Antwerp

As Bolano's friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarría, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolano's fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bolano's enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard--which Bolano 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.

Antwerp's fractured narration in 54 sections--voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers by, from an omniscient narrator, from "Roberto Bolano" all speak--moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 04/27/2010
ISBN: 9780811217170
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.38lbs
Size: 7.12h x 4.80w x 0.52d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 03/01/2010 pg. 35
New York Times Book Review 09/19/2010 pg. 16
New York Review of Books 10/13/2011 pg. 33