Loquela

November 16, 2015
The interplay between fiction, nonfiction, and the mysterious space between is the subject of Chilean writer Labbé'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 isâby design. Labbé is testing the boundaries of life and fiction, working explicitly in the tradition of Maurice Blanchot and Julio Cortázar, 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, Labbé has much to offer the reader willing to peer behind the curtain of language to the secret desires within.

October 15, 2015
A twisty, tricky metafictional romp that uses a murder mystery to explore the death of the author. The second novel translated into English by the Chilean novelist (Navidad & Matanza, 2014) is a deliberate attempt to blur the line between fact and fiction, not because it's autobiographical (though a writer named Carlos figures in the story) but because Labbe wants to explore what makes characters "live" on the page. Carlos, a student and aspiring writer struggling with a detective story, lives with his cousin Alicia and receives a letter from Violeta, who has recently been murdered in her apartment. The book alternates sections from the perspectives of "The Novel" (Carlos' work, presumably), "The Recipient" (excerpts from Carlos' diary), and "The Sender," Violeta, who herself claims to have spent time in a nearby but imaginary land called Neutria. Dream imagery abounds, as do references to various rhetorical conceits--Violeta is fixated on the concept of ekphrasis, of writing out reality in detail as it is happening. All of which is to say that the storytelling gets knotty and recursive around here; readers may wish to take heavy doses of Auster and Borges to prepare to enter this hall of mirrors. But Labbe (and his translator, Vanderhyden, who has an especially tough task here) is never willfully opaque, and Carlos and Violeta emerge from the theorizing as legitimate and full characters in spite of all the philosophizing. Toward the end the characters dwell on a literary theory called Corporalism, "the public declaration of the end of literature to the confusion of character, writing, and author." As with any literary manifesto, literature would be a glum place if all creators adhered to it. But it's unexpectedly fun to watch Labbe test it out. A challenging but endearing attempt to knock down some of the tent poles of narrative fiction.

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