Antwerp

Description

Antwerp’s signature elements—crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits—mark this, his first novel, as pure Bola?o. A elegantly produced, small collectible stamped cover-on-cloth edition.As Bola?o’s friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarr?a, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bola?o’s fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bola?o’s enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard—which Bola?o 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 Bola?o” all speak—moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.