Antwerp Book

Antwerp's signature elementsâ??crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfitsâ??mark this, his first novel, as pure Bolaño. A elegantly produced, small collectible stamped cover-on-cloth edition. As Bolaño's friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarría, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolaño's fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bolaño's enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboardâ??which Bolaño chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after he'd written it ("and even that I can't be certain of")â??as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel.Antwerp's fractured narration in 54 sectionsâ??voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers by, from an omniscient narrator, from "Roberto Bolaño" all speakâ??moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.Read More