{"id":727342,"date":"2026-06-10T11:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T11:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/727342\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T11:13:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T11:13:08","slug":"literary-hub-is-this-the-strangest-soccer-novel-ever-written","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/727342\/","title":{"rendered":"Literary Hub \u00bb Is This the Strangest Soccer Novel Ever Written?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This piece was published in collaboration with\u00a0Golden Goal, a literary magazine about the\u00a0intersection of politics, culture and sport at the\u00a02026 World Cup. To read more, visit their website:\u00a0goldengoal.world<\/a>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Over the years, writers from around the world have tried their hands at using soccer as a backdrop for memorable fiction. Tonally speaking, they cover a vast terrain, including J.L. Carr\u2019s comic How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup and Leonard Gribble\u2019s whodunit The Arsenal Stadium Mystery. Some will cut more deeply for soccer fans of a literary bent; others can be savored no matter what your feelings about the beautiful game might be. David Peace\u2019s modernist Red or Dead, about the life of the legendary Liverpool coach Bill Shankly, left me frequently breathless despite having little emotional investment in the ups and downs of Liverpool.<\/p>\n

If that novel\u2014a work of precisely composed prose in which Peace uses repetition and the sheer bulk of its more than 800 pages to take the reader into Shankly\u2019s inner life and the meticulous rhythms of his squad\u2019s play\u2014represents one pole of how to make a great soccer novel, standing opposite it is Carlos Labb\u00e9\u2019s 2015 The Murmuration<\/a>, translated into English by Will Vanderhyden. I feel comfortable declaring that The Murmuration is the strangest novel ever written about the game of soccer. The bulk of the novel uses a real event as its setting: the 1962 World Cup semi-final between Chile and Brazil. That part of it, at least, will be familiar to longtime soccer enthusiasts. Where things get a little weirder comes when Labb\u00e9 introduces psychic powers into the mix.<\/p>\n

The Murmuration is divided into three sections, the longest of which involves a detailed account of the aforementioned\u00a0 semifinal, which took place 15 years before Labb\u00e9\u2019s birth in Chile, the first and only time that nation hosted the tournament. The first section, \u201cClasses,\u201d takes place on a train and describes a conversation between two people: \u201cthe commentator\u201d and \u201cthe director.\u201d There\u2019s a noir quality to it, with the director\u2014one of several on the board of the Chilean national team\u2014described in language that evokes a femme fatale and the commentator evoking a kind of weathered, faded dignity; eventually, Labb\u00e9 reveals that the commentator\u2019s principles have kept him from seeking work in television. The two see eye to eye on both their love of soccer and their concerns about where the sport is headed.<\/p>\n

A man and a woman meeting late at night, surrounded by mystery; it\u2019s a familiar scenario. They are en route to Santiago for the World Cup\u2019s opening ceremonies, and the director has an offer to make the commentator; again, you might expect you know where this is going. And yes, she would like for him to return to broadcasting\u2014in part because his voice can make collectives of living creatures behave in a certain way. The commentator demonstrates this on the train, as he directs a swarm of fireflies to take on the appearances of different objects, including a horse, a tree, and a burning bush.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s here that one aspect of the book\u2019s English title comes into play: a murmuration is the name for a particular group of birds moving in a complex pattern across the sky. (Its original title, La parv\u00e1, means \u201ca flock of birds,\u201d according to this review<\/a>.) But a murmuration is also a sound that a massive crowd can make\u2014and it doesn\u2019t get more massive than the tens of thousands gathered in a stadium to watch the World Cup.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the voice seems to represent the Chilean national team; at others it acts as a reflection of the nation itself.<\/p>\n

As the director explains, her hope is that the commentator\u2019s work can create a sense of Chilean national identity\u2014as she phrases it, \u201cto bring them to the brink of collective ecstasy, to the edge of national climax, to the point of full and mass blossoming of a proud, fervent, indefinable, worker-driven, class-proof identity.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second of the novel\u2019s three parts, titled \u201cMurmurations,\u201d occupies the majority of the book. While the first and third parts are told in the third person, \u201cMurmurations\u201d is recounted in a kind of shifting first person plural. Sometimes the voice seems to represent the Chilean national team; at others it acts as a reflection of the nation itself. Sometimes the view is narrower; here the voice belongs more clearly to the commentator, and sometimes the perspective breaks away to recount a series of strange events taking place in the directors\u2019 box, where the woman we encountered earlier carries out a series of tasks on her own.<\/p>\n

What Labb\u00e9 conveys through his prose here is the ways that soccer, at this highest of levels, can create a kind of collective experience for both players and spectators. This narrative voice has a personality, which often takes the form of vitriol directed at the infamous Peruvian-born official Yamasaki Maldonado. There\u2019s a stunning level of detail on display here\u2014literally every touch of the ball seems to have been reflected in the prose:<\/p>\n

\u2026they\u2019ll be looking for a new triangle, we\u2019ll think, when they deliver a different kind of ball to their forward, Amarildo. We still won\u2019t see you but will be able to to step up with Ra\u00fal S\u00e1nchez and steal the ball anyway, initiating a different trajectory, but not before referee Yamasaki Maldonado, unsuspected neighbor, will call what to his blind eyes was a foul committed previously by Nilton Santos on Honorinho.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth noting that, despite this maximalist quality, this still only gets the reader to the end of the match\u2019s first half.\u00a0 At that point, Brazil\u2014the defending champions who would go on to win the tournament<\/a>\u2014leads 2-1 on a pair of goals by Garrincha. Here, though, there\u2019s still hope that Chile could advance to the final. A look at the historical record, however, proves that was not the case: ultimately, Brazil advanced on a 4-2 win.<\/p>\n

The way in which Labb\u00e9 explores the overlap of sports and national identities is not the only way in which The Murmuration anticipates the next few decades\u2019 worth of history. Early in the novel, the commentator explains his fears over where the sport is headed:<\/p>\n

Now, with this World Cup, they\u2019re trying to eliminate the team, just as they\u2019re doing with the syndicates, the fishing collectives, the agricultural cooperatives, the small-scale mining organizations, the workers\u2019 groups, the literary movements, the student unions. Now, the profile of the player, the star, is all that\u2019ll matter \u2026<\/p>\n

If this sounds prescient, it\u2019s because Labb\u00e9 is writing about these events from a vantage point of several decades later. Reading The Murmuration in the wake of the announcement and implosion of the Super League<\/a>, Bayern Munich\u2019s executives calling for a dramatic shift in the ownership of Bundesliga clubs<\/a>, and Inter Miami becoming one of the top-selling jerseys worldwide<\/a> makes this passage of fictional dialogue read like something closer to prophecy.<\/p>\n

In the case of the tournament that\u2019s the backdrop for The Murmuration, it\u2019s telling that Pel\u00e9\u2014arguably the prototype for the modern soccer superstar\u2014was a mainstay for Brazil\u2019s national team. (An injury earlier in the tournament kept him out of the semifinal featured here.) It\u2019s one of several ways that this tournament can be seen as a herald for bigger changes to come. As for Chile, the 1962 World Cup is a bittersweet place to leave the country\u2019s national team: their third-place finish in that tournament was the highest they\u2019ve finished in it to date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This piece was published in collaboration with\u00a0Golden Goal, a literary magazine about the\u00a0intersection of politics, culture and sport…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":727343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-727342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=727342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/727343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=727342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=727342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=727342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}