Carlos Labbé's [Navidad & Matanza] begins to fuck with your head
from its very first word--moving through journalese, financial
reporting, whodunit, Joseph Conrad, Raymond Chandler, Nabokov to David
Lynch.--Toby Litt
It's the summer of 1999 when the two children of wealthy video game
executive Jose Francisco Vivar, Alicia and Bruno, go missing in the
beach town of Matanza. Long after their disappearance, the people of
Matanza and the adjacent town of Navidad consistently report sightings
of Bruno--on the beach, in bars, gambling--while reports on Alicia,
however, are next to none. And every clue keeps circling back to a man
named Boris Real . . .
At least that's how the story--or one of many stories, rather--goes. All
of them are told by a journalist narrator, who recounts the mysterious
case of the Vivar family from an underground laboratory where he and six
other subjects have taken up a novel-game, writing and exchanging
chapters over email, all while waiting for the fear-inducing drug hadón
to take its effect, and their uncertain fates.
A literary descendant of Roberto Bolaño and Andrés Neuman, Carlos
Labbé's Navidad & Matanza is a work of metafiction that not only
challenges our perceptions of facts and observations, and of identity
and reality, but also of basic human trust.
Carlos Labbé, one of Granta's Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists,
was born in Chile and is the author of six novels, including Navidad &
Matanza and Locuela, and a collection of short stories. In addition
to his writings he is a musician, and has released three albums. He is a
co-editor at Sangria, a publishing house based in Santiago and Brooklyn,
where he translates and runs workshops. He also writes literary essays,
the most notable ones on Juan Carlos Onetti, Diamela Eltit and Roberto
Bolaño--three writers whose influence can be seen in Navidad &
Matanza.
Will Vanderhyden received an MA in Literary Translation from the
University of Rochester. He has translated fiction by Carlos Labbé,
Edgardo Cozarinsky, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Juan Marsé, Rafael Sanchez
Ferlosio, and Elvio Gandolfo.
