Staff Pick
Considered to be Bolaño's first novel,
Antwerp cannot properly be described as a "novel" in any real sense. But then, Bolaño's writing has always defied easy classification anyway. This slim work is comprised of 56 short passages, each no more than a very long paragraph. While
Antwerp has a few recurring characters, it revolves around only the barest of plots. What is most intriguing about this slim work is that so many of Bolaño's trademark themes, character types, and creative stylings are in clear gestation. Shady cops, nameless women, unsolved violence, sexual aggression, transient nobodies, anonymous settings (campgrounds, beaches, etc.), and a love for literature; it's no wonder a close friend of Bolaño described this as his "big bang." His singular prose is already well developed (as his years of writing and reading poetry evidently paid off), and although this is the earliest of works, there is no real hint of amateurish haste.
Nearly each of the segments in
Antwerp concludes with a few seemingly unrelated quotations (by the character? the narrator? the ever-present author?), written as if Bolaño had an image, thought, or phrase in his mind that he simply
had to commit to paper:
The writer, I think he was English, confessed to the hunchback how hard it was for him to write. All I can come up with are stray sentences, he said, maybe because reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences. Desolation must be something like that, said the hunchback.
It is easy to imagine Bolaño furiously scribbling out the pages that would become this book, overcome by a gift he was just learning to wield effectively.
Antwerp is an essential read for anyone even mildly interested in Bolaño's works. With nearly a dozen of his works available in English (and the remainder soon to come), it is a treasure to behold
Antwerp now, so as to look back and imagine a yet-to-be discovered talent in the infancy of its white-hot brilliance.
From
Antwerp:
Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength...
Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Written when he was only twenty-seven,
Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolaño's fictional universe. This novel presents the genesis of Bolaño's enterprise in prose; all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard--which Bolaño chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after he'd written it ("and even that I can't be certain of")--as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel.
Voices speak from a dream, from a nightmare, from passersby, from an omniscient narrator, from "Roberto Bolaño." Antwerp's fractured narration in fifty-four sections moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.
Review
" is a total avant-garde freakout, and has to be among the most linguistically beautiful things Bolano wrote." Garth Risk Hallberg
Review
"The only novel that doesn't embarrass me is ." The Millions
Review
"Never less than mesmerizing." Roberto Bolaño
Synopsis
Bolaño's radical first novel makes its paperback debut as a New Directions Pearl.
About the Author
Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed "by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times)," and as "the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.Natasha Wimmer's translation of Roberto Bolano's 2666 won the National Book Award's Best Novel of the Year as well as the PEN Prize.