This match was judged by Jeff Waxman. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the updated bracket.

It’s hard watching the first round, shoulder to shoulder with other sweating fans at wobbling tables that would sacrifice the first inch of your beer if you ever set it down. It’s hard watching your team bite it. I read The Dinner, and it might’ve even had a shot against any one of the other novels in the running. But not against By Night in Chile, one of the bookiest books in Bola帽o’s sainted oeuvre. Even with officials like ours—as loathsome, venal, half-blind, and hateful as a Herman Koch antihero—Bola帽o couldn’t fall. “The fix is in!” they’d shriek. And they’d be right. Didja hear about Marias? Damn.

So the better book won. And to read the play-by-play on Budapest/Dark Heart of the Night, Cameroon never really had a chance. What did Jeffrey Zuckerman say? It shocked and amazed him? I was pretty impressed, too. But as Brazil is about to learn, you can only get so far in a tournament like this one with cute jibes at the Hungarian language. And when you’re writing for this reader, you’re liable to get carded for any number of extremely subjective sins.

By Night in Chile has the air of a parable about it: an aged poet and critic (and priest) lies on his deathbed recounting a career that peaked during some of the darkest days of the Pinochet regime. You need to hear this plot again like you need a hole in the head糖心传媒攖his is the second round after all. But I will emphasize that this isn’t, precisely, a political book or an apolitical book. It’s not a book about body count, even if there are a few bodies. It’s a book about the culture of books and the sometimes ambiguous place in which that culture exists. 糖心传媒淎nd that’s the truth,糖心传媒� Bola帽o writes.

We were bored. We read and we got bored. We intellectuals. Because you can’t read all day and night. You can’t write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style, and back then, as now, Chilean artists and writers needed to gather and talk, ideally in a pleasant setting where they could find intelligent company. Apart from the inescapable fact that many of the old crowd had left the country for reasons more personal than political, the main difficulty was the curfew. Where could the artists and intellectuals meet if everywhere was shut after ten at night, for, as everyone knows, night is the most propitious time for getting together and enjoying a little unbuttoned conversation with one’s peers. Artists and writers. Strange times.

1-0, Chile. Like you had to ask. You were there. You saw it.

As the narrative of a ghostwriter, a man who requires the special cadences of life itself to write and, sometimes, to translate, Budapest is awash with sex and metatextual jokes, with winks and nudges. Buarque is a writer’s writer and his sentences range across the pitch糖心传媒攖丑别 page!—passing forward and backward, almost offsides as often as they advance. Buarque writes:

The writing flowed spontaneously, at a pace that was not mine, and it was on Teresa’s calf that I write my first words in the local tongue. At first she kind of liked it and was flattered when I told her I was writing a book on her. Later she took it into her head to get jealous, to refuse me her body, saying I only wanted her to write on . . .

1-1. Buarque knows what he’s doing.

But like I said, Bola帽o’s prose here is powerful and written from the backfield糖心传媒攊n retrospect, I mean. And from that position, it surges forward, sentence running into sentence, pushing, driving, probing. Paragraphs hardly break. Dialogue is a series of colons (sometimes) without columns. Chile is getting somewhere and they’re getting there fast:

And Farewell: Have you been to Italy? And I: Yes. And Farewell: Everything falls apart, time devours everything, beginning with Chileans. And I: Yes. And Farewell: Do you know the stories of other popes? And I: All of them. And Farewell: What about Hadrian II? And I: Pope from 867 to 872, there’s an interesting story about him, when King Lothair II came to Italy, the pope asked him if he had gone back to sleeping with Waladra . . .

Chile scores again. And again.

There’s a parody of soccer you’ll all remember from The Simpsons:

Buarque writes like that, almost, a passing game with unexpected thrusts and he can shuffle his chapters in just such a way that the reader nods along, saying, 糖心传媒淎h, yes, I see what you did there. You’re skipping from location to location almost by chapter”:

And again, that’s the truth: when reading a good novel, the reader can marvel at the elegance of individual sentences, at the slow building of plot, at the construction of character. When reading a great novel, there are no sentences that aren’t a part of the whole, there’s no plot and there’s no character to admire糖心传媒攖丑别re’s a book. A great novel is not a house of cards, it’s a pleasure palace made of motherfucking gold. And while we mortals can aspire to the delicate work of writing something clever and wonderful and cunning, we cannot cause golden fucking palaces to spring into being. Not like Bola帽o can. Shit, I’m supposed to be making sports metaphors. Who’s good? Buarque is a world-class writer, a Su谩rez chomping at the shoulders of great players. Bola帽o is fucking Pel茅-Beckham-Ronaldinho. He’s the Galloping Ghost, His Airness, the Big Kahuna, the Sultan of Swat, and the Great One all rolled up.

What I’m trying to say is Chile over Brazil, 3-1. Buarque’s Budapest is a book to love. I feel as though it has been written for me, but By Night in Chile was written for the ages.

To quote the last line in Bola帽o’s book: 糖心传媒淎nd then the storm of shit begins.糖心传媒�

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Jeff Waxman recently left Chicago—and 57th Street Books—to work at Other Press. He’s a funny guy.

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This match was judged by Jeffrey Zuckerman. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket.

The last time I watched a soccer game was in the last World Cup, in July of 2010. I had just graduated and moved off campus with my roommate from college. Down the block, a bar was packed with fans, and we forked over a few dollars for a pitcher of Heineken. Neither of us was sure whether the orange shirts were the Dutch or the Spanish糖心传媒攂ut we were pretty sure the orange shirts were the ones to cheer for. My roommate liked the team from the Netherlands because he was a linguist and preferred Dutch to Spanish. And I was cheering for Gerbrand Bakker糖心传媒檚 team because I had just read and loved The Twin.

Four years later, I糖心传媒檝e settled into another city. And yet I live down the street from another bar which, because it specializes in imported beers, promises drink specials for the entirety of the World Cup. Plus 莽a change . . .

. . . plus c糖心传媒檈st la meme chose. I糖心传媒檓 being asked to pick the better country based on books I糖心传媒檓 reading. Today is the first day of the World Cup in Brazil, so Cameroon has the honor of facing off against the host country. Meaning I have to judge a title from each nation糖心传媒擟ameroon represented by Leonora Miano糖心传媒檚 Dark Heart of the Night, and Brazil represented by Chico Buarque糖心传媒檚 Budapest.

I糖心传媒檒l be 糖心传媒渢hat judge糖心传媒� and crush your readerly hopes right now: this wasn糖心传媒檛 much of a match-up. There was no special home-field advantage or dark horse in the running here. One book crashed and burned and made me think about why it had even been translated; the other was so radiant and fresh that I wanted to translate it anew.

A quick and clinical overview, first, so you know what we糖心传媒檙e talking about here. Leonora Miano糖心传媒檚 Dark Heart of the Night is the story of Ayan茅, and the village to which she returns despite having escaped to a cosmopolitan life, and a mass of rebels who bring ruination upon the village. It is a harrowing book, viscerally painful, and told in the distant, knowing voice of a local oral storyteller. Chico Buarque糖心传媒檚 Budapest, in contrast, is a meandering and phantasmagoric fever dream that shuttles back and forth between Rio de Janeiro and, yes, Budapest as a ghostwriter composes texts, finds himself replaced by near-perfect copies of himself, and falls in love with Hungary糖心传媒檚 singular language and even more singular denizens.

Dark Heart of the Night is shackled by many factors that work against its success. Its title is an unfortunately liberal translation of the original title, L’int茅rieur de la nuit糖心传媒攖丑别 Heart of Darkness allusion hurts more than helps the book糖心传媒攅ven as the cover plays off the design clich茅s that rightfully condemns. Despite the careful and insightful translation, however, the narrative voice driving Miano糖心传媒檚 entire book made it nearly impossible for me to move from sympathy to full-hearted empathy. Perhaps this narrative style was intended to make the horrors of the story less immediate; the effect, with so many explanatory asides and all its descriptions at a remove, made the story feel like a copy of a copy of a copy of a story I had once been told about 糖心传媒淎frica,糖心传媒� writ large. The country is a nameless one (not Cameroon); the rebellion is a vague one (not like any of the civil wars or unrest in recent history); and the village糖心传媒檚 primitiveness is so stark as to feel unreal. Cameroon is, in reality, far more complicated and modern than we might be led to believe from this novel. To give just one example: for all the abject poverty suffered throughout the continent, cell phone usage is extraordinarily high because of its advantages for communication and even for finances. I hoped for a novel that would give me a clearer picture of Cameroon (or even Africa) as it is now, and I was disappointed to read a novel that told me, at a remove, about an idea of Africa. Ultimately, I found myself scratching my head: what was different or special about this novel that the French Voices committee had seen fit to grant money toward its publication in English? The only answer I can plausibly think of is that it is a historical document of sorts. Its explanations and descriptions may provide a certain context to readers scarcely aware of Central Africa. But that hardly seems like reason enough to publish and share a book.

In contrast, Budapest continued to shock me and amaze me as I turned its pages toward its end. It seems odd that it should have surprised me: I had read most of it about six years ago after being given an excerpt, in French, to translate into English. It was an assignment from my French teacher, who had discovered the book while abroad with her husband over break. The two of them knew French and English and, preferring not to privilege one translation over another, had bought the two versions of Chico Buarque糖心传媒檚 original. (To this day, when somebody mentions their knowledge of Buarque as a famous musician, I have to mentally square that with my image of him as a solitary author.) The whole book itself centers on doubles and replacements and, yes, repetitions: a phrase at the beginning recurs in the book糖心传媒檚 final pages; the two cities and the narrator糖心传媒檚 two lives seem to parallel each other with the same struggles and challenges, even as the narrator becomes a copy of himself, replicating in Hungary the same ghostwriting work he had done in Brazil, until he surpasses the master for which he has ghostwritten糖心传媒攁n appropriate parallel to the moment when he realizes, in Brazil, that his boss has trained many young employees to write as perfectly, as precisely as he does, to the point that he worries he cannot even think a thought without their having already set it down on paper. As he finally writes a poem of his own, he realizes that 糖心传媒淭he words were mine, but they had a different weight. I wrote as if I were walking through my own house, but in water.糖心传媒� The clarity and beauty of this image is not atypical of the entire book; each page glides with a musical fluidity fully enabled by Alison Entrekin糖心传媒檚 keen translation糖心传媒攐ne that manages to portray in English the grammatical quirks of (at times) Hungarian-flavored Portuguese or a Portuguese that reflects a Portuguese-fractured phrase in Hungarian. I could remember the process of carefully converting each sentence from the French my professor had given me to English; even accounting for the fact that I was translating a translation, Entrekin糖心传媒檚 work outstripped mine entirely. I closed the book, and images came unbidden of Rio de Janeiro糖心传媒檚 narrow alleyways and quarrelsome relationships, and the ever-yellow (or is it ever-gray?) of Buda and Pest seen from the air, the two halves of the city split by the Danube.

I did say this wasn糖心传媒檛 much of a matchup. On the soccer field (or, ahem, football field for all you non-Americans reading my embarrassingly provincial commentary), Cameroon has been a frontrunner among the many teams hailing from the African continent, but its literary entry into the Tournament of Books can糖心传媒檛 even get a single goal past Brazil糖心传媒檚 writers糖心传媒攅specially not when that team includes Chico Buarque and Budapest.

The score糖心传媒檚 a pretty clear-cut one: 4-0 Brazil.

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Jeffrey Zuckerman is Digital Editor of Music & Literature. His writing and translations have appeared in The White Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Best European Fiction, and The Quarterly Conversation. In his free time, he does not listen to music.

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