of those around her, causing them to collapse and bleed out. This is followed by a brief final chapter, set after Brazil has won the tournament and Chile has taken third place, as the commentator boards a train to return home.

From the jump, Labbé’s language choices, paired with Vanderhyden’s sharp translation, aim to prickle via contradiction and paradox. When the director steps onto the train, Labbé writes that “her arm rises or, rather, falls as she climbs the stairs.” In her compartment’s sleeper car, the director “doesn’t touch the lamps, sit on the sofa, or use the ashtrays, and yet the lamps shine, the sofa is soft and inviting, and the ashtrays smolder for someone, whoever it is, who may be sleeping in that compartment, under her name.” Such inconsistencies continue, and when the narration ultimately reveals that the director speaks words that everyone on the train “immediately forgets” and that nobody will “even remember that a woman had been in the dining car,” the fog surrounding her actions begins to dissipate. These multiple possible actions mirror the director’s physical deletion from the location in the eyes of all the men except for the commentator. Perhaps she did something or other, but nobody can be sure. This is concretely reinforced when she says to the commentator, “. . . despite the fact that I’m a director, I’m still a woman, not a man . . . my name is already being erased from proceedings of this World Cup.” As for the commentator, thanks to his manipulative gifts, he, too, can imagine variations of every encounter, and Labbé’s crafty language in the opening pages suggests that he sees the world not in a linear manner, but as a tangle of potential routes awaiting his influence.

In a 2015 interview, Labbé is on record stating his mistrust of the official history documenting the Chile-Brazil knockout game, claiming that many of those behind the scenes in power did their best to cast a veil over what they did not want the public to see. Yet for nearly eighty pages, he reconstructs the entire first half of the historic soccer match in great detail, by means of the commentator’s voice, which bounces between “we” and “you” in simple future tense, as well as the occasional “dear listeners” directed at the radio crowd, while controlling the back-and-forth on the pitch and the goings-on in the luxury box above. Labbé may have taken liberties when describing individual plays, though in a work of fiction, this really doesn’t matter.

As one may expect, Labbé lets the two scenarios converse as acts of battle between underdogs and superpowers—for nobody in 1962 expected Chile to best Brazil, and the female “you” in the luxury box is treated more as a sexual object than a colleague by the men around her. But the author also works class differences into these pages, thanks to visual cues. Fans jostle about and scream obscenities in the stands, while above, valets prepare tables adorned with “silk-embroidered tablecloths,” “three types of fork, four different knives, and two spoons at each place setting, serving utensils for salad, seafood, and meats, corkscrews, linen and paper napkins, tea sieves, individual coffee pots, toothpicks.” Additionally, the co-directors wear suits, sport “kerchiefs not of felt but of silk and pocket squares not of red jute but of satin,” as well as “well-groomed haircuts, and cuff links . . . briefcases and fountain pens.” These are men with influence, and as the commentator states to the director when they first meet:

“They want to erase the English word ‘team’ and replace it with the far more generic Spanish word ‘equipo.’ Addicts and fans will be turned into followers and spectators who at first will assume the plural implicit in the definition of ‘equipo’ that refers to the whole, to the team, but soon they’ll get used to the fact that ‘equipo’ also refers to ‘equipment,’ to tools, to individual parts of a machine. Now, with this World Cup, they’re trying to eliminate the team, just as they’re doing with the syndicates, the fishing collectives, the agricultural cooperatives, the small-scale mining organizations, the workers’ groups, the literary movements, the student unions. Now, the profile of the player, the star, is all that’ll matter.”

Throughout the match, as the commentator puppets the enormous crowd to rally behind the national team and heckle the referee with slurs, most of the directors pay no attention to the action, instead greeting diplomats and cutting business deals to benefit their families. Like the swarm of fireflies the commentator controls early in the novel, these men huddle, but they do so to supplement themselves, using soccer merely as a conduit to riches.

This image of swarms extends beyond greedy directors and insects. When originally published nearly a decade ago, The Murmuration was titled La parvá—“a flock of birds”—and as the soccer match begins, the Chilean team, per the commentator, wants “to settle into a shape we’ve caught glimpses of in previous matches but not yet found out here,” while their opponents take on a triangular shape, then that of a rectangle. Chile counters with a shape of parallel lines, then those of a V, a funnel, and an arrow. The match unfolds like a morphing murmuration, with players following the commentator’s instructions, fans humming in unison, and wealthy team directors scheming as one. Such flocking infiltrates the environment, too, as the author mentions an “incessant landscape, shadow after shadow, leaf after leaf, tree after tree, branch after branch, stick after stick, twigs, splinters, papers, fire, smoke.”

Labbé matches this swirling chaos with long, complicated sentences, sometimes lasting upward of a page. While appearing in many of these long-winded sentences, the lone actor, free from the mobs on the page, is the faceless “you,” who takes advantage of the disorder to carefully execute her plan. And once the plan is nearly complete, the commentator, in another lengthy sentence, drops the future tense momentarily, because “the collective pause ends when we allow ourselves to be interrupted and ruptured, when we let you make the decisions: so be it, let us lose ourselves to keep from losing.” The Chilean team finally scores a goal when free of the “we,” though history shows it won’t be enough to beat Brazil. And as the chapter concludes, the commentator adopts the future tense one final time, promising that, for Chile, “anything is possible, because with the feet of our team, we’ll make history as one people, one nation, and one country of winners.” 

The Murmuration is not without flaws. Labbé’s dedication to recapping every play on the pitch turns repetitive despite its frenzied pace, and is at times, dare I say, boring. Other decisions, like refusing to confirm the identity of the female “you,” seem a tad unnecessary, too, because they place additional layers of gossamer over an already cagey narrative. However, even when the novel stumbles, Carlos Labbé writes with confidence in his experimentation, and this is more than enough to keep the pages turning, if only to see how the author might rewrite history in his version of the 1962 Chilean World Cup.

The Murmuration by Carlos Labbé, translated from Spanish by Will Vanderhyden (Open Letter Books, 2024)

© 2024 by Benjamin Woodard. All rights reserved.