This month, we introduce two extraordinary novels erecting vivid, immersive narratives upon the intricate sociopolitical histories of their respective nations. From Chile, Carlos Labbé builds an intricate match of class warfare and collective action against the backdrop of professional soccer; and from Iran, Ghazi Rabihavi tells the tragic story of two queer lovers as they navigate the repressions and tumults of pre- and post-Revolution Iran.
The Murmuration by Carlos Labbé, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden, Open Letter, 2024
Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager
Carlos Labbé’s The Murmuration begins like a monologue from The Twilight Zone: a robust voice draws you aboard the night train from Temuco to Santiago, and a conspiracy of uncertainty and intrigue quickly follows. Cigarettes smolder, nail polish glistens, and a retired sports commentator’s hot cup of matico tea steams into the noir-film night. Suddenly, you find yourself hurtling through the darkness on Schrödinger’s train, where a director of the Chilean national soccer team may or may not be asleep in her first-class train car—or perhaps she is in the dining car, having a drink with the sports commentator. Furtive eyes dart about, noting every detail, but Labbé’s experimental style calls reality itself into question, letting linguistic artistry lead the way in an investigation of Chilean identity, representation, and collective memory.
The Murmuration, written with style by Labbé and now available in an impressive translation by Will Vanderhyden, is a tight, side-eyed thriller that uses the framework of professional soccer to set up an exploration of broader politics. Already known for abstraction in his other works Navidad & Matanza and Spiritual Choreographies, Labbé eschews a traditional plot in The Murmuration, instead relying on an air of mystery and paradox to keep the brief novel moving along. Three short chapters are shaped by artistic license into a loosely historical, conspiratorial plot.
It is the eve of the 1962 FIFA World Cup in Chile, and a deal is being struck. The details are vague and a bit surreal, but we discover that the train’s retired sports commentator possesses a unique power to influence events with his voice—evidence is provided in the fireflies zooming alongside the train in spectacular formation on command—and that the director wants him to come out of retirement so he can use that special talent to guide Chile’s loss in the six semi-final games. Why must Chile lose? The director insists:
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.
Chile did lose the 1962 games, and The Murmuration draws parallels between this and the broader currents of the time. With the 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.” They want “to obviate the possibility of horizontal organization, the importance of the community, the mere idea of which can at times be a threat to them.” The director expresses her frustration with existing power structures, and the commentator assents.
Leaving behind motives in the darkness of the train, the bulk of the novel is a middle chapter in which the Chilean national team faces off against Brazil in a semi-final match. The game is presented like a radio broadcast, in which the commentator exercises his powers on listeners in a gripping play-by-play:
Goal for Brazil. They’ll hug each other and we’ll beat the bleachers with our newspapers, handkerchiefs, and seat cushions. We won’t yet be capable of complaining, of turning on all of you there above with shouted threats, because the play will have shown us that, in a plural plot, Garrincha’s shot, though virtuosic, will always be coherence and never individuality. The Brazilian team will have taken a one to zero lead over us, but in so doing they’ll have shown us how to match them, how to find you: we must incorporate every move, even surprise strikes from the right, into what is ours, into the past and into the future out on these fields.
Labbé crafts this section in the simple future tense, underscoring the manipulation at work and creating a sense of urgency. Long sentences—sometimes lasting longer than a page—zip and zag like players on the field, in formations reminiscent of Hispanophone literature’s embrace of the run-on, but also the postmodernist flair for maximalism. Readers who enjoyed David Foster Wallace’s descriptions of tennis may find a similar pleasure here, but ones who felt the footnotes tedious may find Labbé’s commitment to the actual details of the match tiring. It is to translator Will Vanderhyden’s credit, however, that the prose itself is never dull and Labbé’s experimentation finds a persuasive rhythm in English, keeping the pages turning.
In the game’s executive box, a parallel battle of class warfare emerges. Descriptive details paint a social divide, where boisterous fans shouting obscenities in the rafters contrast against the VIPs settling into cushy leather seats in the box. Stylistic choices mirrors this dichotomy; the commentator’s blurry “we” unifies players and fans—even the opposing Brazilian team members are “comrades”—but the characters in the box are always a separate, singular “you.” It can be inferred that “you” specifically refers to the director from the first section, but this is never made explicit.
The director herself is both a leader and an outsider of the executive box. She is the only woman director, though she admits that her position is only an illusion to appease people in real power. She says she became a director—
To take ownership of the ball. But that was a childish idea, an errant notion that got me into the cult, into the club, got me a seat at the conference room table. The truth is that the ball has one owner and the stadium has another. Those owners agree to elevate certain players—to bring them up from the dirt field—who produce profits for the ball and the stadium. Radio, and in a few years television, has other owners who form a partnership with the owners of the ball and the stadium to expand the reach of the whole enterprise, until it is everywhere, until it fills the eyes and ears of people who themselves, when they were little, chased after that rag ball in the dust. The eyes and ears of all those people become the property of the same individuals who’ll never let a woman enter that space, unless she’s half-naked and holding up a sign.
The director is also the only notable woman at the stadium, just as she was the only notable woman on the train, and her presence there is equally ambiguous. As the chapter comes to a close, her coup is executed—a mysterious vial is pocketed, bodies fall to the floor—and she fades into the background, disappearing from the story.
A brief final chapter returns to the commentator. He is aboard the train again for the return trip to Temuco, this time sipping boldo tea. Temuco is located within Araucanía, a traditional land of the indigenous Mapuche, and after the flurry of the game in the capital, the journey feels like a return to a personal space. As he gazes out the window, his focus turns to the landscape:
He noticed for the first time that the flock, the murmuration, the parvá of xjuxjú and the embers of the wind were two very different things, that the leaves of ñjre, pegjn, and lawal were swirling, moving toward the river or through the crevice, indifferent to his vision, to the booming voice of his Fjcha. . .
Word choice and a somber tone refocus the themes of the novel. When originally published nearly a decade ago, The Murmuration was titled La parvá, or “a flock of birds.” The idea of the flock repeats within the novel, particularly in the movements of the national team as they bend and twist into geometric formations, but also in the collective actions of fans, directors, conspirators, and perhaps the people at large. The chapter considers the commentator’s life as an individual for the first time, as well as his role within the flock and in shaping the narrative. His inner monologue suggests that of many possible formations, only one path can be chosen.
The efforts of the Chilean team in 1962 are generally remembered as one of their best performances, and The Murmuration revisits this collective memory with a critical eye, framing the question of who calls the shots—and why—as a re-evaluation of the power structures that shape history, and perhaps also a consideration of reality as one outcome of many possible formations. By obfuscating details, Labbé’s cagey, paradoxical language opens itself to interpretation and contemplation, which will keep readers engaged well beyond the brief pages of the novel.
Boys of Love by Ghazi Rabihavi, translated from Persian by Poupeh Missaghi, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
Review by Filip Noubel, Editor-at-Large for Uzbekistan
On the very first page of Ghazi Rabihavi’s long novel, Boys of Love, the unsuspecting reader encounters a chilling warning: “Boys of Love is not the best title for this narrative of pain and violence. Or maybe Boys of Death. Yes, this is the title I’ll put on the cover once I finish writing, because you, the protagonist of this narrative, are dead. Even though I did not witness your death or hear about it from anyone, I know you are dead, and I am your real murderer.” From then on, a dark spell colors every scene of this love story between two young Iranian men in the late 70s and early 80s. As the author zooms out of their relationship to describe the brutal changes of Iranian society at the time—from toppling the Shah to resisting Saddam Hussein’s invasion—a vast panorama of the nation unfolds, tackling vast issues of gender, religion, ethnic minorities, exile, and forced labor, as well as the intimate dramas of courage and betrayal.
The plot revolves around the two main figures: Jamil, the narrator and the son of an influential village family, and Naji, a poor grass-cutter—young men in their early twenties who are trying to live as lovers in the last years of Pahlavi Iran. As any public manifestation of same-sex love is forbidden and considered shameful from the double perspective of sexual and social mores, they flee Jamil’s home village when their relationship is discovered, ending up on a pig farm owned by kind members of the Christian Armenian minority. Here, the third main character of the novel appears: a violin, previously owned by Jamil’s maternal grandfather and played by Naji, who starts taking music lessons with Amrollah Khan, a secluded musician who gives the two young men a spiritual and artistic asylum. However, that shelter proves fragile as the Islamic Revolution in 1979 sweeps away any remnants of the previous regime, banning anything—including musical performance and even instruments—that is declared contrary to the official Islamic dogma. From that point on, the life of the two lovers morphs into an endless flight, running through episodes of growing fear, pain, horror, and narrow escapes.
As young gay men, Jamil and Naji are both confronted with Iranian gender politics and the challenge of discovering their own gender identity. Early in the novel, Jamil witnesses a dance at a wedding ceremony with his family members, Behi and Hamed:
I told myself I was thinking about the dancer, who smelled so nice.
“How beautifully the dancer danced.”
“Yes, very,” Behi agreed.
“Only a woman should be able to dance like that, as skillfully as the dancer did. Wow!” added Hamed.
“The dancer was a man, Jamil. You know that, right? That man danced better than any woman. You yourself saw what he did with his waist,” Behi said.
Through such scenes, Rabihavi introduces the complicated discourse around masculinity and same-sex relations in traditional Iranian and Arab societies. A few very specific and designated roles—such as that of the wedding dancer—allow for the public recognition of non-binary identities, though they nevertheless must remain within that social and linguistic designation. Officially, same-sex relations, particularly male ones, are forbidden and considered sinful and shameful both religiously and socially, but at the same time, it is very common for established men to have sexual relations with very young boys—as long as there is never a public display, and provided that the men are also married with children. Many of these relationships begin with an act of rape, only to develop into further complexities between the rich and powerful client and the desperate victim, with sexual services evolving into lasting entanglements on both sides. With a great sensitivity to detail, Rabihavi explores the complicated emotions of love and hate that emerge within these relationships—particularly on the side of the younger boys or men, some of whom come to enjoy the financial and social rewards that come with these ties.
In eliciting these various dimensions of sexual politics, the many individuals passing through the pages of Boys of Love give voice to the different denigrations that manifest through repression, abuse, and power. At one point, Jamil and Naji are followed by a married man named Kavous, who becomes obsessed with Naji:
He had come on the pretext of thanking Naji, but when he started telling us about his life, little by little, we realized he had other intentions. He said he had a wife and three daughters and that he wished at least one of them could have been a boy. He said he didn’t have any sexual relationship with his wife, that he didn’t enjoy being with her. Between his words, he made us understand that he had fallen for Naji and would do anything for us.
Another story comes from Javad, a young Iranian man who was also raped. Through him, Jamil considers the fate of an identity that is inextricably linked to sexual violence:
Today, as I’m remembering [Javad], I’m crying, for him and for how one person had changed his sexual destiny by force and threat. Such things have not been rare in this world, men constantly raping young boys, leading their bodies to want that kind of sex after it is repeated enough, the victims even becoming addicts, their lives fucked up after their sexual identities are ruined.
I murmured, “Someone else deciding one’s sexual destiny.” But he seemed to have a hard time accepting this idea. “Maybe there was something in me that was different from others. Even before I was trapped under the body of that pimp. No. Let us not curse him. He wasn’t a bad guy. He was just a motherfucker. . . .”
The twists and upheavals of Boys of Love develops over three hundred pages alongside the narrator’s comments, in which the reader is warned of the catastrophes that will befall the characters and their loved ones. Through a series of break-ups and reunions, Jamil and Naji are developed through contrasted psychological portraits, alternately displaying their bravery, cunning, exhaustion, moral treason, loyalty, and extreme naïveté. While their young souls are full of dreams, they are also brutally exposed to a society undergoing violent upheavals; clashes of diametrically opposed ideologies, war, corruption; and the demonization of marginal groups—by which they face discrimination not only for their queerness, but also their musicianship.
In speaking on this period of Iran’s history, Rabihavi likely draws from his well of personal knowledge; he was twenty-two when Khomeini launched the Islamic Revolution, and thereafter experienced persecution and imprisonment for his outspoken writings. Now living in exile in London, the author’s lifelong defense of freedom—literary and otherwise—reverberates through Boys of Love, always alongside the price one pays for seeking it out. In an early scene, Jamil reads The Blind Owl by Sadeh Hedayat, a cult writer of modern Iranian literature who was, by certain accounts, queer. Through the following passage, one imagines that Rabihavi had Hedayat in mind while crafting this singularly tragic and deeply felt novel:
I was hoping . . . that I could ask him about the secrets of The Blind Owl, such as the meaning of the sentence the book opens with: “In life there are wounds that, like leprosy, silently scrape at and consume the soul, in solitude—This agony can not be revealed to anyone . . .”
*****
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