Antwerp

Description

Antwerp was Roberto Bolano's first novel, though he chose not to publish it until 2002, more than twenty years after he'd written it. Set amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites on the Costa Brava, and filled with hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen, Antwerp is a short and cinematic experimental crime novel spliced together with voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers-by, from an omniscient narrator, from "Roberto Bolano". Intense and irrepressible, the novel is a personal declaration of the power of literature; reading it is to be present at the birth of Bolano's enterprise in prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes.

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. He is the author of The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.

A fascinating, even compulsory addition to the Bolano fan's bookshelf . . . the sentences whizz over your head like bullets. * Daily Telegraph * It's hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolano. -- Nicole Krauss * Guardian *